China: An Act of Barbarism

Life was not easy for Chiang Kai-shek's mother, Wang Tsai-yu, a simple peasant woman who was widowed early and did embroidery to send her promising son to academies in Paoting and Tokyo, Japan. When she died in 1921, the fast-rising young Chiang matched her devotion by building her an elaborate tomb in the eastern China mountain village of Chikow, where the family lived. Last week, calling her memorial a "source of poison in Chinese society," an official Peking report joyfully revealed that members of the Red Guards had attacked the tomb and razed it to rubble. That particular act...

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