Chinese President Xi Jinping is not usually associated with an ecstatic smile. That is because the country’s government, along with the state media, has worked hard to build a reputation of seriousness.
The Chinese president met his US counterpart, Donald Trump, for a bilateral meeting in Busan, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea. Discussions ranged from soybeans, fentanyl, rare earth minerals and computer chips.
However, aside from the diplomacy, the White House has released pictures that show a different side of Xi. The photos show both the leaders sitting across from each other with their officials beside them. Xi appears grinning with his eyes closed at a piece of paper held out by Trump. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi can also be seen smiling beside him.
Last month, a Reuters video captured the Chinese leader cracking a joke with South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung while exchanging gifts. Lee gave him a wooden board for the chess game Go and received two Xiaomi phones made in China.
When Lee asked, “How is the communication security?”, it left Xi and others in splits. “You can check if there’s a backdoor,” Xi responded. China has been accused of building backdoors in their devices, a hidden way of accessing a device without the user knowing.
But Xi’s laugh is a rarity, as not only has he just curbed freedom of expression in China but also strictly controlled the flow of information, and with that, his image. As social media and Western news websites are banned in China, censors can easily remove any coverage of Xi that does not align with the government’s narrative.
Photos of the Chinese leader smiling and laughing are nowhere to be found on platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu. Only a few posts of the gift exchange between Xi and Lee were available on Weibo, as Chinese-language news sites based out of the country had reported about the same.