The Resurrection of Lei Feng: Rebuilding the Chinese Party-State’s Infrastructure of Volunteer Mobilization

Abstract

The year 2008, marked by mass volunteer mobilization after the Sichuan Earthquake and during the Beijing Olympics, is hailed in official discourse as “Year Zero” of volunteering in China, when volunteering became integrated into mainstream Chinese culture and society and began to enjoy high-level official support and recognition. Since then, the Communist Party Youth League, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and other state agencies have rolled out several programmes at the local, regional and national levels to recruit and mobilize volunteers for a wide range of forms of social service. In fact, the irruption of volunteering into the public sphere in 2008 was not as sudden as it appeared. A Party-state organizational and propaganda infrastructure of popular mobilization, inherited from the Mao era, had continued to function, albeit in low gear, throughout the three decades following the Cultural Revolution, transforming its discourses and practices to adopt neo-liberal models of volunteerism introduced from Hong Kong and the West, featuring depoliticized, individualized and market service approaches. After 2008, the Party-State’s volunteering infrastructure was ramped up, and it was re-politicised at two levels: at a symbolic level, the filiation with the Party’s revolutionary heritage became increasingly explicit in volunteering propaganda, and at an organizational level, the purpose of volunteer mobilization became explicitly oriented to counter the rise of independent NGOs and civil society organizations, creating an infrastructure to enable the Party to channel and control popular energies to serve society within its own parameters. This article traces the evolution of state-sponsored volunteer practices, discourses and organizational forms from the Mao era until today, paying attention to the shifting representations of the revolutionary hero and model volunteer, Lei Feng. We conclude that state-led volunteering in contemporary China paradoxically redeploys discursive and organizational legacies of revolutionary mobilization to attain the opposite goal of de-mobilization or de-politicization, channeling popular altruism and energies into forms of social service that reinforce market-driven neoliberal governmentality and Party-led nation-building.