Eric's Beijing Diary

Ever heard of Lei Feng? He was a soldier who was killed in an accident when a telephone pole fell on him. Lei Feng would have passed into obscurity, but he was immortalized when, for some reason, he was chosen by Mao as an example for young people. Now young people remember him every year (and if they don't, they are reminded). Anyway, there is a funny piece in the Danwei blog about some students from a local cosmetology school in a small town in Henan Province who were giving free haircuts at a local park as a means of gaining needed practice for the skills they were developing. When park officials objected, the students said that they were "learning from Lei Feng." The park kicked them out. Perhaps that is not so surprising, but the funniest part of the story was the guy from the forestry department who told the students, You can only come here to learn from Lei Feng when the government organizes you to do so. If they don't organize you to learn from Lei Feng then you can't come. Learning from Lei Feng is not something you can do anytime you wish. My reaction was laughter, but for others, who have been taught all their lives to revere the memory of Lei Feng, it was no laughing matter. Reaction was swift. I guess it would be similar to the kind of reaction one might expect if a church told members that they could only follow Christ's example when the church told them to.