Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Lei Feng

Lei Feng is an interesting phenomenon in China. The Wikipedia entry about him (English) is pretty short and interesting. Very little is actually known about him, and he died an utterly prosaic death, crushed by a telephone pole as he was directing a truck to back up.

After his death, Mao and the communists decided to make an icon of him, and he and images of him were used as a propaganda tool. This was in 1963, and the "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng" campaign did a lot to emphasize the class struggle and to strengthen the cult of Mao.

What's fascinating to me now is the dichotomy between those (in China) who still take his "legacy" seriously, and those who poke fun at images of him.

Here are some more links to interesting Danwei articles:

Posted by at 8:55 PM

1 comments:

  1. Would you believe I learnt Chinese for fourteen years and I'd never even heard of this guy until last year. That's what you get from having your Chinese education in the Republic of China rather than the Peoples Republic

    ReplyDelete

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