China’s next first lady is a star

Beijing: She has a resume that would make US political consultants drool: A renowned soprano who’s performed for troops serving the motherland, opera fans at Lincoln Centre and ordinary Chinese watching annual TV variety galas, Peng Liyuan is also a World Health Organisation goodwill ambassador in the fight against tuberculosis and HIV.

She’s volunteered to help earthquake victims and hobnobbed with Bill Gates at an anti-smoking event in Beijing.

An ‘artist-soldier’ in the army, she holds a civilian rank equivalent to major general, and sometimes belts out patriotic melodies in military skirt suits.

And the 49-year-old with the approachable good looks has the Tiger Mom base covered too: Her daughter is studying at Harvard.

As China counts down to its carefully scripted 18th Communist Party congress next month, everyone here knows the country will soon get a new president, and who it will be. (His name is Xi Jinping.)

Suspense

But there is suspense over one element of the transition: Will the nation get a full-fledged first lady as well in the form of Peng Liyuan?

The spouses of China’s senior leaders have kept a low profile in the decades since Mao Tse-tung’s power-hungry wife, reviled in the official press as the ‘White-Boned Demon’, shot to infamy as a member of the Gang of Four. Madame Mao received a suspended death sentence on charges that included counter-revolution, and later committed suicide.

After the low-key Xi was tapped as Hu Jintao’s heir apparent in 2007, many observers predicted that Peng would be a cosmopolitan, western-style first lady embodying a more open, modern China. Yet crafting a public role for Peng will require Communist Party image makers to delicately navigate millenniums-old suspicion of women near the centre of power in China, the party’s own squeamishness about making officials’ private lives public, and a gossipy media culture increasingly critical of elites’ lifestyles and behaviour.

“In China, there’s still this strain of thought, particularly in the countryside, that there are two possible roles for a female: the woman is either servile ... or an empress type,” said Ross Terrill, who wrote biographies of Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing. “There’s still a feeling that women can lead men astray, especially in affairs of the state.”

The woman-as-evil-schemer archetype got some recent reinforcement when one of Xi’s rivals for the top party job, Bo Xilai, was ousted from the Politburo amid a scandal involving his wife, a prominent lawyer named Gu Kailai, who was convicted of murdering a British businessman.

Popular Peng

The popular Peng could be a real asset for Xi, Terrill said. But “if the party suddenly appeared to be putting her in a box, saying no to her career, then that could trigger annoyance in the public,” he said. “It could be a test of how modernised they are.”

The October 1 issue of the glossy celebrity magazine OK China featured a seven-page spread on the famous politician and his wife: photos of her “flawless wardrobe,” details about their date nights, even a copy of their marriage certificate. But the pair wasn’t Xi and Peng: It was the Obamas.

China watchers say they will be looking to see how Peng and Xi present themselves in the coming months for clues on the new administration’s style. “As a new leader, you always should give some kind of freshness to the public,” said Cheng Li, a China expert at the Brookings Institution. “Xi needs to do a lot himself, but with a beautiful, popular first lady, this kind of image could be very helpful.”

— Los Angeles Times