Movement to Emulate Lei Feng

Just finished reading On Photography by Susan Sontag, so this will be the last quote from that book. The following is from a footnote:

The Chinese concern for the reiterative function of images (and of words) inspires the distributing of additional images, photographs that depict scenes in which, clearly, no photographer could have been present; and the continuing use of such photographs suggests how slender is the population's understanding of what photographic images and picture-taking imply. In his book Chinese Shadows, Simon Leys gives an example from the "Movement to Emulate Lei Feng", a mass campaign of the mid-1960s to inculcate the ideals of Maoist citizenship built around the apotheosis of an Unknown Citizen, a conscript named Lei Feng who died at twenty in a banal accident. Lei Feng Exhibitions organized in the large cities included "photographic documents, such as 'Lei Feng helping an old woman to cross the street', 'Lei Feng secretly [sic] doing his comrade's washing', 'Lei Feng giving his lunch to a comrade who forgot his lunch box', and so forth", with, apparently, nobody questioning "the providential presence of a photographer during the various incidents in the life of that humble, hitherto unknown soldier." In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.

First published in 1977.