It’s no coincidence. Last week marked fifty years since Chairman Mao advised his people to “learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” an ordinary, young squad leader in a transport unit of the People’s Liberation Army, who was plucked from obscurity and thrust ahead as a kind of Communist Rosie the Riveter, an icon of revolutionary selflessness. Lei Feng, who stood just five feet tall, called himself “a tiny screw” in the “machine” of revolution. After he died, at the age of twenty-two, the Communist Party unveiled his diary, which included such observations as “A person’s life is limited but to serve the people is unlimited.”
Amid the tropical palmetto scrub and banyan trees of Foshan, Lei Feng looked out of place in his military-issue fur-lined hat and heavy parka. The mismatch runs deeper, of course, and, last week, it became excruciatingly clear just how deep. The Chinese press reported that a trio of films about Lei Feng’s life—“Youthful Days,” “The Sweet Smile,” and “Lei Feng in 1959”—landed like the proverbial tree in the woods. “Some cinemas played the films to near-empty houses. They still kept it in the schedule in case anyone showed up,” the Global Times reported, in a piece fairly headlined “Despite Orders Lei Feng Films Bomb.” Cinemas in such big cities as Nanjing and Taiyuan conceded to the New York Times that they had failed to sell even a single ticket.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Lei Feng. It would be easy to read this as a failure of propaganda, but in fact the depth of China’s estrangement from Lei Feng speaks to a deep change in how citizens see themselves and their relationship to the state. Maoism explicitly disavowed the value of the individual in society by recasting every citizen, in effect, as a “screw in the machine.” It was immoral—and illegal—to take a second job, because spare time belonged to the state. As Mao put it, in 1968, “Party unity” depended on the belief that “the individual is subordinate to the organization.” Political violence bred conformity. A doctor who was terrorized during the Cultural Revolution—exiled to the western reaches of the country, where his wife committed suicide—later said this of the lesson he learned:
To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you… That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.
But, as Maoism faded, individuals related to each other and the state in radically new ways. Meanwhile, the center of social interaction moved from the town square and auditorium to the living room and dinner table, and then the laptop and cell phone. By the nineties, so many people were moonlighting and creating their own professional identities that China generated a brisk new business in the printing of business cards. Today, the spirit of individualism is so pronounced that people pine a bit for the days when they felt unified by a common enterprise.
That is not the same as pining for Lei Feng. For better or worse, instead of imitating him, Chinese people, today, have learned that getting ahead requires relentless self-definition. The Norwegian sinologist Mette Halskov Hansen spent four years studying a rural Chinese school from the inside. In a new study of individualism, she recalled watching students recite a pledge at a pep rally that I have come to think of as the polar opposite of the Lei Feng ethos:
Ever since God created all things on earth, there has not been one person like me. My eyes and my ears, my brain and my soul, all are exceptional. Nobody speaks or behaves like me, no one before me and no one will after me. I am the biggest miracle of nature!
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Evan Osnos
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