Lei Feng (18 December 1940 – 15 August 1962), born Lei Zhengxing, was a Chinese soldier in the People's Liberation Army who was the object of several major propaganda campaigns in China. The most well-known of these campaigns in 1963 promoted the slogan "Follow the examples of Comrade Lei Feng." Lei was portrayed as a model citizen, and the masses were encouraged to emulate his selflessness, modesty, and devotion to Mao Zedong. In the following years, Lei Feng was portrayed as a symbol and model of party revolution by both the Chinese Communist Party and Government of China. For decades, he was used to promote the "Learn from Lei Feng as a Model" in the media. Political ideology closely follows the Chinese Communist Party, actively helping others in work and daily life, practicing frugality and thrift, and upholding the socialist spirit of "one for all, all for one" which is known as the Lei Feng spirit. After Mao's death, Chinese state media continued to promote Lei Feng as a model of earnestness and service, and his image still appears in popular forms such as on T-shirts and memorabilia.
The biographical details of Lei Feng's life, and especially his diary, are generally believed to be propaganda creations by Western historians; even the historicity of Lei Feng himself is sometimes questioned. Contemporary research believed that Lei's diary was edited and propagandized, but not fabricated. The continuing use of Lei in government propaganda has become a source of cynicism and even derision amongst segments of the Chinese population. Nevertheless, Lei's function as a propaganda icon has survived decades of political change in China.
The current biography of Lei Feng as given in China's state media says that he was born in Wangcheng (near the town of Leifeng, Changsha, Hunan, named in his honour). According to CNTV, Lei's immediate family all died before the establishment of the People's Republic, leaving him an orphan. His father died when he was just five (killed by the invading Japanese Army), his elder brother, who was exploited as a child labourer, died a year later, and his younger brother died soon afterward. Finally, his mother died by suicide after being "dishonored by a landlord."
In the autumn of 1958, Anshan Iron and Steel Group (Angang) recruited workers in Changsha, Hunan Province. Lei Feng was recommended and joined the Angang Mining Company's Gongchangling Iron Mine as a bulldozer operator.
He became a member of the Communist youth corps when he was young and joined a transportation unit of the People's Liberation Army at the age of twenty. According to his official biography, Lei died in 1962 at the age of 21 (22 by Chinese East Asian age reckoning, by which a newborn is age 1 at birth), when a telephone pole, struck by an army truck, hit him as he was directing the truck in backing up.
In popular analysis, Lei Feng and his diary were not widely known until after his death. According to Harold Tanner, Lei Feng's Diary was first presented to the public by Lin Biao in the first of many "Learn from Lei Feng" campaigns in 1963, after Lei's death. The diary was full of accounts of Lei's admiration for Mao Zedong, his selfless deeds, and his desire to foment revolutionary spirit. Famously, he pledged that his only ambition was "to be a rustless screw" in the revolutionary cause. Lin's use of Lei's diary was part of a larger effort to improve Mao's image, which had suffered after the Great Leap Forward. Western scholars generally believe that the diary was forged by Party officials under Lin's direction.
However, contemporary researchers noted that Lei Feng's diary was not in fact discovered after his death; excerpts had already been published between 1959 and 1960, then circulated through the Party propaganda system until Mao's approval helped turn Lei Feng into a national icon. Lei Feng was, unlike earlier historians believed, already a well-known media figure while he was alive.
The diary contains about 200,000 words describing selfless thoughts with enthusiastic comments on Mao and the inspiring nature of the Party. The campaign began at a time when the Chinese economy was recovering from the Great Leap Forward campaign. In 1964 the Lei Feng campaign shifted gradually from doing good deeds to a cult of Mao.
When Lei Feng died in the line of duty, he was only 22, but his short life gives concentrated expression to the noble ideals of a new people, nurtured with the communist spirit, and also to the noble moral integrity and values of the Chinese people in the new period. These are firm faith in communist ideals, political warmheartedness for the party and the socialist cause, the revolutionary will to work arduously for self-improvement, the moral quality and self-cultivation of showing fraternal unity and taking pleasure in assisting others, the heroic spirit of being ready to take up cudgels for a just cause without caring for one's safety, the attitude of seeking advancement and studying hard, and the genuine spirit of matching words with deeds and enthusiastically carrying out one's duties.
Chinese leaders have praised Lei Feng as the personification of altruism. Leaders who have written about Lei Feng include Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Jiang Zemin. His cultural importance is still reproduced and reinforced by the media and cultural apparatus of the Chinese party-state, including emphasizing the importance of moral character during Mao's era. Lei Feng's prominence in school textbooks has since declined, although he remains part of the national curriculum. The phrase huó Léi Fēng (活雷锋; lit. "living Lei Feng") has become a noun (or adjective) for anyone who is seen as selfless, or anyone who goes out of their way to help others.
The CCP's construction of Lei Feng as a celebrity soldier is unique to the PRC and differs from the more typical creation of military heroes by governments during times of war. In the PRC, Lei Feng was part of continuing public promotion of soldiers as exemplary models, and evidence of the People's Liberation Army's role as social and political support to the Communist government.
Details of Lei Feng's life have been subject to dispute. While someone named Lei Feng may have existed, scholars generally believe the person depicted in the campaign was almost certainly a fabrication. The argument for inauthenticity, for instance, is that the campaign presented a collection of twelve photographs of Lei Feng performing good deeds. The photographs were of exceptionally high professional quality, and depicted Lei—supposedly an obscure and unknown young man—engaging in mundane tasks. This question on photographs was first bought by Associated Press reporters, and became central to the questions on Lei Feng's historicity and inauthenticity. There are also arguments that Lei Feng's deeds could have been real, because the staged photographs were commissioned reenactments of events attributed to Lei Feng by the People's Liberation Army leadership for a traveling exhibit, during Lei's rise to stardom in China, rather than proof that the person and all his actions were invented.
Traditional Western historians believed that Lei Feng and his diary became popular only after his death, which contributed to the view that the Party fabricated his diary or his identity. Xiaofeng Tian argued that Lei Feng's diary was edited but not entirely fabricated. The diary's content reflected a highly self-conscious production, which included Lei Feng's personal experience of being bullied in the military due to his short stature, his self-awareness of the publicity he received, descriptions of the famine during the early People's Republic (which were deleted in later editorialization during the Cultural Revolution), and his personal sentiments, which were consistent with the cultural and social circumstances of 1950s and 1960s China. The diary was later popularized and reshaped into propaganda to fit the ideological frameworks of different political periods, but Tian believed the "popularity of Lei