Death Wish

Case of the faded star

Remember China's Ping Pong diplomacy? Its chief ambassador was Chuang Tse-tung, the three-time world table tennis champion (1961, 1963 and 1965) who is widely acknowledged to be one of the top players of all time. Chuang was dispatched with a Chinese team to the U.S. in 1972, as well as to Japan, Thailand and Malaysia, for the highly publicized matches that signaled Peking's desire to broaden its international ties.

Reports have now reached Hong Kong that Chuang attempted to take his own life in Peking by hanging himself with his belt. The reason: he had come under attack for his association with the Gang of Four, the political radicals headed by Mao Tse-tung's widow, Chiang Ch'ing, who are still being reviled in the Chinese press because they reduced the national economy to "semianarchy" and "rode roughshod over the people, drank their blood and ate their flesh." Soon after the Gang of Four was arrested last year, Chuang, now 36, was kicked out of his job as Minister of Physical Culture and Sports. Reduced to sweeping Peking's streets and publicly denounced--one accusation was that he "persisted in wearing a Swiss-made watch," a sure sign of Western decadence in China--Chuang was said to have fallen into a suicidal depression.

Last week the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that another of Chiang Ch'ing's proteges, Yu Hui-yung, a composer who had been Minister of Culture, had succeeded where Chuang had failed. Yu reportedly committed suicide by gulping large amounts of poisonous detergent in a latrine in the Culture Ministry, where he had been forced to work as a janitor.

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