Prime-time slot for TV series on war heroine

The heroism of a Chinese woman who saved lives in occupied Belgium in World War II is the subject of a series on state television.

It charts the life of Qian Xiuling, whose intervention on behalf of 96 Belgians due to be executed earned her recognition from authorities in post-war Belgium.

Qian was born in Yixing, Jiangsu province, in 1912 and studied biology at Louvain in Belgium, where she married a Greek medical student. After obtaining her doctorate, the couple settled in the Belgian town of Herbeumont.

In May 1940, the German occupiers appointed as governor of the country General Alexander von Falkenhausen. Qian had an introduction to the general through her cousin, a senior official in the Kuomintang army who was personal attache to Chiang Kai-shek when von Falkenhausen was an adviser to the army in Nanking in 1919.

On June 8, 1944, resistance fighters in the town of Ecaussinnes, in southern Belgium, killed three Gestapo officers. The next day, 500 Nazi soldiers surrounded the town, arrested 96 Belgians and threatened to shoot them in groups of 15 unless the culprits were handed over.

When villagers begged Qian to intervene, she persuaded the general to spare those arrested.

This act aroused the suspicion of the Gestapo, which arrested the general on July 20 and sent him to Berlin to try him for insubordination.