Xi Jinping is everywhere: China’s omnipresent leader
XI COULD ALSO END UP BEING CALLED PARTY CHAIRMAN, A ROLE THAT WOULD PAVE THE WAY FOR HIM TO STAY IN OFFICE PAST 2022 WHEN PRECEDENT DICTATES HE SHOULD STEP DOWN
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s stiff smile greets visitors in room after room at a Beijing exhibition put up by the Communist party to tout its past five years of accomplishments.
“Five Years On” looks at China’s changes since 2012 — when Xi came to power — ahead of the twice-adecade party congress which opened on Wednesday. Xi’s omnipresence at the Soviet-style Beijing Exhibition Centre is yet another example of the cult of personality that the state propaganda machine has wrapped around the most powerful Chinese leader in decades.
Alongside every flow chart and diorama on display in the red star-topped building loomed a largerthan-life photo of the president: commanding a lectern, striding alongside farmers or foreign dignitaries, inspecting a steel plant, even aiming a gun alongside troops in Macau. Other displays showed five-year-old menus and receipts from modest meals Xi ate while inspecting villages in the countryside.
His fans flocked to the exhibit. “We don’t find the photos weird. We grew up in this environment,” said finance manager Liu Wen, 35, pointing out that the face of modern China’s founder, Mao Zedong, graces every yuan bill.
“It’s not a cult of personality, because as people from a collectivist society, when we see Xi Dada, we think of the team behind him, not of him as an individual hero,” he added, using a chummy nickname coined for the leader by party propaganda organs that roughly equates to “Big Uncle Xi.”
Xi’s ever-expanding power and intolerance for dissent has earned him comparisons to Mao.
While his father was purged under the Communist leader, 64year-old Xi rose through the ranks without scandal, thanks to an unassuming demeanour that earned
him fewer rivals than most. “He believes that the party is the force that can really transform China,”
said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, China politics specialist at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Beginning as a countylevel party secretary, Xi rose to become governor of coastal Fujian province, then party secretary of Zhejiang province and eventually Shanghai, in 2007.
That same year, he was appointed to China’s top governing body, the Politburo Standing Committee, a group he has led since 2012 as general secretary.
Xi is now expected to secure a second five-year term as head of the party during the congress, like his predecessors. But more importantly, he will have the opportunity to stack key positions with loyalists. Xi is the first Chinese leader to have been born after 1949, when the Communist revolution that gives the party its legitimacy ended.
It was on Friday learnt that Xi had foiled a coup by former political heavy weights who were at the receiving end of his highprofile anti-graft campaign.
Xi was born into revolutionary aristocracy and came of age in the tumult of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Since taking office, he cast aside decades of precedent, stamping his authority on the party’s 89 million members and asserting China’s rising might on the global stage.