Socialist emulation in China: worker heroes yesterday and today

Chinese labour heroes represent an idiosyncratic expression of a broader twentieth-century phenomenon of promoting worker emulation through the hailing of model labourers. Taken from a comparative perspective, the Chinese practice can be seen not only as modelled on an earlier Soviet development, but also a broader need felt in totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s that workers needed to be ‘remoralised’ through the establishment of cults of workers and work. Recently revived in the People's Republic of China in the form of patriotic movies and television shows, the main historical development of the Chinese articulation of this broader historical labour phenomenon is assessed in light of recent studies of Soviet and National Socialist attempts to heroise labour.