Lei Feng
Lei Feng a Chinese soldier and Communist youth (1940-1962) whose short life of selfless good deeds and modest service was promoted after his death as the model of the citizen-soldier, making his name a byword in China for altruism and devotion to others.
Early Life
Lei Feng was born on 18 December 1940 in Jianjiatang, Wangcheng county, Hunan province, into a peasant family that was crushed by poverty and misfortune. His father, a poor farmer, died when Lei was a small child, and his mother, who had been sold into the family as a child bride, endured great hardship. She took her own life when he was not yet seven.
Orphaned, he was raised by relatives and by neighbours, and he worked as a cowherd and a farm boy. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 he was taken into the care of the local government, which arranged for him to attend school, and he became one of the many children of the poor whom the new order lifted out of destitution.
He joined the Young Pioneers, the children's wing of the Communist movement, and proved a diligent pupil and a willing helper. His gratitude to the new state and to the Communist Party became the central theme of his later writings and the thing for which his contemporaries most remembered him.
Work and Military Service
After finishing school Lei Feng worked briefly in agriculture and then as a clerk and a tractor driver on an irrigation project, where he was praised for his energy and his willingness to take on any task. He later moved to the industrial city of Anshan in Liaoning and worked in the steelworks, and then drove a bulldozer on a construction site, earning a reputation as an enthusiastic young worker.
He joined the Communist Youth League in 1957 and volunteered for military service, enlisting in the People's Liberation Army in 1960. He was assigned to a transport unit in the Shenyang military region as a driver and, later, as a squad leader. He was small and could not drive well at first, but he practised relentlessly and became a competent driver.
In the army he was known for his frugality and for giving away his savings to help others. He mended his own clothes and shoes and lived on the plainest food and the smallest expenses, yet he gave money to disaster relief, to communes and to strangers in difficulty. He carried out good deeds without seeking recognition, and his diary recorded the effort to serve the people in every small way.
The Diary and the Model Figure
Lei Feng kept a diary, and after his death the diary became one of the most widely read texts in modern China. In it he recorded his thoughts about duty, discipline and the desire to be a useful cog in the machinery of society, and he set down resolutions to live for others rather than for himself and to obey the Party in all things.
On 15 August 1962 he died in an accident while directing a truck, struck by a falling pole near a worksite in Fushun, Liaoning, aged twenty-one. The following year the national leadership called upon the whole country to learn from comrade Lei Feng, and a campaign of emulation spread through schools, factories, offices and the army.
The campaign made him the archetype of the good citizen. Children were taught to follow his example by helping the aged, saving water and paper, and doing good turns for strangers, and the phrase doing a Lei Feng good deed entered everyday speech. His photograph in a fur hat became one of the most familiar images in the country.
Cultural and Political Impact
The movement to learn from Lei Feng was renewed repeatedly in later decades, especially around the anniversary of his death on 5 March, which became a national day of voluntary service and public-spirited activity. Campaigns in different eras recast him to suit their purposes, and each generation was asked to find in his simple story a lesson for its own time.
His image appeared on stamps, posters, badges and in films, and his diary was reprinted in enormous editions. Museums and memorial halls dedicated to him were established in Fushun and elsewhere, and schools and work units organised study sessions in which his virtues of thrift, obedience, diligence and service were held up for imitation.
The promotion of Lei Feng served the state as a means of encouraging social cohesion and unselfishness, and it corresponded to a broader interest in moral education. Over time some scholars debated how much of the record was embellished, but the cultural presence of the figure remained enormous and largely uncontested in public life.
Legacy
More than half a century after his death Lei Feng remains a recognisable name throughout China and a shorthand for the honest, hardworking and helpful citizen. The annual day of remembrance still prompts volunteer activity, and schools continue to teach his story. His name is attached to countless teams, service brigades and awards across the country.
The legend also reflects the values of its time: loyalty, frugality, discipline and the subordination of personal interest to the collective. For many Chinese he stands for an ideal of decency that is separable from any particular political season, and the image of the young soldier doing quiet good deeds has proved remarkably durable.
He was born poor and orphaned, rose through the opportunities of the new state, and died young in an ordinary accident, and it is precisely the ordinariness of his life that gave the example its power. In the pantheon of modern Chinese model figures, Lei Feng remains the one most easily remembered and most often invoked.
See also
- Learn from Lei Feng
- People's Liberation Army
- Young Pioneers of China
- Communist Youth League
References
- ↑ Lei Feng, The Diary of Lei Feng, Foreign Languages Press, 1963.
- ↑ Mary Sheridan, Lei Feng and the Chinese Political Model, Ohio State University Press, 1979.
- ↑ Elizabeth J. Perry, Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition, University of California Press, 2012.
- ↑ Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, Stanford University Press, 1997.