The march of the volunteers

Across China today, volunteers pan the social landscape to perform unpaid good deeds.  “Unpaid” is the operative word on the current generation, unusual since Deng Xiao Ping opened the floodgates to capitalism and the free market.  The post-Cultural Revolution babies grew up with the understanding that anything one does must of necessity entail a monetary recompense.  Add the one child policy where parents who lost patience on the time-consuming task of persuasion got into the habit of bribing their children, and the sole child paid to comply to a request, or obey a demand, reigns.

I knew a girl once already past a score who held her parents captive to her wishes unless she was substantially bribed!  Derided as ‘little emperors’, their numbers are substantial in the urban centers.  Volunteerism is not one of their great attributes.

We do not normally associate “volunteers” to Zhongguoren.  Those of us outside the East Asian mainland still call the country “Red” China with a menacing tone reserved for unfriendly faeries on Halloween! In 2008, after the Zichuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics, we regarded volunteers as essentially propaganda faces for show fawningly eager to project a favorable face to the unfriendly, if not belligerent, west.

The 150 national pavilions and 2 million gate till crossers during the Shanghai Expo changed all that as the world was genuinely feted with volunteers who made the event run smoothly and established a friendly tone in the people management of the high tech global exposition focused on urban settlements.

All these sound strange given our years of brainwashing to be wary of the red menace.   But in our task to teach the English language by capitalizing on familiar sounds and tunes, we discovered that the National Anthem of China came from a 1934 song called the “March of the Volunteers”, penned against the backdrop of resistance against Japanese expansion after Nippon occupied Manchuria.

Ironically, the Nationalists (Guomindang aka Kuomintang) of Chiang-Kai-Shek banned the song because the author was a leftist intellectual.  It also highlighted the fact that the real resistance during the second Sino-Nippon war came from groups of volunteers rather than from the government’s military.  The song was later adopted as the national anthem when the Gongchandang of Mao Zedong led the PRC.

Diminutive soldier “boy” Lei Feng who we mentioned in an article on our recent visit to Yingkou enhanced the image of the volunteer.  The 21-year-old boy from Mao’s Hunan became a PLA soldier, met his un-heroic demise over a bumped electric pole in Liaoning, but his fame came from his reflections on a diary he wrote, ala Anne Frank.

The selfless style reflected in his writings caught the eye of CPP propaganda after his death in ’63, and while America was morally stunned and conscience stricken by MLK, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Mall in Washington, D.C., Lei Feng became the poster boy of dedication and selflessness of every Red Book quoting Red Guard from Yunnan to Heilongjiang.

March 5, neither Lei Feng’s birthday or death anniversary, is a remembrance of a selfless fellow, now with the added caveat on modesty when the young students render their version of their “day on, rather than day off” service akin to that used to honor MLK Day in the US of A.

The power of mass action was evident in the three snowstorms we had while the University was in session last semester.  With all the rescue and emergency vehicles deployed on the streets and highways, the student pilots and stewardesses, along with their engineering and business management counterparts, came out with their pick and shovels, chipped away at encrusted ice on the sidewalks and pavements, not missing a beat on their academic time and still managing to clear pathways and roads within 48 hours after the storm.

When governance is more intent in preserving power than delivering service, we have the likes of. oh, never mind.  I forgot.  This is about volunteers in China.

A nation of volunteers, China is not.  In fact, the incidences of greed demonstrated by Wall Street is nothing compared to the less than kosher methods of acquiring wealth the Solicitor General of the nation is now out to confront, or, at least, be seen as acting upon, on sectors as varied as construction, real estate, manufacturing, land acquisition, public works, ecological protection, and not the least, the financial markets.

If the current TV soap operas are any indication of the pervasive influence of money as the measure of one’s social face, then the vaunted and much heralded Chinese filial tranquility itself is in danger.

But at least, the society is airing out its linen in public. This is why the sudden rediscovery and emphasis of doing things past promise of financial remuneration, and the reawakening compliance of the public to this ethos, can only be a plus to a nation of folks now known as marked with the Renminbi sign on their forehead.

We remember Lei Feng today.