SHANGHAI — Is China having a first lady moment? It would certainly seem so. Peng Liyuan, a.k.a. Mrs. Xi Jinping, the wife of China's new president, has emerged swiftly and seemingly decisively, into an overtly more prominent first-lady role than we've seen for some time in China. To be fair she has the track record to be a front-and-center Spouse No. 1 -- she's long been a soprano singer of highly patriotic tunes with a voice that can hit the high notes and shatter glass. Her regular appearances on the long-running, and mostly just plain long, state TV traditional spring festival variety show mean she is universally known in China, whether formally clad in her trim People's Liberation Army olive uniform with plenty of blingy braid attached, or in one of her many elaborate ball gowns belting out a song or three.
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But with Xi's political elevation, so too Peng Liyuan's profile has been lifted. She has all the credentials -- she is photogenic, dresses extremely well, and has a record of championing good causes (she was an ambassador for tobacco control in 2009 and in 2012 was appointed as the ambassador for the fight against tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS for the WHO, an initiative aided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). When she recently stepped of the plane with Xi on an overseas trip, the photographers ate up her stylish black peabody coat, her spot-on high-bouffant hairdo, and a handbag of sumptuous leather that did not have any obvious branding (very important in these days of corruption crackdown and Chinese politicians being snapped with expensive Swiss watches and luxury European designer accessories that should be beyond the reach of fairly low-paid public officials).
All of this of course is no accident. Part of the Xi "China Dream Team" is the promotion of a first lady, something (if the Chinese blogosphere is to be believed) many Chinese have been waiting for after years of being fascinated with foreign first ladies from Michelle Obama to Carla Bruni to Cherie Blair. Going back of course, there's still a fascination among some with Jackie O., while, back in 1972, Pat Nixon intrigued the Chinese by wearing a rather scandalous red coat (her advisers told her the Chinese associated red with prostitutes) and accompanying her husband on tours of communes and schools. Obviously Peng Liyuan knows how to draw attention too, arriving with her husband in Tanzania on his recent swing through Africa in a well-tailored peach dress suit and with another luxurious leather, but again unbranded, handbag.
Still, as much as China watchers have argued that Peng Liyuan is the start of a new trend of prominent first ladies in China, the fact is that the tradition of prominent and controversial first ladies in Chinese politics is long and storied, dating all the way back to the birth of the Chinese Republic in 1911. And speculation about who is and who isn't a senior leader's consort has always been rife, at least unofficially. Indeed China's imperial system had a rigid and well defined ranking system of empress, consorts and concubines. There's some long history here: The Rites of Zhou, one of three ancient ritual texts listed among the classics of Confucianism and published sometime in the second century, stated that an emperor was entitled one empress, three madames, nine imperial concubines, 27 shifus (female masters), and 81 imperial wives.
Admittedly, since the 1980s, Chinese first ladies have been largely seen but not heard. Deng Xiaoping's wife, Zhuo Lin, often travelled with the paramount leader but was invariably well in the background; Jiang Zemin's wife, Wang Yeping, was seen even less, largely due to her frail health; Hu Jintao's wife, Liu Yongqing, was rarely photographed and said next to nothing publicly. Of course China loves gossip as much as anywhere, though the PRC is not getting its own TMZ anytime soon. Rumours of Jiang's close relationship with a well-known and popular singer indicated that Chinese leaders could have a taste for showgirls as much as any Kennedy.
It's not that senior leaders didn't have smart wives -- the wife of Mao's number two Zhou En-lai, Deng Yingchao, was a political force in her own right and as urbane and sophisticated as her husband. She shared her husband's travails -- hiding out in the Astor Hotel in Shanghai during the 1927 White Terror -- and later chaired the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a rubber-stamp unelected parliament that ratifies Communist Party policy, from 1983 to 1988. But the guiding trend after the Maoist years was for the wives to stay in the background. Hua Guofeng, Mao's designated successor, was married to Han Zhijun, who was less prominent but was known as the mother of four children and an avid gardener apparently. The wife of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist and popular general secretary of the Communist Party who was ousted in 1989 for supporting the students at Tiananmen Square, loyally accompanied him into internal exile until his death. She was apparently an excellent chess player, passing much of the time checkmating her husband, according to Zhao's leaked secret journals, which were eventually published in 2009 after his death.
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