A typical "heartwarming" story goes like this: A crisis erupts and a policeman (or one of any other profession) rushes to the rescue. He spends days saving a dozen people while totally oblivious to the needs of his own family. At the same time, his wife is giving birth to their first-born or his old mother is dying, but he would not squeeze out time to visit them. Even though he passes his home many times, he does not stop but rushes to save total strangers.
As is obvious, whoever wrote this must have been moved to tears by the absolute selflessness of the hero. In placing a halo around him, he or she has played up the deliberate neglect of the needs of the hero's family - to the extent of dwarfing the fact that he saved a dozen lives. And for thousands of years, Chinese people have eaten up this sort of thing as part of our regular diet of moral lessons.
Yes, it goes back to before the days of newspapers and television reports and movie biographies. And it predates the age when the word "propaganda" was coined. Ordinary Chinese, especially the illiterate, depended on folk operas for their knowledge of history as well as entertainment. Those operas were predominantly morality tales where characters were portrayed in stark black and white. There was no room for nuance.
Take the famous Three Kingdoms saga. To show Liu Bei in a positive light, his archenemy Cao Cao had to be made a villain, complete with a white face (in Chinese traditional opera a white face denotes either a clown or an evil person). Never mind that in historical records Cao was a capable leader of great complexity.
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