Jiao Yulu

Jiao Yulu a Chinese Communist cadre (1922-1964) who served as county party secretary in Lankao, Henan, and who became a national exemplar of diligent and self-sacrificing public service after dying of liver cancer at the age of forty-two, revered for leading relief and land improvement work among the poor peasants of the flood-prone Yellow River plain.

Early Life

Jiao Yulu was born on 16 August 1922 into a poor peasant family in Boshang village, Boshan district, Zibo, in Shandong province. The family was impoverished and, in his youth, buffeted by war, famine and the disruptions of the Japanese occupation, which reached Shandong in the late 1930s. He had limited schooling and worked from childhood on the land.

During the war years he took part in resistance and relief activities and joined the Communist movement, entering the Communist Party of China in 1946. He served in local posts in Shandong and later in Henan, where he was assigned after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. His early career was that of an obscure county and district functionary.

Colleagues described a plain, hardworking man who lived frugally and who was more comfortable in the fields than in an office. He married and had children, and the family shared the modest circumstances of an ordinary cadre. His health was never robust, and he suffered from stomach and liver complaints that he largely ignored.

The Lankao Years

In 1962 Jiao Yulu was appointed first secretary of the Communist Party in Lankao county, in eastern Henan, a poor district of about a million people on the sandy, salinated flats near the old course of the Yellow River. The county suffered from three interlocking curses: shifting sand that buried fields and villages, waterlogging and salinised soil that would not bear crops, and recurrent floods.

Rather than govern from his office he travelled constantly among the villages, often on foot or by bicycle, inspecting the sand dunes, the alkali patches and the waterlogged hollows, and listening to the peasants about what might be done. He refused special treatment, shared the coarse food of the people and the discomfort of their shelters, and insisted that cadres work alongside the farmers.

He led campaigns to plant trees and to stabilise the dunes with trees and grasses, to drain the waterlogged ground, and to leach and improve the salinised soil, so that the land might support crops again. The work was slow and the results partial, but it established the practical programme of reclamation that later generations of the county continued to follow.

Illness and Death

Throughout his time in Lankao Jiao Yulu was in increasing pain from what proved to be liver cancer. He was known for pressing a hard object or the arm of a chair against his side to ease the ache, and for continuing to travel and work when he should have been resting. He concealed the severity of his condition from his colleagues as long as he could.

In 1964 he could no longer work and was sent for treatment, first in Kaifeng and then in Zhengzhou and Beijing. He died in Zhengzhou on 15 May 1964, aged forty-two. His last request was that his body be returned to Lankao and buried on the sand dunes he had tried to tame, and that no special expense be incurred on his behalf.

The image that fixed itself in the public memory was of a sick man who had spent himself for the people of a poor county and who asked, at the end, only to be among them. His death, and the stories of his refusal of comfort and his persistence in the face of illness, made him a symbol of devoted and humble service.

The Model of the Good Cadre

In the mid-1960s a national campaign called upon cadres to learn from Jiao Yulu, holding him up as the model of the upright official who serves the people, shuns privilege and works to the end. His story was taught in schools and party schools, dramatised in film and on the stage, and repeated in study sessions throughout the country.

The campaign belonged to a wider effort to encourage discipline and selflessness in public life and to present the Communist Party through the conduct of its honest members rather than through doctrine alone. Reports emphasised his frugality, his rejection of gifts and favours, and the plainness of his family life, contrasting these with the temptations of office.

He was remembered as one who neither sought nor accepted advantage, whose only concern was the welfare of the people he governed, and who died in harness. The phrase to learn from Jiao Yulu entered common usage as shorthand for conscientious and self-denying public service, and his grave in Lankao became a place of remembrance.

Legacy

In later decades the name of Jiao Yulu was invoked again and again in campaigns for honest and effective administration, and his life was presented as an answer to corruption and indifference. Study of his example was revived at various times, and officials were urged to measure themselves against his conduct and his frugality.

Lankao, once among the poorest counties of Henan, was later transformed by decades of soil improvement, irrigation and tree planting, and the work that he began was claimed as part of his legacy. A memorial hall, a park and a cadre college were established in the county in his memory, and visitors came from across the country.

He stands in the tradition of model cadre and servant of the people, alongside soldiers such as Lei Feng and officials such as Kong Fansen. His brief tenure in a single poor county, and the endurance of his reputation, illustrate how a career of obscure local service could be elevated into a national moral example.

See also

• Lankao
• Lei Feng
• Kong Fansen
• Yellow River