Southern Metropolis Daily speculates that Chinese president met UK opposition leader on state visit because of their political affinity

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

As the strongman president of the world’s second largest economy took centre stage on the first day of Xi Jinping’s state visit to Britain, one Chinese newspaper asked its reporters to investigate a supporting actor: the 66-year-old Labour party leader and MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.

“Who is Jeremy Corbyn?” wondered the Southern Metropolis Daily, one of Guangdong province’s top newspapers. “Why is China’s head of state meeting the opposition leader during his UK visit? Is it common practice, or does it carry deeper meaning?”

The front page of the Southern Metropolis Daily. The text under the main headline asks why Xi Jinping was meeting Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn had vowed to raise concerns over Beijing’s human rights record with Xi during their meeting at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday. The Labour party said the pair had a “cordial and constructive” encounter.

There was no mention of any discussion of human rights in China, where an army of Communist party censors stands ready to extirpate any mention of such topics from the media.



Xinhua, China’s official news agency, issued a meagre two-paragraph summary of the Xi-Corbyn summit.

“Xi Jinping noted the special role played by the Labour party in UK political life, and said he would like to see more cooperation with the party,” it said. “Jeremy Corbyn said China has made huge achievements in helping more than 600 million of its people out of poverty.”



With an intensifying government crackdown on dissent under way in China, the Southern Metropolis Daily also steered clear of mentioning human rights.

Instead, it offered readers a potted biography of Labour’s leader – born in Wiltshire in 1949, the year Chairman Mao took power – and sought to explain why Xi might have wanted to meet him in the first place.

Li Guanjie, a researcher from Shanghai International Studies University, suggested one answer might be a political affinity between Xi, who has sought to revive the study of Marxism in China, and Corbyn, who has described Marx as “a fascinating figure”.



Li told the newspaper “the reason why President Xi Jinping was meeting the newly-elected opposition leader could be that Corbyn’s ideas about socialism and the working class are similar to the ideology of our country’s ruling party”.



“When Britain became the first western power to recognise the legal status of the People’s Republic of China [in 1950] it was Clement Attlee’s Labour party that was in government,” the newspaper added.

The Southern Metropolis Daily noted that Labour “heavyweights” such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had opposed the election of a man it called “Labour’s famous old lefty”.

More controversially, in one-party China, the newspaper also sought to explain the multi-party democracy in which Corbyn is now a key player.

“The main responsibility of the opposition party is to scrutinise the behaviour of the ruling party,” it said.

Additional reporting Luna Lin