Yang Kaihui - Death

Death

In October 1930, the local KMT warlord He Jian captured Yang Kaihui and her son Mao Anying. Her captors wanted her to publicly renounce Mao Zedong and the CPC, but she refused to do so. Even under torture, she is reputed to have told her captors that "You could kill me as you like, you would never get anything from my mouth," "Chopping off the head is like the passing of wind, death could frighten cowards, rather than our Communists," "Even if the seas run dry and the rocks crumble, I would never break off relations with Mao Zedong," and "I prefer to die for the success of Mao's revolution career." Yang was executed in Changsha on November 14, 1930 at the age of 29. Her son, Mao Anying, who died twenty years later in the Korean War, was forced to watch his mother being shot.

Read more about this topic:  Yang Kaihui

Famous quotes containing the word death:

    Families suffered badly under industrialization, but they survived, and the lives of men, women, and children improved. Children, once marginal and exploited figures, have moved to a position of greater protection and respect,... The historic decline in the overall death rates for children is an astonishing social fact, notwithstanding the disgraceful infant mortality figures for the poor and minorities. Like the decline in death from childbirth for women, this is a stunning achievement.
    Joseph Featherstone (20th century)

    And yet the sun pardons our voices still,
    And berries in the hedge
    Through all the nights of rain have come to the full,
    And death seems like long hills, a range
    We ride each day towards, and never reach.
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    They are girls. Green girls.
    Death and life is their daily work.
    Death seams up and down the leaf.
    I call the leaves my death girls.
    Anne Sexton (1928–1974)