How A Leader Is Made
According to a wildly popular online cartoon in China, the answer (to What’s the Secret to China’s Success?) lies in the careful way the country grooms its leaders – a process that supposedly puts the American and British political career ladder to shame.
The “How Leaders Are Made” video, which has been viewed more than 1 million times since it was uploaded on Oct. 15, presents cartoon characters representing China’s President Xi Jinping and the six other men who make up the country’s ruling Standing Committee.
As a bouncy Xi bobs across the screen, a bright, cheery voice intones that every provincial or ministerial level leader in China is chosen from among 140,000 officials—a process that takes at least 20 years. The men who rule the world’s second-largest economy, clearly, are very special men whose selection involves “meritocratic screening that requires years of hard work like the making of a kung fu master.”
And what effort does reaching the level of U.S. President involve, according to the video? Only one year and “an unending flow of greenbacks.” (Becoming Britain’s PM is compared to Susan Boyle winning “Britain’s Got Talent.”)
Who exactly produced the cartoon isn’t clear. The five-minute spot was uploaded in Beijing and the closing credits are for “A studio on Fuxing Road.” Surely this is a pun: fuxing, or revival, is a signature catchphrase of China’s ruling Communist Party, which has unveiled a propaganda campaign calling for the national revival of the Middle Kingdom.
Furthermore, Fuxing Road in Beijing is a street famous for being lined with government bureaus. The office of the General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television is one of them. As speculation erupted over the video’s mystery creator, the Southern Metropolis Daily, an occasionally enterprising Chinese daily, quoted an expert who said the video was very likely made by someone in government. After all, despite the massive number of hits the cartoon has received, the video has not been pulled by China’s industrious censors.
Related Articles
- Xi’s Neo-Maoist Mass Line Campaign Casts A Dark Shadow Over China (chinadailymail.com)
- What’s the Secret to China’s Success? (world.time.com)
- Viral cartoon comparing Xi and Obama raises questions in China (straitstimes.com)
- Did China Make A Weird Viral Cartoon To Mock US Politics? (businessinsider.com)
- Cartoon-version Xi Jinping goes viral on Youku (wantchinatimes.com)
- Did China Make A Weird Viral Cartoon To Mock US Politics? – Business Insider (vote-pedia.com)
- Viral Cartoon Video in China Makes Fun of American & British Elections (ijreview.com)
- President Xi animation surprises netizens (nzweek.com)
- Chinese leaders very busy (bloodandtreasure.typepad.com)
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Reblogged this on Oyia Brown.
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Thanks to all readers’ “Likes” and reblogging. Like it or not, this unprecedented non-democratic leader training and power succession system in China has been working quite smoothly in this century under the direction of Deng Xiao-ping, despite lots of shortcomings such as corruption and nepotism. It is already an elephant in the room. Please do not pretend it does not exist. May I suggest all of you put aside the wishful thinking for democratization for a while and take some time to study the merits and weaknesses of this system (which has been named by me as ‘Helmsman Ruler System”) realistically and objectively. My first China Daily Mail essay “China’s Rotational Political Succession System” posted on Aug 24, 2013 argues that it is a pragmatic version of Plato’s rotational ruler prototype with three common features and two pragmatic variations. A Tsinghua University professor reposted it on The 4th Media’s Debate Forum in Beijing. Scholars in China have begun to examine this system. My primary goal of writing it is to encourage more productive discussions and sensible debates in all meaningful directions. You are most welcome to publish your criticizism worldwide on my book “Helmsman Ruler” (preview available at Amazon and scribd.com), however harsh it may be.
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