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:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,
Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.”
—Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)