You raise an excellent point, attempts at moral exhortation have a long history in China as does the use of iconic figures as part of moral education.

Just a quick note to thank you for this post, and also to note that efforts to promote and reinforce good behavior in this way have a long history in China. I was just reading an article about community compacts (xiangyue) in the Song (and then Zhu Xi’s reincarnation of them) and they were deployed in a similar way–in this sense, a written guideline for correct, harmonious behavior. And, of course, there were enormous efforts to this end during the Republican period as well (most prominently the New Life Movement of the mid-30s). In response to earlier posters who have mentioned that the Lei Feng phenomenon is a reflection of Chinese people’s inability to act on these norms of “good behavior,” I would gently suggest instead that it is rather evidence of the persistence of a set of ideal behaviors.

Ironically, on the newest March 05, I was the only one who can still remember Lei Feng in my friends circle (a community of Chinese students who are studying somewhere overseas).

By the way, I read all the diaries of Lei Feng and can still remember a lot. It was not seldom in the 60s and 70s (also the first years of 80s) for young Chinese college students and workers to write such kind of diaries on order to get some political privileges in contests etc.