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Xi Jinping: the growing cult of China's 'Big Daddy Xi'
A growing cult of personality surrounds Chinese president Xi Jinping as he seeks to cement his position as a Putin-style strongman determined to realise his “China Dream”
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai (The Telegraph)
They call him “Xi Dada” or “Big Daddy Xi” and he is rapidly emerging as China’s most powerful leader since Mao.
Xi Jinping completes two years as president in January and as he enters his third year in office a growing cult of personality is being built around the 61-year-old as he fights to stamp his authority onto the Chinese Communist Party.
There are love songs about Xi, odes to Xi, academic papers about Xi, cartoons of Xi and even action figures of Xi.
A Xi-related publishing blitz has seen at least seven major books hit Chinese shelves since late 2013, including collections of Xi Jinping’s thoughts, his speeches, anecdotes, quotes, newspaper editorials and work reports.
The most recent – a compendium of quotations entitled “Approachable: The Charm of Xi Jinping’s Words” – is large and yellow but otherwise bears a striking resemblance to Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book”. That volume, once said to have been the most printed on earth, began life in the early 1960s as “200 Quotations from Chairman Mao”.
Xi’s 273-page paperback was published last month by Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University and contains fawning analyses of sound bites from his first two years in office.
“President Xi often uses metaphors and story-telling methods to explain profound truths,” gushes the preamble. “President Xi’s language contains great wisdom in its simplicity and has a penetrating power that directly touches people’s hearts.”
Among dozens of “charming” presidential quotations are: “The arrow won’t come back after you shoot the bow,” and, in a section about foreign policy, “As distance tests a horse’s strength, so time reveals a person’s heart”.
A second print run has already been ordered after the initial 50,000 copies flew off the shelves and an English-language version is in the pipeline, a university official said.
The construction of a cult of personality around president Xi represents a dramatic direction change for a country that sought to rule collectively after the devastation wrought during Chairman Mao’s three-decade monopoly on power.
Before Xi took office, “there had been a taboo and long-standing party norm: don’t hold yourself up as a personality,” said Carl Minzner, an expert in Chinese law and governance from New York’s Fordham Law School.
“Big Daddy Xi” has shredded that rulebook. “In two years he has managed to amass a level of power that we haven’t seen in one person in quite some time,” said Prof Minzner.
The message from Beijing’s spin-doctors was crystal clear. “Xi is the top dog.”
In a recent speech, Zheng Yongnian, the director of the Asia Institute at the Singapore National University, argued Xi was establishing himself as the third key leader of post-Revolution China.
Just as Mao dominated the “first generation” of Communist China and Deng Xiaoping the second, now Xi Jinping was cementing himself as the helmsman of the “third generation”.
“In the previous system, each of the Politburo members led his own slice of the pie,” Prof Zheng argued. “Now it is different. Xi is in charge of everything.”
Barack Obama echoed that analysis last week, as Xi tightened his grip on power by ordering the arrest of Zhou Yongkang, a key rival and China’s former security chief, for a sensational list of charges including taking “massive” bribes, leaking state secrets and “trading power for sex and money”.
“Everybody’s been impressed by his… clout inside of China after only a year and a half or two years,” the US president said on Wednesday.
“He has consolidated power faster and more comprehensively than probably anybody since Deng Xiaoping,” Obama added, voicing concerns about the possible implications for human rights and China’s relations with its neighbours.
The rise of “Big Daddy Xi” stems from the president’s apparent conviction that it was the absence of firm leadership that allowed the Soviet Union to crumble.
“When the Soviet Party was about to collapse, there was not one person who was man enough to turn back the tide,” he reportedly told senior leaders in late 2012.
A Vladimir Putin-style strongman is now needed if China is to avoid the same fate, Xi believes. He has welcomed comparisons to Russia’s muscle-flexing president, telling that country’s state-media: “I feel that our personalities are quite similar”.
Prince Charles once dismissed China’s leaders as a lifeless collective of “appalling old waxworks”. But the Xi Jinping now being presented to China and the world is a vivid, multi-dimensional character, at once action hero, skilled diplomat and doting father.
Photographs in Xi’s recently published tome “The Governance of China” show him lecturing Obama and Putin, as both appear to listen intently. Elsewhere he is shown clad in army fatigues and braving minus 30Â?C temperatures as he visits border troops in Inner Mongolia.
There is also a softer side to “Big Daddy Xi”. He is an easy-going family chief whose glamorous wife, the singer Peng Liyuan, regards him as “both a unique and a very ordinary person”.
“Peng takes every opportunity to be together with her husband, cooking dishes of different styles for him,” we are told. They have a daughter whose Chinese name means “living an honest life and being a useful person to society”.
In a 22-page hagiography called “Man of the People” we are introduced to “a mild person” and “man of compassion” who has “brought a fresh breeze through the country’s political life”.
“Sometimes he stays up late watching sports on television,” the profile notes.
Ordinary Chinese appear to have warmed to Xi’s wholesome yet hardman persona.
Applications for state funding for Xi-related academic papers reportedly rocketed in 2014. Approved studies include those on the “historical materialism of Xi’s important speeches”, the “essence of Xi Jinping’s series of important speeches” and the “innovation in Xi’s key speeches”.
“We love and respect President Xi,” said Song Zhigang, the composer of a recent viral love song about Xi and his wife called “Big Daddy Xi loves Mama Peng” that has been viewed nearly 25 million times since its online release.
Yet the meteoric rise of “Big Daddy Xi” could also prove dangerous, cautioned Prof Minzner.
“Given China’s turbulent past, and its lack of autonomous political or legal institutions, you have to be worried when you see power increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a single populist leader,” he said.
Online entrepreneurs show no such fears and are busy cashing in on China’s commander-in-chief with rubber dolls, sticker collections and even replicas of a black umbrella once used by the President.
“We regard Xi as the emperor of a reviving nation,” said Xiao Ajian, who, for around £2, sells two-sided heart-shaped amulets featuring Chairman Mao on one side and “Big Daddy Xi” on the other.
“The design shows Xi is great,” Mr Xiao added. “As great as Mao.”
