BEIJING—One November afternoon a few years ago, President Xi Jinping met an elderly woman while visiting a remote mountain village in central China. A folksy tune spun from their encounter and crafted into a rousing music video last winter went viral.
Titled “How Should I Address You”—in reference to the question the farmer asked Mr. Xi—the music video celebrates the president’s concern for the rural poor. Heavily promoted by state media and praised by viewers, it was touted by senior Communist Party officials as an apt paean to Mr. Xi and a model of modern propaganda needed to appeal to a public accustomed to smartphones and the Internet.
Updated image-making is a key ingredient in propelling Mr. Xi to pre-eminence in Chinese politics and public life in the three years since he came to power.
Drawing on imagery that recalls Mao Zedong and on methods that are more Madison Avenue, the publicity campaign has mixed blanket news coverage of Mr. Xi with social media and viral marketing. The effort has reached deep into the traditional propaganda apparatus and tapped talent well beyond it.
A high-level party office that chiefly oversees foreign affairs has emerged as a creative force in the campaign, turning to outside media consultants—including a boutique firm run by Egyptian-born British nationals—to produce polished publicity films that appeal to younger, more discerning audiences.
Such productions show “a realization of the importance of reaching out to people in a personal way. Authenticity is important,” said Sameh El-Shahat, a government adviser and founder of British communications consultancy China-i Ltd.
In its embrace of new techniques and foreign expertise, the campaign represents an upgrade of the stiff, jargon-heavy formulas on which state media have long relied to present Chinese leaders and their policies to the public.
Some party members and ordinary Chinese have criticized the campaign, seeing its praise for Mr. Xi and use of Mao-era imagery as worrying signs of a budding personality cult and a harbinger of more-dictatorial rule. The party’s propaganda department and the government’s information office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
To some, the overhauling of propaganda is part of Mr. Xi’s ambitious bid to reinvent the foundations of Communist Party legitimacy. In doing so, he aims to preserve the party’s hold over China as the economy slows and a more prosperous population demands a more responsive government.
“The party elite were unified in wanting a more decisive, more centralized leadership, and one that was able to carry out the main mission of making one-party rule sustainable,” said Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London. “Xi is placed as someone with the leadership style to serve the party’s purposes in a really critical period.”
Mr. Xi has promoted nationalism and traditional Confucian morality, hoping to instill pride in being Chinese and provide an alternative value system to the democratic West. At the same time, he has reorganized decision-making to centralize control in his hands, used a popular anticorruption campaign to purge rivals and warn foot-draggers, while stifling dissent within and outside the party.
All told, the approach is giving Mr. Xi clout and popularity unrivaled by Chinese leaders in recent decades.
His dominance, combined with police sweeps against activist lawyers, the silencing of liberal social-media personalities and warnings about foreign spies, has unnerved some Chinese. Some have likened the political climate to the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s radical movement launched 50 years ago this Monday that led to violent persecutions and the deaths of some 1.5 million people.
Today, a critical difference, according to historians and people who lived through the period, is that Mr. Xi wants popular support, not mass participation. Instead, Mr. Xi is being packaged as a new can-do leader, not as dictatorial as Mao but firmer than the consensus-driven collective leadership the party turned to as an antidote to his one-person rule.
“People are more likely to fall in line behind a clear, strong and visible leader,” said Jude Blanchette, a Beijing-based researcher who is writing a book on Mao’s legacy. Faced with China’s increasingly savvy and skeptical populace, he said, the party has adapted by dabbling in new media methods and retail politics more commonly seen in the West.
Mr. Xi has called for party image-makers, state media and writers to craft a national narrative befitting China’s growing stature and to “tell China’s story well” at home and abroad.
One early image-making foray came when Mr. Xi visited a steamed-bun shop in Beijing for lunch in late 2013—a rare outing for Chinese leaders, who seldom mingle with the public. Cellphone videos and photos taken by other diners crackled across social media, rather than being censored. Comments praised Mr. Xi for being down-to-earth; a folk song titled “Steamed-Bun Shop” soon marked the event.
New players are bringing fresh energy to the strategy. A leader in making viral videos is an enigmatic producer called Studio on Fuxing Road. Its debut video released in late 2013, “How Leaders are Made,” depicted Mr. Xi and other politicians as cartoon characters with cutout faces, while comparing how the U.S., Britain and China each select their top leaders.
Since then, Studio on Fuxing Road has garnered plenty of plaudits and millions of views for its videos but has stayed secretive about its affiliations. It has no published phone number or address. Credits on its videos feature only its name, which means “Studio on the Road to Rejuvenation”—a nod toward Mr. Xi’s oft-touted “China Dream” of national renaissance.
The studio is part of the party’s International Department, which handles foreign relations, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Under the editorial control of the department’s Information Bureau, the studio selects themes for its films and often enlists outside contractors to help produce them, the people said.
Among them is China-i, whose Egyptian-born founder Mr. El-Shahat became a public-relations consultant in China after stints in Europe and the U.S. as an investment banker and furniture designer. China-i has produced two videos for Studio on Fuxing Road that showcased China’s relations with the U.S. and Britain, according to several people involved in the productions.
“Using such methods to promote China is so much better than using slogans,” Zhang Xingsheng, a Chinese nature conservationist, wrote on his verified microblog in response to a Studio on Fuxing Road video on China’s new five-year economic plan. Others, however, recoiled from what they saw as cheesy kitsch.
Despite the effort to make Mr. Xi a more accessible leader, those involved in the image campaign prefer anonymity. The International Department didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. El-Shahat declined to say if his consultancy works for the studio. http://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinpings-extreme-makeover-1463069291
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