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Extraordinary Stamina. Yet her story also shows her extraordinary stamina. In the long, hard years when China's Communists were holed up in their precarious refuge in remote Yenan, women had to do hard physical labor in the fields and on reclamation projects, but were excused during their menstrual periods. Chiang Ch'ing scornfully refused this concession. Later, when she was daily plodding through the countryside near Wuhan in central China helping with land distribution to poor peasants, she sometimes almost dropped from exhaustion and still bitterly remembered the peasants' taunts: "Who do you think you are?"
Despite her often spartan life, luxury appealed to her and money used to preoccupy her greatly. Going out with young men in Shanghai, she insisted on paying her own way; when she was broke, she would insist: "This time you pay, but next time I pay." Once, on the way to a movie, a pickpocket stole her money. Rather than admit this to her escort, she fled and later took out a small loan at a bank; she was "ashamed to report," notes Witke, that she never repaid it.
In the 1940s a Hong Kong movie company produced a film called The Inside Story of the Ch'ing Court. Its central character was the Empress Dowager Tz'u-Hsi (1835-1908), who tried to maintain imperial luxury in the midst of internal disorder and foreign invasion. After a long struggle, Chiang Ch'ing succeeded in having the film banned. Many Chinese had identified her with the empress—who was portrayed as loving the theater, flowers and the new invention of photography. Pretty close. Apart from her lifelong interest in the theater, Chiang Ch'ing's hobbies—which she delighted in sharing with Witke—were horticulture and photography. She took pictures constantly, not in the socialist fashion of factories and farms, but of the subjects favored by traditional Chinese painters—flowers sparkling with morning dew or mountains silhouetted against the evening sky. It is as if she saw the camera simply as a technologically advanced way of doing the arts of bygone eras. She inscribed the backs of her photographs in red, as if harking back to the vermilion ink that was once reserved exclusively for use by China's emperors.
Chiang Ch'ing was, for Communist China, a particularly stylish woman; at one point in her interviews she distributed black midi-length dresses to her several female aides and demanded that they wear them at dinner that night. She had her own collection of "bourgeois" films by such foreign stars as Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. All this is in marked contrast to the dreary, controlled socialist culture and drab unisexual clothes that she helped to impose on China's masses. Hardly a surprise that in the current campaign against her, Chiang Ch'ing's love of luxury is a major charge against her. She did not seem to be aware of the contradiction, seeming confident that as the Chairman's wife she was simply entitled to certain privileges. "What set her apart," says Witke, "was the sense of being her own person, of being able to say, speak and act more or less as she wanted."