beyondbrics

China is dusting off a Maoist icon for the modern age.

Lei Feng, a soldier celebrated for his revolutionary fervor in the 1960s, is being invoked to justify everything from a Good Samaritan law to better risk management at banks.

The proximate cause of the sudden flourishing of Lei Feng nostalgia is the 50th anniversary of his death. In 1962 Lei was dealt a fatal blow by a falling telephone pole as he helped a comrade in trouble – just the sort of selfless act that characterised his short life.

The Lei Feng myth – er, story – has served different purposes over the past five decades.  In 1963, when his diary was posthumously discovered, Lei was praised for his devotion to the Communist party, a contrast to wishy-washy intellectuals.

In the 1980s his example of self-sacrifice was held up as criticism of the individualism of those calling for democracy.

In recent years, Lei Feng has been directed toward a rather more constructive goal, as a paragon of helping others, a neighbourly generosity that has suffered in China’s headlong rush towards prosperity.

March 5 has been enshrined on the calendar as “Study Lei Feng Day”. And in this golden jubilee anniversary year, China’s government agencies, schools, companies and pundits are pulling out all the stops.

The education ministry published a directive this week ordering schools and universities to include “learn from Lei Feng activities” in their assessments of students. They “should promote Lei Feng’s selfless spirit of serving the people and finding pleasure in helping others”, the ministry said.

Gong Wen, a scholar at Tsinghua University, drew attention to the death of a toddler that horrified many in China last year. Video footage showed 18 passers-by ignoring the two-year-old after she was struck by a van in a market – a disturbing illustration of how reluctant people can be to help strangers. Gong argued that establishing a “duty to protect” in Chinese law would help revive public morality of the Lei Feng kind.

Even Chinese bankers have been told to burnish their Lei Feng credentials. The Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission published a statement exhorting them to “really apply the Lei Feng spirit in practice in pushing forward the reform, development and supervision of the banking sector”.

But some bloggers have said that the collective hand-wringing about the absence of Lei Feng ideals in today’s China is wide of the mark. Just look at the country’s export factories, said Shuxia Jian on Weibo, the country’s Twitter. The thousands of Foxconn workers churning out iPhones who earn little money and feed the Apple money-making machine? “They are the living embodiments of Lei Feng.”

Related reading:
In praise of risk management and dinners missed: propaganda, banking style, beyondbrics
China: Mao and the next generation, FT
Maoist revival gathers pace in Chongqing, FT
China: A sharper focus, FT
Mao and forever, FT