She is only 10, but Dai Jingya has already come face to face with more heads of state than most people will in their lifetimes. She has rubbed shoulders with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), and greeted the leaders of Singapore, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Denmark.
Dai is one of a group of children from Beijing schools organized to welcome the constant stream of foreign dignitaries coming to the Chinese capital to pay their respects.
The ritual has echoes of both the personality cult rule of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and the way emperors embodied the state in the era of imperial China, experts say.
Photo: AFP
In closely choreographed performances that always takes pride of place on the state broadcaster CCTV’s main evening news, Xi and his guest first review the honor guard at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square.
The pair walk past the phalanx of about 40 children, who on cue burst into ecstatic screams of “Welcome to China” in Chinese and English, jumping up and down waving a Chinese flag in one hand and the visitor’s emblem in the other.
“I really like coming here to welcome the foreigners, we get to miss school and sometimes I get to see myself on the evening news,” Dai said, waiting under a hot sun for a ceremony to begin.
However, she has yet to glimpse US President Barack Obama, she said, adding he is the leader “I want to see the most.”
The welcome ceremonies have a long history, but the presence of children was reintroduced after Xi took power in 2012, following a decades-long gap.
When then-Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited China in 1954, he became the first non-Communist leader to visit the nation.
It was a crucial endorsement of Mao’s rule with the world order in flux as decolonization and revolution redrew the map, and his host pulled out all the stops in the way only an absolute leader can.
About 300,000 people lined the 10km route that the prime minister’s limousine took from Beijing’s airport to the city, according to a report at the time in London’s News Chronicle.
Under Mao, smiling children in red neckerchiefs from the Young Pioneers, a Chinese Communist Party youth organization, were frequently on hand to welcome foreign leaders. After his death in 1976 and the end of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, China moved the formal welcome ceremonies from the airport to the Great Hall of the People, and two years later the government stopped organizing citizens to line the roads.
In 1989, during the administration of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民), the Chinese Department of Protocol ordered that elementary and middle-school students would no longer take part in welcoming state visitors.
However, Xi has revived the practice.
A few other countries use children in similar ceremonies, but rarely with such prominence.
Before anyone of importance arrives, teachers drill the students with military-like commands.
“This is a great opportunity,” one teacher said to an unruly boy. “Do not embarrass yourself and your school by doing anything that would upset the leaders.”
When Xi arrives, the teachers must look on from afar, a mix of pride and nerves as they snap photographs, while hoping their charges behave in the presence of power.
After the leaders left, the children rushed into the bathroom, each declaring they were unafraid of Xi, and taunting a boy they said was scared.
When Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo visited, many students were excited, albeit largely unaware of his nation’s existence, let alone the many human rights violations Obiang is alleged to have committed during more than 30 years in office.
It was the second time eight-year-old You Ziniu had been mustered to join the welcoming committee, after he greeted Obama last year.
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