The Che Cheng Min Award

"Immediately after the quake, Che Cheng-min, a member of the Tangshan party committee, dragged himself from the ruins of his wrecked house. Seeing him, his 13-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son cried 'Qick, Daddy, come and save use

But Che Cheng-min heard another call for help from behind a wall, where the family of Chiu Kuang-yu, secretary of the Lu Pei neighborhood party committee, lived. The earth was still quaking. What should a good Communist do in such critical moments? Without hesitation, Che told his wife, 'I am going to rescue old Chiu first.'

" 'What about your own children?' Chiu asked his rescuer. 'Let us not bother about them,' Che replied. 'You are secretary of the neighborhood party committee and you have no time to lose.'

"When he returned home, Che Cheng-min found his two children dead. But he felt neither remorse nor grief. In the interest of the people and in the majority interest, he did not hesitate to sacrifice his own children."

And thank you, People's Daily, for holding up such acts of heroism. There ought to be a Che Cheng-min Prize for heroes who sacrifice their own children for an abstract idea; who sacrifice people with a lower case p for The People with a capital P.

We could nominate several candidates. Perhaps the conservationists who would stop America feeding itself and much of the rest of the world for the noble idea of conserving energy rather than letting it go into fertilizers. The no-growthers who would let their children well, their neighbors' children, anyway have less than they had themselves. The environmentalists who oppose pesticides because it denies malaria-carrying mosquitoes a living.

But at the moment the most meritorious of the "let other people die for Our Cause" heroes are the anti-nukes, who oppose nuclear power partially replacing less safe sources of electricity. From among them, we nominate the Oregonians for Nuclear Safeguards for the Che Cheng-min Award. Their official brochure starts off like this: "All of the conventional methods of producing electricity are virtually harmless. Dams and water and geothermal and coal and solar and wind and tidal power. But nuclear power . . .can kill you, and all those around you, and pollute the place you live for hundreds of generations yet unborn."

You are not alone, Che Cheng. You have kindred souls in Portland, Oregon.