Narrating China's Governance: Stories in Xi Jinping's Speeches

by Department of Commentary People's Daily, Jing Luo (Translator)

This open access book captures and elaborates on the skill of storytelling as one of the distinct leadership features of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic of China. It gathers the stories included in Xi’s speeches on various occasions, where they conveyed the essence of China’s history and culture, its reform and development, and the principles of China’s participating in global governance and cooperating with other countries to build a community of common destiny. The respective stories not only convey abstract and profound concepts of governance in comparatively straightforward language, but also create an immediate emotional connection between the narrator and the listener.In addition to the original stories, extensive additional materials are provided to convey the original context in which each was told, including when and to whom Xi told it, helping readers attain a deeper, intuitive understandingof their relevance.

Genres: China

294 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 20, 2019

Reviews

[celestine]

Quite a dry and frankly boring read. What you get here is excerpts from speeches (and some of his writing pre-presidency) of Xi Jinping on a variety of occasions, followed by People’s Daily commentary on that excerpt that’s essentially just Wikipedia-style contextualization. The last third of the book is mostly skippable, as Xi recounts to various nations he’s visiting elements of their culture he appreciates or anecdotes of foreign travelers relevant to said nation. The most interesting aspect of this book for people who’ve already studied some on Xi-era China is probably the segments where we get to see some of his writings in the early 90s, fragments that are otherwise unpublished or untranslated in English. Xi looks to synthesize Chinese traditional philosophy with Marxism as has been the goal of “sinicized Marxism” since the Deng era, and for English readers this is a decent enough source for some additional reading. In 2023 it’s a little underwhelming as it basically stops at 2015-16, before Xi’s “hit the socialism button” had really started to kick into gear.