PATRIOTIC DUTY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 3, 5 January 1939, Page 14

PATRIOTIC DUTY

CHINESE WOMAN'S DEVOTION

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who has recently retired from the Chinese Air Ministry, has made it clear r.o the world that Chinese women are capable of a great deal of achievement, states Florence Dean in the London "Daily Telegraph." Educated in the United States, she speaks English. She married General Chiang Kai-shek in 1928.

She earned _.her right to fame by slow, hard years of devotion to a course of action undertaken as a patriotic duty.

In 1931 she accompanied her husband into the interior of China and remained at his side through the vicissitudes of his five years' campaign against the Chinese Soviet Army. When necessary she lived in unheated, ill-ventilated, unsanitary houses, in cities ignorant of water-1 works or sewerage systems. She walked over war-scarred acres and saw I children dying of hunger and mothers I too weak to tend them. i She talked with despairing farmers whose crops had been ravaged. In this way she learned much about the conditions in which China's poorest classes live. IN A WAR-TORN PROVINCE. In 1934 she launched a scheme for the rehabilitation of rural areas in war-torn Kiangsi Province, eagerly co-. operating with every individual ? and society, native or foreign, that \vas willing to help.

Collaborating with her husband, •Madame Chiang next helped to frame the New Life Movement. In her own words, its purpose was "to elevate the people to an understanding of their duties to their villages, as well as to their families, and also to the nation as citizens."

In the autumn of 1935 General and Madame Chiang toured many of the outlying provinces in an effort to bring about a real unification of China.

In the hilly country of the aboriginal Miao tribes Madame Chiang put on heavy boots, overalls, and a farmer's broad-brimmed sun hat, and climbed on foot to villages otherwise inaccessible.

Such things had never been done before by a woman of the ruling class in China.

Amber beads may be brightened up successfully by washing them in milk.

Books which have become damp should be left in the sunshine for a time to prevent them from becoming mildewed.