Model worker Lei Feng fading into the mist for youngsters

With just days to go until the mainland marks its annual Lei Feng Day, the memory of the model worker seems to be slipping from the public consciousness.

'Do you know who Lei Feng is?' To the surprise of a survey pollster in Kunming, most of the students surveyed said 'no'.

Kunming's Metro Times polled 100 students from primary and high schools in the provincial capital, Yunnan , two days ago. It found that more than 50 per cent did not know who Lei was, making wild guesses including that he was a Red Guard or a janitor.

Until at least the 1980s, Lei was widely studied by primary school children and was long regarded as the communist version of the 'Good Samaritan'.

Born to a poor farming family in Hunan in 1940, Lei became an orphan at seven when he lost his family in the civil war. He joined the youth league of the Communist Party when he was nine, and was long hailed as a role model of service, from his school years to his time in a steel factory, and later in the People's Liberation Army.

When Lei died at the age of 22 in a car accident, Mao Zedong and other leaders praised him as 'Mao's good fighter' and for living out the communist spirit. Mao even set March 5 as Learning from Lei Feng Day.