Drawing a Blank on a Party Hero

China Promotes Obscure Professor as Role Model

President Hu Jintao chatted in a Beijing hospital April 5 with Fang Yonggang, a provincial professor being treated for cancer. The Communist Party has exhorted Chinese to "learn from Fang's spirit of studying party doctrine." (By Zhong Kuirun -- New China Official News Agency)

DALIAN, China -- The Fang Yonggang inspirational message went out loud and clear from the Communist Party Working Committee in Dalian's crowded Renminlu neighborhood.

"We should earnestly organize party members, officials and people who live in this neighborhood to study the advanced achievements of Comrade Fang Yonggang," read a written notice circulated to local government offices, businesses and apartment buildings. "We should learn from Fang's spirit of studying party doctrine and exploring the truth."

The directive on Fang was one cog in a national campaign launched recently by the Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department in Beijing. President Hu Jintao personally endorsed the campaign by visiting the ailing Fang in a hospital room and, in a front-page article in the official People's Daily newspaper on April 6, urging party members and soldiers to "learn from Fang Yonggang."

But who exactly was Fang Yonggang? Hardly anyone knew.

Fang, 44, a slight, bespectacled professor at the Naval Academy in Dalian, in northeastern China, became the latest in a long list of figures drawn from relative obscurity by the Communist Party's propaganda apparatus and thrust before the Chinese people as a role model. For example, more than 40 years ago, a soldier named Lei Feng was celebrated as a model squad leader for his truck-driving prowess. More recently, a bus driver named Bi Xiuli won praise for helping passengers selflessly as she navigated around Beijing.

The enduring use of study campaigns and role models, sometimes with the help of fictional embellishments, illustrates the party's abiding determination to mold public opinion in China, hiding inconvenient truths through censorship and creating useful truths through the promotion of popular legends. Since coming to power in 1949, the party has made this two-pronged control of information one of its principal weapons in retaining a monopoly on power.

Fang is something new in that long history, a hero for more modern times. According to the official plotline, he has been singled out, not for blue-collar exploits like Bi Xiuli's, but for tirelessly explaining modern party doctrine to ordinary people. In the words of an editorial in the People's Daily, he found a way to transmit "the boundless charisma of the party's new theory" to the masses, particularly those who have doubts about communism in a time of rapid modernization and raw capitalism.

Li Changchun, who handles propaganda on the Politburo's all-powerful Standing Committee, made comments underlining Fang's knack for helping common people understand the apparent contradiction after visiting him April 8 in a Beijing military hospital, where Fang was being treated for cancer.

Officials at Li's Central Propaganda Department refused requests for an interview to provide further explanation, and declined to make Fang, his relatives or his associates available. But the attention lavished on Fang by Hu, Li and their propaganda machinery suggested a high level of concern over the ideological doubts that have arisen as socialism fades from China's economy.

As China's 1.3 billion people become better-educated and more used to thinking for themselves, the impact of such campaigns appears to have diminished. For that reason, perhaps, they have become less frequent. Although Central China Television and the government-controlled press have devoted generous time and space to Fang and his teachings over the last couple of months, Chinese who are not party activists long ago learned to tune out when the propaganda begins and have no idea what the campaign is about.

The official press said "people from all walks of life" across China were heeding Hu's call to study Fang's writings. But of 25 people interviewed at random this week in two Beijing middle-class neighborhoods, only three recognized the name Fang Yonggang. "Is he Chinese?" asked a gray-haired woman enjoying the morning sun on a park bench.

A senior propaganda official, after extolling Fang's virtues for several minutes as a model for the people, acknowledged that he himself was not really familiar with Fang's teachings. "I have not yet mastered them," he said.