China says Xi Jinping’s an avid reader ... but what’s on his reading list?

China’s state-controlled media said on World Reading Day that the country’s President Xi Jinping is an enthusiastic reader of literature and philosophy and Chinese citizens should learn from him.

“Xi Jinping ... has always regarded reading as a life attitude, a duty of work and a spiritual pursuit,” the state-run Xinhua news agency said in an editorial.

Xinhua quoted Xi’s comment in 2013 that “I have many hobbies and the biggest one is reading books. Reading is part of my lifestyle.”

The efforts to paint Xi as a learned scholar and a lifestyle model come as the president is demanding absolute loyalty from the army and the Communist Party ahead of a key power reshuffle at a party congress due to be held this autumn.

Remarks by Xi are dispatched to local cadres and army officers “to study” and one book of Xi’s earlier speeches, The Governance of China, has been translated into dozens of languages. The book was seen on the desk of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, in a photograph published by Chinese state media two years ago.

Xi’s formal education was interrupted during the Cultural Revolution when he was in first years of middle school, but he was enrolled into Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1975. He later obtained a doctoral degree from Tsinghua in 2002 when he was a provincial governor.