No turning back the tide on Xi Jinping personality cult

Xi Jinping’s New Thought does not excite the broad population, who puzzle over what it might really mean.

Xi Jinping at a container terminal in Wuhan.

Twelve senior Chinese Communist Party officials, dressed in business suits, were recently driven to the site deep in the Henan countryside where President Xi Jinping planted a tree eight years ago. They stood in silent homage to the tree, contemplating the messages it might be subtly transmitting about governance.

“Red tourism” has been common in China for years, but almost entirely associated with the founding of the party such as the Long March, and especially Mao Zedong, who died 41 years ago.

Now Xi, whom the party at last month’s five-yearly national congress elevated above Deng Xiaoping to a plinth almost level with Mao, is becoming, while still in his political prime, the subject of ­intense personal idolisation.

The tree in Henan was ­described as having grown “big, verdant and tall” and the officials led by provincial party secretary Xie Fuzhan were “immersed in thought, filled with deep emotions” as they paid tribute.

But going too far and too fast in this direction risks a dangerous backlash, including among the 89 million members of the party, whose constitution explicitly prohibits, inserted in the wake of the Cultural Revolution with its rabid Mao-worshipping Red Guards, “any form of personality cult”.

The Qianxinan Ribao, a daily newspaper in the province of Guizhou that Xi represented at the party congress, was consequently instructed by the central party early this week to rework its front page, which featured a large photograph of Xi with an article headlined, “The Great Lingxiu”— a term for leader only previously associated with Mao. The popular response was sufficiently negative to warrant the removal of the photograph and title from the paper’s website.

Some bloggers said that this episode had been devised by senior party officials as a test of the ­extent of opposition to making Xi the centre of post-congress propaganda campaigns.

At present, high-level party delegations including politburo members are travelling around China’s provinces and around neighbouring countries such as Mongolia, South Korea and Japan to “propagate the spirit of the congress”, which enshrined Xi’s “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” in the party’s constitution.

About 4500 loudspeakers have been installed in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province that surrounds Beijing, and villages in order to propagate this spirit, that calls all people to “unite tightly around President Xi”. Xinhua state news agency this week devoted seven titles to Xi: creative leader, core of the party, a servant pursuing happiness for the people, strategist of reform and development for the country, commander-in-chief of the restructured military, the Lingxiu of a great country and architect of modernisation in the New Era.

Deng, whose party status has been eclipsed by Xi, had only one title: the architect of China’s ­reform and opening up.

Xi and his six Politburo Standing Committee colleagues visited immediately after the party congress the site of the first congress, Shanghai, where with clenched fists they repeated the oaths of loyalty they had made when first joining the party.

Li Xi, the party secretary of Guangdong province, imitated this event in visiting the museum in Guangzhou on the site of the party’s third meeting, accompanied by senior colleagues, who ­repeated their oaths too. Party leaders in Sichuan, Inner Mongolia and Shanxi followed suit.

A song was launched in Beijing this week: To follow you is to follow the sun. It is dedicated to Xi, about whom it says: “You love the land with true feeling, people are cheering, your strength built this era, to follow you is to follow the sun”.

In rural Jiangxi province, where about a tenth of the population are Christian, followers of the faith have been told to replace images of Jesus in their homes with those of Xi if they are to ­receive welfare support.

Party propaganda chiefs face the problem that there is not much else to work on. Xi’s New Thought does not excite the broad population, who puzzle over what it might really mean. That leaves them with promoting personalities — but the leadership is no longer a team, as under Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao. It is dominated by one figure, and will be so for the next five or possibly 10 years.

Potential titles for leaders, such as “helmsman”, were mostly taken up by Mao. It provokes ready opposition to recycle those. That leaves awkward configurations such as “the core”.

Xie Chuntao, director of party history at the Central Party School, says: “Chinese people have learnt from their ­experience of the Cultural Revolution that personality cults won’t work. We won’t have such a cult again.”

The rush into production since the congress of fridge magnets, souvenir plates and other trinkets featuring Xi — sometimes with his popular singer wife Peng Liyuan — demonstrates that this trend is becoming a tide that will take much effort now to turn back.

Additional reporting: Zhang Yufei