4:34 pm HKT Dec 4, 2015
China’s People’s Daily Runs 11 Xi Jinping Headlines on its Front Page
The front page of the People’s Daily newspaper on Friday, Dec. 4, 2015. Instances of Xi Jinping’s name are circled in red. Felicia Sonmez/The Wall Street Journal
What’s the news in China today?
For readers of the People’s Daily newspaper, it’s Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping … and more Xi Jinping.
The Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece is known for delivering the news with a distinctly, well, Communist Party flavor. But on Friday, the paper pushed the already sky-high limits of its enthusiasm for China’s top leader, running no fewer than 11 headlines and one subheadline mentioning President Xi on its front page.
Mr. Xi is in the midst of a five-day visit to Africa, where he has pledged billions of dollars in new investment and sought to forge closer ties with African leaders.
Readers seeking non-Xi news on the paper’s second page were out of luck. Nearly all of page 2 was devoted to a nine-photo spread of Xi meeting with African leaders, while half of page 3 was taken up by the text of an op-ed piece on China-Africa relations written by Mr. Xi and published in the Johannesburg-based Star newspaper.
State media’s unswerving focus on Mr. Xi has set China’s leader apart from his recent predecessors and spurred much speculation among China watchers over whether the country is on the path toward another personality cult similar to the one that surrounded Mao Zedong in the 1960s and ’70s.
In a study released last July, the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project found that Mr. Xi’s name had graced the pages of the People’s Daily more than any other Chinese leader since Mao. In the first 18 months since he rose to power, Mr. Xi was mentioned by name in the paper 4,725 times, compared with 2,405 and 2,001 times for his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin during a similar period, the study found.
State broadcaster China Central Television has devoted nearly all of its evening newscast to Mr. Xi during the Chinese president’s recent travels abroad. And state media have sought to promote Mr. Xi’s speeches both domestically and abroad through online quizzes, cartoons and the ubiquitous “Governance of China,” a 515-page book compiling Mr. Xi’s greatest hits.
David Bandurski, a researcher at the China Media Project, said that there has been a definite shift in state media’s attention to China’s top leader since Mr. Xi came to power.
“There’s no denying the magnitude of propaganda on Xi Jinping as a personality is much higher than we’ve seen with previous leaders,” Mr. Bandurski told China Real Time. “The really interesting thing today is to see headline, headline, headline – Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping, in the headlines of the first three pages.”
Since the end of the Mao era, the Communist Party has explicitly sought to avoid any form of personality cult. The question going forward, Mr. Bandurski said, is whether the focus on Mr. Xi is a signal that the party’s emphasis on collective decision-making is weakening.
“Is he the image of strong party leadership or is he an image of decreasing collective decision making?” Mr. Bandurski said of Mr. Xi. “If you see this continue – tomorrow or regularly, if we see this kind of emphasis on Xi Jinping and a de-emphasis on other leaders, then we get the message that the leadership is not so collective.”
