'It's no House of Cards': Xi's surprising pop culture reference on power struggle aimed at viewers back home

President Xi Jinping's public dismissal of suggestions that his sweeping anti-corruption campaign was motivated by a power struggle was aimed at his audience back home, analysts said on Wednesday after his landmark speech in Seattle.

Addressing a banquet in Washington state at the start of his week-long visit to the United States, Xi raised eyebrows with comments on his high-profile graft crackdown.

"We have punished tigers and flies … It has nothing to do with power struggles. In this case there is no House of Cards," Xi said in a surprising reference to the popular American political drama series starring Kevin Spacey as ruthless and power-hungry US President Francis Underwood.

Read more: Full coverage of Xi Jinping's US trip

While the House of Cards analogy was intended to resonate with an American audience, his rejection of the sceptics' view about his anti-graft campaign was addressed to people watching on the other side of Pacific, said Xiaoyu Pu, a political science professor from the University of Nevada.

Steve Tsang, a senior fellow of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, agreed.

"We need to bear in mind that during his visit in the US, there will be a lot of American media coverage, but it is not going to be anything comparable to the Chinese media coverage. So the primary audience in fact is not the Americans, but the Chinese," Tsang said.

He also said that from Xi's perspective the anti-corruption campaign was not aimed at purging political opponents, but at cleaning up the Communist Party to maintain its ruling status.