A NEW film has been playing to packed houses in Beijing cinemas. It is about Lei Feng, a young soldier in the People's Liberation Army with a reputation for helping his friends and devotion to the revolution. Lei was killed ingloriously by a falling telegraph pole in 1963, but a year later was transformed into a symbol of selfless devotion to socialism, when Chairman Mao Zedong uttered the words: "Learn from Lei Feng."
The party propaganda machine did the rest. A diary of Lei was happily located. In it he had scribbled the lines which every Chinese schoolchild came to know: "Whatever Chairman Mao says, that I will always do," and "I have only one desire in my heart. I want to be wholeheartedly dedicated to the Party, socialism and communism.
After Mao's canonisation of the unfortunate 22-year-old conscript, a memorial hall was built in the coal-mining town of Fushun in Hunan province where he was born. In it were installed a huge bust of the model of unquestioning obedience, and giant photographs of a smiling Lei helping his comrades, reading Mao's works and playing with children.
A song was popularised called Emulate the Good Example of Lei Feng, which contained the lines:
ever frugal and simple, ever willing to be a screw in the machine of revolution.
And all he ever wanted was for collectivisation to shine!
For collectivisation to shine.
The hall today displays Lei's pistol, a mitten, his old shoes, socks, underwear, washbasin, tin cup, worn-down toothbrush and yellowing pages from his diary. Throughout China exhibitions were staged showing reproductions of the same mundane items, preserved under glass like Elvis Presley's silk shirts at Graceland.
Lei became the Chinese equivalent of Pavel Morozov, the Russian boy eulogised by Stalin for turning on his kulak parents during the repression of rich peasants at the time of collectivisation. Throughout the years, Emulate Lei Feng" campaigns were launched to stiffen the resolve of China's revolutionary youth. March 5th, the day Mao named him a socialist icon, became a day for selfless activity in China.
Lei's memory faded somewhat during the 1980s when the zeal of revolution began giving way to the drive to make money, and western reporters allowed into China questioned whether Lei even existed, and if the convenient diary and the photographs documenting the ideal life of an ever-smiling youth - unknown until long after his death - were genuine.
But after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, as hard-liners sought to rekindle faith in the system, Lei appeared again as an example of how young people should serve the army and the party. Tapes of old Lei Feng songs and copies of his diary flooded the state shops once more. The party general secretary, Jiang Zemin, and the Premier, Li Peng, urged party, army and people "to take the path of Lei Feng, to set off a new surge of learning about Lei Feng."
Now Lei has appeared again, this time in the movie Days After Fei Feng Passed Away, which has been shown for the past month in Beijing. It focuses on the mental anguish of Lei's comrade, Qiao Anshan, who drove the truck into the pole which crashed down on to Lei's head.
Qiao was overcome by remorse and determined to emulate the good deeds of his comrade-in-arms, but became increasingly distressed as people grew more cynical and money-oriented, and it became common to joke that "Lei Feng arrives on March 5th and leaves on March 6th."
The film-makers claim the story is true. Few will believe that, and it can be argued that Chinese film-makers are doing no more with history for propaganda purposes than their western colleagues do for commercial reasons, as in JFK making a hero of an eccentric attorney to promote a conspiracy theory, or Michael Collins killing off Harry Boland in the way it occurred in the film for artistic convenience. The difference is that in China, questioning or debating the veracity of such movies as Days After Lei Feng Passed Away is not permitted.
And it is only the first in this momentous year for Chinese history of a summer of such new films which the communist government is promoting to present its own version of the past and underpin its legitimacy, including Strategic Turning Point, Red River Valley and Opium War.
The discovery of Lei's contrite comrade is a new angle on the old story. It helped make the film a box-office success, the biggest in three years, out-performing imported hits of the last three years such as Waterworld, Sabrina and Broken Arrow, according to the China Daily. So too did the use of an "old trick", as the review in the official newspaper frankly called it. It explained what the "old trick" was. Under orders from above, thousands of work units purchased blocs of tickets and sent their employees to the cinemas by the busload, whether they really wanted to go or not.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term - a "must-see" movie.