Where is Xi Jinping?

At the time of writing, China’s paramount leader, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, so regular a fixture on the news that he IS the news, hasn’t been seen in public for over two weeks. When he deigns to reappear, probably soon, it will be in all his glory, his personality cult jump-started and re-personified, but for now he’s neither here nor there; he’s in the ether.

That’s not to say it’s a cause for alarm, though tongues will wag. There’s the timing for one. Torrential floods hit, and he’s suddenly nowhere to be seen. Other Chinese communist leaders made the point of visiting disaster zones, if only for PR purposes, but not so with Xi. Is he sick? Has he had a breakdown? Or is he spooked out by the floods, seeking to disassociate from the inauspicious mandate of heaven’s apparent wrath?

Maybe it’s political. Does withdrawal to the bunker have anything to do with the murky goings-on in the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force — a reported suicide, two top generals sacked and replaced with loyal outsiders, and a sweep of arrests? The investigation seems to be deepening.

Perhaps he’s hitting the beach, but doesn’t photograph well in swimming trunks (not that that stopped the equally portly Jiāng Zémín 江泽民 from splashing in the surf for the cameras during his visit to Hawaii in 1997). If Xi has been at the beach in Beidaihe all along, the optics would be subpar given the flooding in adjacent parts of northern China.

Xi’s disappeared before, and unlike his former protégé Qín Gāng 秦刚, whose disappearance was not born of volition, Xi can come and go as he pleases. He’s the most powerful man in the country, with a formidable, hand-picked politburo, a military packed with loyalists, and a huge security establishment behind him, so if he opts to disappear, his protocol people can handle it.

Xi’s face has remained in the news, but only in the form of reruns, for the duration of his absence.

If he were abducted by aliens, the public would be the last to know.

Watching CCTV’s evening news broadcast Xinwen Lianbo daily since the hard rain fell does not begin to answer these questions. But CCTV without Xi has been interesting to watch, daresay, more interesting than usual, because the big hole created by the big man’s absence is filled with pictures of other people doing other things, and some of it is quite interesting.

Take the story that aired on August 10 about a Tibetan named Pemba. It’s communist propaganda, celebrating the life of a humble, hardworking man who joined the PLA and dedicated his life to helping others. But it’s propaganda without the personality cult, and it has a refreshing retro feel, like going back to days of soft authoritarianism when Jiang or Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 was in charge.

The usual CCP memes still fill the TV screen: leaders pointing at things, officials examining the rice harvest, soldiers and armed police mobilized en masse to “beat back the torrents and fight the floods,” Party members helping children and old ladies. But compared with the usual 7 p.m. news, half of which is focused on Xi, time has been freed up for smaller stories about CCP officials lower in stature and even a few ordinary folk.

While it’s not exhilarating, and it still falls short of good journalism, it’s good television. CCTV has excellent camera crews, state-of-the-art editing facilities, and a global reach that is the envy of BBC and CNN, with bureaus and budgets that Western news outlets can only dream about. But most of the time they don’t do anything, largely because CCTV has to mouth the Party line, and the Party line is whatever Xi is talking about. The strongman personality cult leaves little or no time for CCTV’s talented staff in the provinces of China, let alone its bilingual talents who are posted to its 70+ news bureaus abroad.

It’s edifying to see China on the screen, if only for as long as Xi stops upstaging everyone else, as a country containing multitudes, with lots of people doing good things and credit being spread around. It’s still propaganda, it’s CCTV after all, but it’s time-tested propaganda that meets the viewer halfway and gives voice to “good communists” and “model citizens” instead of crediting Xi for all accomplishments and achievements. Instead of starting every sentence with the formulaic “As Xi Jinping says…” the recipients of CCTV’s microphone can be seen expressing ideas of their own.

Personality cult mode requires all officials to kowtow to Xi, by walking several steps behind in his wake, or jotting down his every utterance, or clapping at his every arrival and departure, or clutching his books in hand, feigning to read his tomes on camera.

With Xi momentarily out of the way, CCTV has been showing scenes of people taking care of each other, and finding time and editorial leeway to celebrate more ordinary lives, such as the railway workers who whipped up noodles and soup from scratch in the dining car of a stranded train filled with distraught passengers.

In my daily tongue-and-cheek summaries of the news on the CCTV Follies, I dubbed Xi Jinping as the galaxy brain because the propagation of his cult requires the TV news to show him as all-wise, all-knowing, omnipotent and infallible, basically operating at a level above that of normal humans.

For example, on July 27, my summary of Xinwen Lianbo included 93 shots of Xi’s visit to Sichuan, which left precious little time for anything else happening that day. August 1 news was packed with footage of Xi mixing with the military, as well as glowing reviews of his two latest publications. No room for a serious report on the sharp turn in the weather.

The next few days, as the rains continued to fall and flooding was prevalent, saw Xi-heavy news, dozens of shots focused on his ideas about culture and minorities (including translations of his seminal works into different languages), but there was no news of HIM, it was all out of the can.

Since the peak of the floods, it’s down to four or five archival shots a day, and that’s it. No member of Xi’s politburo team has been seen, other than former Tianjin mayor Zhāng Guóqīng 张国清, visiting the flood zone.

The problem with the news on days when Xi is being pumped up like a superhero, the kind of Übermensch who only emerges every 100 years or so, who possesses a penetrating vision for China in the New Era (his era), and who shrewdly wants China to have more “Chinese characteristics” (his characteristics) is that there is no room for anyone else.

Xi’s pithy aphorisms, ranging from “green mountains are silver and gold mountains” and “the river and mountains are the people and the people are the rivers and mountains” sound like the utterances of a man without vision posing as a visionary.

He’s no galaxy brain, not in this time-space continuum, not in this solar system or any other.

But there is a galaxy brain of sorts, a million points of light so to speak, when smart, talented, and hardworking people put their heads together to solve problems of poverty, hunger, disease, and infrastructure, and we get edifying glimpses of that in China’s sheer industrial output and manufacture, its top-notch science and research, its bountiful agriculture, its rapid digitalization and technical advances, its fast trains and electric cars, and, yes, even the stellar space program, all of which CCTV devotes time to when Xi isn’t hogging the camera.

For the sake of better propaganda, maybe Xi Jinping should excuse himself from the news cycle more often, or at least drop the cumbersome, time-consuming, resource-wasting personality cult.

Who knows? CCTV news might even find the time and freedom to do some journalism for a change.