A six-part television extravaganza starring the president as he bestrides the world is designed to cement his role ahead of October’s party congress

The red carpet has been rolled out at Harare’s international airport: the Great Statesman saunters down it, his fingers pressed tightly into Robert Mugabe’s palm.



Next, it leads from His Excellency’s Jaguar into London’s 15th century Guildhall, where the Lord Mayor has laid on a banquet of dover sole and red-legged partridge in his honour.

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“Wherever he goes, Xi Jinping sets off a whirlwind of charisma!” hyperbolises a narrator from China’s Communist party-controlled broadcaster, CCTV.

The scenes are part of a four-and-a-half-hour television extravaganza being screened in China this week in a bid to burnish the president’s leadership credentials ahead of a key political summit that will kick off on October 18. “For the first time, China is standing at the centre of the world stage,” viewers of the six-part series Major Country Diplomacy are told. “This is is a new historical course charted by president Xi Jinping.”



October’s twice-a-decade congress marks the end of Xi’s first term as China’s paramount leader and with the event just weeks away, Beijing’s propaganda apparatus is working overtime to sing his praises.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Xi hand in hand with Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

As part of that PR offensive, a string of big-budget “documentaries” – in reality slick, state-funded advertorials – have received a prime-time billing. Earlier this summer, one such series hailed what it portrayed as Xi’s relentless assault on corruption and – despite a notorious crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists – his bid to advance the rule of law.



This week, the focus has been on the overseas triumphs of a globetrotting statesman who has racked up more than 350,000 air-miles battling to make both China – and the world – great again.



In Major Country Diplomacy, Xi appears nursing a pint with David Cameron and being grinned at by Prince William. He hobnobs with Barack Obama, strolls through Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and entertains a plethora of world leaders from Raúl Castro and Nicolás Maduro to Shinzo Abe and Jacob Zuma. “Usually he doesn’t have time to dine,” Xi’s interpreter, Zhou Yu, says of his workaholic boss. “Once ... his bodyguard [had to give] me a box of biscuits [so he didn’t go hungry].”

Kerry Brown, head of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London, said the pre-congress propaganda blitz was mainly for internal consumption: “The core audience for Xi Jinping’s travels abroad is always at home.”

Beijing hoped to portray him as a “global president, for a global age, for a global China” who was restoring his nation to its rightful place on the world stage, said Brown, whose latest book, China’s World: What China Wants, looks at foreign policy under Xi. “This is something most Chinese have an appetite for ... no matter what their inner-most thoughts about the party or the system.”

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But the 45-minute films also have a foreign target, painting China’s leader as the anti-Trump; a committed internationalist who champions global trade, developing nations and the fight against climate change. In episode two, Russian president Vladimir Putin pops up to hammer home the message that Xi is both a strong and a stable world leader: “He’s a very good friend, a very reliable partner.”



Other foreign voices also applaud Xi’s preeminence. A British sociologist recites a passage from Xi’s The Governance of China, a tome propagandists claim has sold more than 6m copies worldwide. An Argentine politician declares himself “muy impresionado” with Xi’s rule. Former French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, commends Xi’s writing skills and is filmed receiving a signed copy of his book.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hosting Vladimir Putin in Beijing. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an American CCTV host who also appears in the series, claimed Xi was playing “a very, very active personal role” in driving a “historic” transformation in Chinese foreign policy. “China has moved from largely a reactive to a very proactive foreign policy,” he said. “People see the more overt expressions of it in the South China Sea and East China Sea but it is really much broader than that,” he added, highlighting what he called Xi’s efforts to promote “a new kind of global governance” on issues such as climate change and trade.



Kuhn, who is preparing his own six-part series on the Chinese president for the Communist party’s English-language channel, said that in official circles Xi was increasingly depicted as the third most important leader of post-revolution China. “Mao Zedong made China stand up in the world ... then Deng Xiaoping [made] China strong economically and now Xi Jinping is making his mark by engaging fully with the world and [bringing about] the full rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” he said.



“Maybe that is a bit overly simplistic … but that is what is being talked about. And central to that ... is that [Xi] becomes a world statesman-like leader who is bringing China into global governance for the benefit of all countries, including China.”

Brown said Beijing hoped Xi would succeed in recasting China as a benign giant interested in “win-win cooperation” and the greater global good. But there was one flaw in the plan: “The world clearly doesn’t buy it.”

Additional reporting by Wang Zhen