Xi Jinping’s New Year’s message was full of opaque platitudes, banalities and aphorisms as expected — but it was also like a guided tour inside his brain that gives hints of what to expect in the year to come.
It was broadcast from a windowless wood-paneled bunker inside the gates of Zhongnanhai. The ersatz office is lined with bookshelves and numerous photos of Xi himself.
Very much attune to communist mythology, Xi behaves as though he were born in a magical cave at the old Communist Party headquarters in Yan'an — and he’s good at getting the media to portray him that way. Folksy, down to earth, a man of the people. Never mind that he lived in Zhongnanhai palace as a kid, or that Zhongnanhai is his bunker now. If he wants to be seen as a second Mao, the myth of Yan'an is an essential part of it. It’s where Mao began to loom larger than life due to a whipped up personality cult.