China's censors have reacted to news that President Xi Jinping had a species of beetle named after him by erasing the discovery from the Internet.

The 63-year-old, who is known as Big Daddy or Daddy Xi, is nurturing something of a personality cult and the comparison with a lowly insect has apparently not going down well with him.

The taxonomist responsible - Cheng-Bin Wang, from the southern island of Hainan – apparently named the beetle as a ‘tremendous honour’ for the president and will have been mortified to learn that it was taken as an insult.

China's President Xi Jinping, seen here in Tacoma, Washington, during a visit to the US last year, is the subject of a personality cult and censors keep a close watch for negative references on the Internet

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Mr Wang, who is affiliated to the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, christened the species Rhyzodiastes (Temoana) Xii when he discovered it recently.

Writing in the taxonomy journal Zootaxa, he said: ‘The specific epithet is dedicated to Dr Xi Jin-Ping, the President of the People’s Republic of China, for his leadership making our motherland stronger and stronger.’

His eight-page paper, published last month, went into great detail about the magnificent creature which has a ‘genital segment...moderately long and narrowly rounded at tip’.

Mr Wang told the AFP news agency he greatly admired the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and saw the beetle as a symbol of Mr Xi’s achievements.

He said: ‘The Rhyzodiastes (Temoana) is very rare – you might not encounter a single one even after 10 field collection sessions – and it also eats rotten wood for food.

‘So it’s a metaphor for Xi Jinping, a rare person you only encounter once a century, and specifically his controls on corruption, which will allow Chinese corruption to gradually disappear.’

But the US-based China Digital Times said references to the bug have been deleted from the Internet that is visible to web users in China.

Large numbers of external news websites and information sources – varying from the BBC to Zootaxa – are either blocked entirely or interfered with by Chinese censors on a regular basis.

President Xi Jinping, who took over in 2012, is revered in a way that has not been seen in China since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. His image is seen here on a poster as Chinese soldiers march past

China Digital Times claimed the authorities in Beijing issued a stern warning to Chinese news producers: ‘All websites find and delete the article “Entomologists Report: Scholars Use Daddy Xi to Name a New Type of Beetle” and related information.’

A search for the beetle’s Chinese name on the hugely popular Weibo social media platform came up with a message stating that no search results could be shown due to ‘relevant laws and policies’.

President Xi is not the first world leader to have had a strange creature named after him.

In 2013 a trapdoor spider was named Aptostichus Barackobamai after the US President and in 1999 a sea slug was christened Mandelia Mirocornata in honour of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Mr Wang said his gesture had been ‘deliberately vilified’ by people with ‘no culture’.