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China's Vice President Xi is in town: what 6 international newspapers say

Chinese Vice President and presumed leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping is visiting the United States this week. From the increased US militarization of the Asia-Pacific region to China’s human rights record, newspapers across the globe are chiming in with their opinions and expectations for this high-profile visit. Here are a sample of six:

1. The visit could represent a new frontier for China

Susan Walsh/AP
President Obama meets with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, Tuesday, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.

  • By Whitney Eulich Staff writer

The Wall Street Journal, "Who Will Tell the Truth About China?" (Column)

“The purpose of Mr. Xi's image-making [US trip ] – helped along by some credulous Western reporting – is to present him as someone who took his knocks in life and understands what it's like to be dirt poor even as he has risen up the party hierarchy.

This, comrades, is baloney.

Thanks to a WikiLeaked State Department cable from 2009, we know more about Mr. Xi than he would probably be willing to volunteer. Among other interesting details: Mr. Xi ‘chose to survive [the Cultural Revolution] by becoming redder than red’; his first degree ‘was not a 'real' university education but instead a three-year degree in applied Marxism’; he was ‘considered of only average intelligence’; and ‘the most permanent influences shaping [his] worldview were his princeling pedigree,’ not his sojourn in the countryside.

…

[C]hange will ‘occur where you least expect it.’ Most Chinese today already get their news from Weibo (Chinese Twitter), eroding party control over the flow of information. American Idol-type singing contests are engendering a taste for democracy. And multiplying acts of cultural subversion are gradually making it impossible for the party to impose its categories of thought, even if it can still impose proscriptions on action.

How will Mr. Xi handle this new China? It's too soon to say. But no Chinese leader will be able to depend on the controls their predecessors enjoyed – technology simply won't allow it, and neither will evolving public expectations about what is permitted.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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