Lauded by supreme leader Mao Zedong as a role model, 1960s soldier and folk hero Lei Feng is getting renewed attention in China under President Xi Jinping’s push for patriotic education.
The ruling Communist Party’s propaganda machine has been churning out stories about Lei washing his comrades' feet and darning their socks after a long march, propaganda posters of him helping villagers lay sandbags or wielding hand-grenades in a snowstorm, as well as a slew of books and patriotic movies about his life.
Much of that story is fictional, many commentators say, but it’s officially sanctioned and may not be questioned.
March 5 has been designated “Learn from Lei Feng Day,” and young people across the country attended ideological courses on him, “so that the Lei Feng spirit will shine in the new era,” state broadcaster CCTV said.
Meanwhile, volunteers turned out in cities and rural areas to offer their skills and expertise for free, from haircuts and blood pressure checks to lessons in how to use technology, it said.
“Young volunteers are ... patiently teaching the elderly to use smartphones, and popularizing anti-fraud knowledge,” CCTV said. “In the fields, volunteers bring professional agricultural technology training to growers [and] deliver practical agricultural knowledge to farmers.”
The party-backed Global Times newspaper described Lei as “a late soldier renowned for his generosity and altruistic deeds” in a post to X on March 5.
“Groups of volunteers, including soldiers, police officers and lawyers, provided various free services for residents and visitors, such as hairdressing, legal consultation and career planning in downtown #Shanghai,” the post said.
Little interest
Still, there is scant interest in Lei among ordinary Chinese, said Li Meng, a resident of the eastern province of Jiangsu.
“They’re promoting learning from Lei Feng, but ordinary people living in the real world don’t buy it,” Li told RFA Mandarin in an interview on Thursday. “Telling the truth, doing good deeds and helping others don’t always have a good outcome.”
The government has to work extra hard to get people to think about Lei, said a resident of the eastern province of Shandong who gave only the surname Lu for fear of reprisals.
“Everyone knows that local governments are just intervening to get people to [learn from Lei Feng],” she said. “It’s all fake, and not worth bothering with.”
“They tell so many lies, they even believe them themselves,” Lu said.
Lei’s image as an icon of Chinese communism is protected by laws banning the “defamation” of People’s Liberation Army personnel, and of the Communist Party’s “revolutionary heroes and martyrs.”
In 2017, TV host Liang Hongda sparked a furious backlash in state media for “defaming” Lei after he suggested that much of the propaganda around the soldier was staged.
“Lei Feng is a role model that all Chinese young people learn from,” state news agency Xinhua wrote in a 2023 feature article about people who take Lei’s reported selflessness as a model.
“Times change, but we still need the Lei Feng spirit,” the article said. “The things he did may seem trivial, but behind them was a nobility that we can all achieve.”
It cited the sacrifice of a character in science-fiction author Liu Cixin’s blockbuster novel The Wandering Earth who gave his life to save the planet, saying Lei’s spirit of self-sacrifice still has a place in an age of high technology.
Born to poor peasant family
According to the official account, Lei Feng was born in a poor peasant family in Hunan’s Wangcheng county in 1940, and “lived a life of hunger and cold from childhood.”
After Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Lei became a diligent disciple of Mao’s political writings, the story goes, although there is widespread skepticism around the official hagiography of Lei.
“Under the nourishment of Mao Zedong Thought, he grew up to be a great proletarian revolutionary fighter, an outstanding member of the Communist Party of China, and a good son of the motherland and the people,” according to the description of a 1963 book about Lei Feng’s life titled: Lei Feng: Mao Zedong’s Good Soldier.
The official account of his death in 1962 -- that a power pole fell on him -- was overturned in 1997 when his former comrade Qiao Anshan confessed to having crushed Lei by reversing into the power pole with a truck that the pair of them had been ordered to wash.
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The ongoing veneration of “revolutionary heroes” is part of a nationwide enforcement of patriotic feeling under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
The Patriotic Education Law, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2024, was passed in a bid to boost patriotic feeling among the country’s youth, and applies to local and central government departments, schools and even families.
It also forms part of the government’s “ethnic unity” policy, which has included forcible assimilation schemes targeting Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, along with bans on ethnic minority language-teaching in Inner Mongolia and among Tibetan communities in Sichuan.
Scholar Lu Chenyuan said Lei Feng’s image is a product of the party propaganda machine.
“Lei Feng’s actions, including the photos, were staged,” Lu said. “Anyone with a little bit of intelligence knows that.”
“There’s no way that such a fake idol can improve the morality of the Chinese people.”
He said figures like Lei Feng are a feature of totalitarian rule.
“They promote illusory moral idols and try to reshape social morality with the help of past propaganda models,” Lu said. “But it won’t have any practical effect.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.