By Claire Fu and Ben Blanchard
Sept 25 (Reuters) – She chatted with US first lady Melania Trump in English without a translator, and sang along quietly when serenaded by a youth choir, looking effortlessly glamorous in a modern take on a traditional Chinese outfit.
On Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Washington trip, his wife Peng Liyuan is his soft power superweapon, projecting a gentler, more approachable image of China, despite its disputes with the United States over everything from trade to Taiwan.
“Thank you, mother Peng!” children in the choir told her, after performing Chinese folk song “Jasmine Flower” at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art in Washington on Thursday.
China’s Washington ambassador, Xie Feng, highlighted her diplomatic role on X, posting a video of Peng applauding the performance.
Peng “encouraged American teenagers to continue studying the Chinese language and culture and to become envoys of friendship between China and the United States”, Xie wrote.
“She helps to put a more human face on what otherwise can be some quite hard-nosed diplomacy and generate some kind of feel-good moments as far as US-China relations go,” said Joe Mazur, geopolitics analyst at Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China.
China’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Peng’s Washington reception.
TRADITIONAL LOW PROFILE FOR FIRST LADIES
However, discussions on Chinese social media of her activities and fashion choices during the trip remain heavily limited, underscoring sensitivities about public discussion of the personal lives of top leaders.
Searches for her fashion sense and English abilities on popular Chinese platform, Red Note, yielded no results.
Wives of top Chinese leaders have traditionally kept a low profile over the past few decades, because of the experience of Jiang Qing, the widow of the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
Jiang, the leader of the infamous “Gang of Four” that wielded supreme power during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, received a suspended death sentence in 1981 for the deaths of tens of thousands during that period of chaos.
Peng was previously best known in China as a soprano singer for the military. As Xi was rising to power in the early 2000s Chinese media got more leeway to cover her activities.
“When he comes home, I’ve never thought of it as though there’s some leader in the house. In my eyes, he’s just my husband,” Peng said in an interview with a state-run magazine in 2007.
She described Xi as frugal, hardworking and down-to-earth.
Coming from humble beginnings, Peng has championed difficult social causes, such as people living with HIV/AIDS.
Peng is Xi’s second wife, and the two have a daughter who studied at Harvard. Xi divorced his first wife, the daughter of a diplomat.
(Reporting by Claire Fu and Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Mei Mei Chu; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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