China widens personality cult around ‘unrivaled helmsman’ Xi
BEIJING — The village where he laboured as a teen has become a shrine, a tree he planted an icon. State media applaud him endlessly, private businessmen praise his speeches and universities are devoting new departments to his theories.
At the start of his second five-year term as leader of China’s ruling Communist Party, Xi Jinping is at the centre of China’s most colorful efforts to build a cult of personality since the death of the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong, in 1976.
Efforts range from the trivial to the borderline hysterical, such as when state broadcaster China Central Television led its evening national news bulletin Friday with more than four minutes of uninterrupted clapping for Xi as he met with adoring citizens.
“I am a servant of the people,” Xi is described as telling an illiterate villager in a profile Friday by the official Xinhua News Agency that ran several thousand words and also hailed him as an “unrivaled helmsman.” It said Xi led over 60 million people out of poverty in his first term, a statistic repeated ad nauseam in state media.