Some reader asked me, a while ago, why I used the Dear Supreme Leader title to refer to him. I forgot to answer. Then I saw tweets annotating his New Year speech and I thought, ah, let’s do a story about him.
As usual, we can start with wikipedia. There you learn about his age, sex, father’s name, spouse name, etc.
Before he became the successor of Hu Jintao, people knew very little about him. They all knew his father Xi Zhongxun was a Zhao, who joined the red army from the very early stage. And as with most of Zhaos, he was purged and later jailed during the cultural revolution. This was a common theme in CCP under Dear Supreme Leader Mao.
This picture of his father is widely circulated among Chinese people. The sign hang on his neck says: “Anti-Party scum Xi Zhongxun”.
Once the cultural revolution ended, Xi Zhongxun became the governor of Guangdong province and was the chief driver of the Shenzhen special economic zone.
Another thing that makes the father stood out among the Zhaos, was his defense of Hu Yaobang when Hu was forced down from his position as Party chief. The father retired shortly after. Hu was the CCP leader whose death sparked the 1989 democracy movement.
That was why, in 2012, on the cusp of the reign of Dear Supreme Leader, people were guessing who he actually was. Because of his father, many expected him to be mainland’s Chiang Ching Kuo, the last dictator of Taiwan who ended the Martial Law and allowed opposition party to exist.
I actually don’t know. But I can provide you with background information.
Back in the 50s and 60s, when CCP just took power, they quickly established the all are equal but some are more equal than others rule. All high level government officials were provided with housing, drivers, domestic helpers, summer vacation to the beaches, etc. And if you are still single, you can pick a young college student as wife also. There is no reason that the Dear Supreme Leader did not live that kind of life also.
Dear Supreme Leader also went to the schools where most of the children of high level government officials went. Then his father got purged, and he was excluded from the fun stuff.
What do I mean by fun stuff?
Well, during the cultural revolution, in Bejing, there were the infamous red guards. These are the high schoolers who were endorsed by the Dear Supreme Leader Mao. They can do whatever they want. Part of the fun stuff was to beat up the teachers. Another was to raid ordinary residential homes and rob them of anything you liked. Of course during those fun times, some lives were lost. But who cares, red guards were always right and those were the bad people.
That was the beginning of cultural revolution. Our Dear Supreme Leader was just 14 year old back then.
And only those children of the high level government officials were allowed to join the red guards. But our Dear Supreme Leader’s father was already purged and later jailed. So he could not join.
Instead, when he was 16 year old, he was sent to a remote rural village per Mao’s Down to the Countryside Movement.
Back in 2012, there were articles about how he escaped the harsh rural life and ran back to Beijing. His mother, also punished for being his father’s wife, reported him to authority, instead of protecting him. According to some, he was sent to a re-education school and later detained for wandering in Beijing and forced to do some construction work. After this escape episode ended, he finally went back to the remote rural village to continue his education from the peasants.
Later, the Dear Supreme Leader revealed a lot of memory of this period. And many Chinese people were impressed.
Here are some fun facts:
In 2003, during an interview, he said that.
And of course some big muscled men challenged themselves with 100 kg weights. They reported that they lasted only 550 meters.
That is why he is Supreme.
Young people from the cities that were sent to the countryside are called the intellectual youth, because they were, ehhhh, very intellectual. So one member of the intellectual youth had a book called “Faust”.
Dear Supreme Leader was so hungry for reading that he walked 15km to borrow it and then another 15 km to return it, according to Chinese media.
The Chinese media reported that when he visited London in 2015, Dear Supreme Leader quoted “to be or not to be” during a speech at the financial center.
He said he searched for and read works by Shakespeare when he was in the countryside in his youth.
Many Chinese, including yours truly, wonder how he got those books. Chinese translation of Shakespeare was not printed until the 80’s. Perhaps the intellectual youth near him were also very supreme?
Another thing makes his claim extraordinary is that during the cultural revolution, foreign books (unless from Soviet Union) were consider poisonous and banned. You would be punished if you were found owning one.
According the government website, he did not wear any gloves when working with the rocks and ropes. His palms were covered in blisters. and bled the next day. He actually showed the peasants how to work hard.
In 1975, his father was freed and so the Dear Supreme Leader got the chance to attend Qinghua university, the top engineering school in the country. There he studied chemical engineering, as a “Worker-Peasant-Soldier student”.
The higher education system in China was completely stopped during cultural revolution. Only “Worker-Peasant-Soldier student” whose political background was solid could get into college. It was only in 1977 that Deng Xiaoping restored the college entrance exam system so exam scores, not political background, decided who get to go to higher education.
After graduation, with the help of his father, the Dear Supreme Leader started his journey in the Chinese political system. And in 1998, he started graduate study in law and ideology and got a Ph.D from Qinghua university, while also working full time as a government official. This is a very standard packaging for great leaders, nothing special.
Also, rumours say that someone wrote the PhD thesis for him.
His career path to become the Supreme Leader is a bit boring: you can find all of it in wikipedia. Instead, let me share some fun names people use to refer to him.
Part of the reason people are not using his actual name anymore is, of course, censorship. Due to extensive censorship, people have learned to avoid “sensitive words”, which are words that invite scrutiny of censor. If you are not careful, your social media account(s) can be suspended, your chat groups can be silenced. The consequences is not just inconvenience, but also loss of money. Many people have money tied to their wechat accounts. (Tencent, owner of wechat, keeps the money)
For example, according to a report in March 2020 by DW, because of COVID, censorship was expanded on Chinese social media. Especially since Feb. 2020, 87% of the censorship is related to his name.
Another part of the reason is to convene their feelings towards him. At some point, a popular nickname for the Dear Supreme Leader literally means “Papa Xi”. But I have not seen anyone using it recently. Those were the time people still had illusions about him.
Here are some that people are still using:
Very obvious feelings in this one. It has been used the moment some people realized that he has no intention to further political reform to make China a free country.
This is because his formal education ended when he was in secondary school, when cultural revolution started, and he also was packaged as a Ph.D. Many people, based on his track records of mispronoucing words and misquoting poems, think he has very low level of literacy and education.
Li Rui, who was revered within CCP as he used to be a secretary for the dear supreme leader Mao, told VOA reporters that the current Dear Supreme Leader’s education level is primary school.
Jin is a unit of weight in China, 2 jin is a kilo. 200 jin equals 100 kg. So, you know what this is about.
Baozi is a very popular fast-food in China. It is supposed to be Dear Supreme Leader’s favourite food. In 2013, he even showed up at a chain store called Qingfeng to eat baozi with ordinary folks.
It became a PR compaign when local officals mimicked Dear Supreme Leader and ate baozi everywhere.
To me, this is the most beloved nickname. Easy to remember and hard to censor.
In Chinese, there is a sense of contempt when you nickname someone with food.
Related to 4. Qing Feng Bao Zi Pu
literally means the current emperor
Perhaps the most famous nickname because of a South Park episode that made it known to a large audience that China hates Winnie.
There are some memorable pics for this nickname too.
Because he has so many nicknames, there is even a wikipedia page in Chinese for it. But it is nowhere near complete. New names are arising all the time.
By the way, Winnie-the-Pooh is in the public domain now!
Because that was how we called Mao when I was little: the dear supreme leader Mao.
BTW, western media starts to call him “supreme leader”. I guess he is not a “dear” yet.