The Myth Of A Kinder, Gentler Xi Jinping

The news media and political analysts are often criticised for taking too negative a view of the world. However, there is one niche area where the opposite is true: incoming world leaders.

The formula is simple: pick a country, preferably one with a history of authoritarianism. Now introduce the new leader, and write a piece about how they will change their country for the better. Pay too much attention to their youth, where they studied and who their family is, while at the same time disregarding the political reality they actually live in. Then, when you've written your thousand words, make sure to label them a 'reformer'.

The last decade has seen many new faces added to this list of potential reformers who failed to live up to the hopes of columnists around the world. Bashar al-Assad, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hassan Rouhani, Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi, Petro Poroshenko, Kim Jung Un. The list goes on.

And the latest entry for 2018 is none other than Xi Jinping, someone who many naïvely hoped could begin to liberalize China's authoritarian state. Instead, as we now know, he did quite the opposite, slowly building up a techno-Orwellian state stifling any and all dissent. This week, however, he appears to be intent on becoming dictator of China as well, moving to abolish the country's 10-year term limit for its leaders.

Isaac Stone Fish's insightful article for The Atlantic looks at how the media and analysts got Xi so wrong and examines how time and time again the same mistakes are made when it comes to profiling incoming world leaders. As such it serves not just as an indictment of the Chinese leader, but also of the media industry at large.