US officials now call Xi Jinping ‘general secretary’ instead of China’s ‘president’ – but why?
- The deliberate change could be an effort to delegitimise Xi’s rule, drive a wedge between party and populace and evoke a Cold War-era feel
- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo takes the lead in adopting the new description, and FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General William Barr follow suit
Two years ago, during Mike Pompeo’s first months on the job as US secretary of state, his public mentions of Chinese President Xi Jinping were cordial.
He was “honoured” to attend a working dinner with Xi in Buenos Aires; he thanked Xi for his role in “bringing North Korea to the negotiating table”; and he spoke gratefully of a “productive meeting with President Xi” during a visit to Beijing.
But today, with US-China relations in free fall, not only has the tone of Pompeo’s public statements regarding Xi soured considerably, his appellation of choice has also changed.
To top US officials, most notably Pompeo, Xi is now no longer the “Chinese president”, but the “general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)”, a sign, say analysts, of efforts by the administration to delegitimise Xi’s rule, drive a wedge between party and populace and evoke loaded connotations with the Cold War-era.
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Xi holds three official titles: head of state (guojia zhuxi, literally “state chairman”), chairman of the central military commission, and general secretary of the CCP. Though none of those translate directly to “president”, and despite the fact that official Chinese missives and state media reports almost always lead with Xi’s party title, the English-speaking world has by and large favoured “president”.
For 2018 and most of 2019, so did Pompeo. But over the past several weeks he has entirely abandoned that term in favour of “general secretary”, coinciding with a barrage of actions the Trump administration has taken against Beijing on matters ranging from Xinjiang and Hong Kong to Huawei and the South China Sea.