Word: ch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Chiang Ch'ing herself, her testimony shows her at times to be isolated, frustrated and unhappy, at the mercy of a power game she never, even at her best moments, mastered completely. She was never really accepted by the masses; many Chinese saw her as a typical emperor's wife, whose efforts to get power for herself were illegitimate. She was bitterly hated by many veterans of both the party and the army who had been the victims of her intemperate attacks during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, when Chairman Mao died, depriving Chiang Ch...
Personally, Chiang Ch'ing comes across as a woman of great complexity. She is obviously very intelligent, capable of great charm. She is also arrogant, unpredictable, self-centered. She is tireless, nervous and excitable; at one point in her interviews she became so wound up that she had to take sleeping pills before going to bed, then she overdosed herself and collapsed on the floor. At another point, she suddenly rose and started playing billiards with two aides, squealing with delight when she did well. Such exercise, she explained, was necessary to keep her legs from swelling...
...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...
...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...
...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...