Lei Feng's
Immortal Spirit
NEW-OLD
ROLE MODEL
Peking propagandists bring back their '60s hero: Lei Feng
March 6, 1987
Julian Baum, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
In a flashback
to a 1960s propaganda campaign, the "glorious name of Lei Feng"
has been revived as a role model for Chinese youth.
Mao Tse-tung penned his famous inscription "learn from Lei Feng"
24 years ago yesterday, and China's leading newspapers carried commentaries
memorializing the young military driver from Hunan Province who was
made into a hero for helping to construct socialism.
This week, banners on Peking streets and posters in buses have appeared,
saying "learn from Lei Feng." A few young people from communist
youth organizations have manned street booths, symbolically serving
the people.
Observers say the revival is another sign of the more conservative political
style that has characterized the Communist Party leadership since January.
The so-called "spirit of Lei Feng" was loyalty to the party
and selfless devotion to the people. Lei was praised for performing
seemingly endless, anonymous, and trivial deeds and was elevated into
a model of the young socialist who exemplified virtues which the party
advocated in the 1960s and which the official Chinese press says is
again relevant to the 1980s.
"Lei Feng is the representative of Chinese traditional merit and
communist morality," said a front-page commentary in China Youth
News.
"Self-realization is not and should not be the ultimate goal of
life," the commentary said. "To give full play to the spirit
of Lei Feng is the requirement of our social system and our common cause."
Some sociologists say the Lei Feng hero-model was ultimately repressive
of individualism, diverting youths' energies into trivial pursuits and
rote learning, making them cogs in the wheel of socialist society. One
of the most famous of Lei's alleged writings concerned the contributions
of a screw. "A man's usefulness to the revolutionary cause is like
a screw in a machine. It is only by the many, many interconnected and
fixed screws that the machine can move freely, increasing its enormous
work power. Though a screw is small, its use is beyond estimation."
Liu Binyan, who is one of China's most famous contemporary writers and
who was recently expelled from the Communist Party for advocating "bourgeois
liberalism" once criticized the Lei Feng campaign: "I don't
think Lei Feng is at all a perfect model. He has serious, even fatal
defects. His imperfection lies in the fact that he only follows orders
from above."
The "learn from Lei Feng" campaign in the 1960s motivated
millions of youths to keep diaries of daily deeds, secretly wash other
people's clothes, clean windows, and intensify their devotion to collective
tasks. He also exemplified unquestioning acceptance of Mao's teachings.
Christian
Science Monitor
March 6, 1987, p. 11
© 1987 The Christian Science Publishing Society