Tibetan Yak herders anoint Xi Jinping a Buddhist deity

Chinese President-potentially-for-life Xi Jinping is garnering even higher accolades as farmers hail him as a Bodhisattva.

Chinese President Xi Jinping at the National People's Congress in Beijing. Picture: AFP

Chinese President-potentially-for-life Xi Jinping is garnering even higher accolades, as farmers hail the leader as a living Buddhist deity.

The Communist Party chief of Qinghai province, Wang Guosheng, revealed during a discussion on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing at the weekend that “the ordinary ­people in the herder areas” — meaning ethnic Tibetan yak herders — were venerating Mr Xi as “a living Bodhisattva”.

A Bodhisattva — sometimes translated as “one whose essence is perfect knowledge” — is a person who, through great compassion and dedication, is set on the path to becoming a Buddha.

“This is a really vivid thing to say,” Mr Wang added.

Mr Xi’s limit of two five-year terms as President was removed by a constitutional amendment after congress delegates voted ­yesterday. Mr Wang said Qinghai had taken to heart Mao Zedong’s advice to inspire the masses to love the party and its leader, by distributing “images” of the leader to all those shifted controversially from their traditional nomadic life to permanent homes provided by the state.

In his state-of-the-nation ­address a week ago, Premier Li Keqiang pledged the government to “fully uphold the party’s basic policy on religious affairs”.

Mr Xi is general-secretary of the party, whose members are forbidden from being followers of any ­religion.

He has occasionally referred positively to the cultural roles of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

But Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for ­Religious Affairs, recently stressed in an article in the party’s flagship magazine that all members should be “firm Marxist atheists”.