PLA mouthpiece says West Point Lei Feng legend no joke

The PLA Daily came out again on Sunday to support a decades-old legend that elite US military school West Point once studied communist hero Lei Feng.

It also warned that some "Western countries" had ulterior motives in trying to undermine the credibility of stories about Communist Party heroes.

For years, the Chinese public was told that at least at one point the US military studied the life of Lei Feng. The article yesterday was the army mouthpiece's second in a week trying to bolster the legend.

The articles came after former Xinhua reporter Li Zhurun, now a university professor, admitted on January 4 that he had been duped by an April Fool's joke by an unspecified Western news outlet. Li reported in 1981 that Lei was being studied as an example in the military academy. "It was the biggest mistake of my life to introduce the lie that Lei Feng was studied at West Point," Li wrote on Weibo, adding he found out in 1997 that he was tricked.

But Sunday's PLA Daily commentary said: "Lei Feng's image and spirit has been deeply ingrained in the people's hearts and has even extended its influence outside China. The West Point academy once hung the portrait of Lei Feng on its walls."

In its first article backing up the story last Wednesday, the PLA Daily said Tian Zhifang, a former Chinese embassy staff member in the US, gave the Lei Feng museum a West Point recruitment leaflet in 2002, in which Lei's photo was on the school's blackboard. Tian was the Chinese embassy's first secretary in Washington from 1984 to 1988.

But in 2005, Major General Jin Yinan, from the National Defence University, wrote that the portrait was indeed on a West Point blackboard, but it was only part of studies on the Chinese army and not to learn from the life of Lei Feng.

The PLA Daily's commentary on Sunday also claimed that some Western countries wanted to alter stories of communist heroes. "Some Western countries are accelerating their efforts to plan colour revolutions and they want to start a 'cultural cold war' and 'political GM (genetic modification) project'," it said. "They are now targeting China with their political GM strategy."

Lei Feng, a soldier, died aged 22 in 1962 after he was hit by a telegraph pole. For decades, he has been hailed by mainland propaganda authorities as a model citizen for his selflessness.