【纽约时报0227】当戈登·盖柯遇见雷锋

lilyma06

Gordon Gekko, Meet Lei Feng By MARK MCDONALD
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/gordon-gekko-meet-lei-feng/
  A poster of Lei Feng — hero-solider, selfless citizen and Communist Party role model. The top line says, “Learn From the Lei Feng Spirit.” The bottom line: “Love Your Party, Love Your Society, Love Your People.”
HONG KONG — The Chinese Communist Party knows it has a problem. A billion Gordon Gekkos are blooming, but moral standards are withering on the vine. Corruption pervades. Villainy abounds.
Everybody seems to be cutting corners. Contractors add too much sand to their concrete, causing bridges and buildings to collapse. Shoddy designs send bullet trains running off their rails. Milk producers add poisonous chemicals to baby formula. Government officials gamble away municipal funds in the casinos of Macao. A third of China’s wealthiest billionaires are senior leaders supposedly living on meager government salaries — while their kids party in exclusive clubs and flout traffic laws in absurdly expensive cars. Everyday citizens are increasingly angry at the excesses of the so-called Red Nobility, and the societal rift between town and country grows ever more bitter.
Enter Lei Feng to the rescue.
Communist propagandists are going old school, circa 1962, in resurrecting Lei Feng as a paragon of moral virtue and party devotion. They have just launched a 50th anniversary campaign called “Practice Lei Feng Spirit” in an attempt to restore some sense of moral order.
Here’s the brief bio by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, as published in the People’s Daily newspaper: “Born in late 1940 in central China’s Hunan Province, Lei was orphaned at the age of 7. He started working in a steel mill in 1958, and became an army recruit in 1960 at the age of 20. Lei is known for devoting almost all of his spare time and money to selflessly helping the needy.’’
Some accounts say that Lei died when he was hit in the head by a falling telephone pole that was knocked over by an army truck. His good deeds seemed to know no bounds, from darning his fellow soldiers’ socks to doing other people’s laundry.
“He was respected and remembered for decades as a role model for his selfless altruistic attitude, patriotism and modesty,’’ the Communist Party newspaper Global Times said.
“The ‘Lei Feng Spirit,’ a cultural icon symbolizing selflessness, modesty and dedication, was formed in the 1960s and had an extraordinarily broad impact.’’
According to one entry in the recently published compilation of Lei Feng’s diaries and poems, he aspired to be “a revolutionary screw that never rusts.’’
Lei Feng’s voluminous writings — perhaps forged by publicists, perhaps not — were studied by a generation of Chinese schoolchildren. The scholar Stanley Rosen said Lei’s “ordinary but great communist spirit’’ was linked in party propaganda to his peasant-family background and because he had “suffered great hardships at the hands of the landlord class’’ and then exploitation by the ruling class.
There is substantial evidence that the Lei Feng myth was just that, little more than a folkloric concoction, much like the Soviet propaganda campaign that exaggerated the exploits of Aleksei Stakhanov.
Stakhanov, a Ukrainian coal-mining dynamo, reputedly dug a record 102 tons, singlehandedly, during a single shift in 1935. He made the cover of Time magazine, and Stalin used the ensuing Stakhanovite movement to proclaim the inevitable triumph of socialism over capitalism.
Fifty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev was facing a crippling decrease in productivity by Soviet workers. Enter, again, Aleksei Stakhanov.
“Although the Stakhanovite movement no longer exists as such except in Soviet legend,’’ my colleague Serge Schmemann wrote from Moscow in 1985,  “a flood of newspaper and television reports pegged to the anniversary have highlighted some striking similarities between the problems and propaganda of those days and Mr. Gorbachev’s campaign to enhance productivity.’’
The Soviets had productivity, the Chinese have corruption.
The question at hand for Communist Party officials is how well the legend of Lei will play in modern China. Global Times acknowledged that “in today’s society, the Lei Feng Spirit has encountered some problems.’’
The paper even pointed to a specific incident in 2007 that illustrated a growing selfishness and cynicism in China. A latter-day would-be Lei Feng — a young man named  Peng Yu — helped an elderly woman who had fallen while running for a bus. The woman, who was injured, claimed that Mr. Peng was at fault. When a court ordered him to pay the woman the equivalent of $6,800, the paper said, it “caused quite a stir in Chinese society.’’
A Lei Feng video game was published several years ago to make him a little more hip and a little less Beaver Cleaver. Gamers performed good deeds to advance to their ultimate goal — winning a set of Chairman Mao’s collected writings.
“Once the propaganda during the Cultural Revolution became a joke, people didn’t trust the story of Lei Feng anymore,’’ said Xu Youyu, a Beijing philosopher quoted in a story Tuesday in The South China Morning Post. “The propaganda machine needs to find a new way to persuade people.’’
The paper also quoted a Communist Youth League official as saying that many young Chinese don’t know about Lei Feng’s exploits — or even who he was.
The dusting-off of Lei Feng dovetails with a wider revival of “red culture” that began to be orchestrated last year before the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party.
Despite their efforts to put the Mao era behind them, as my colleague Edward Wong has written, Communist Party leaders “still promote the myths and icons of that time to instill patriotism and loyalty in the population.’’
Students and party members have been ordered to work on farms for a month at a time. And party leaders, most notably Bo Xilai in the megacity of Chongqing, have ordered schools and work units at state-owned companies to sing Maoist classics like “The East is Red” and “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.”
In Chongqing, Ed reported, “even prisons are holding singalongs, and one psychiatric hospital has prescribed it for patients.’’




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