By Austin Ramzy

New York Times

HONG KONG >> It’s all right to cry, even when you’re the leader of the world’s most populous nation.

That was one message in an online report on Wednesday carried by several Communist Party and state media outlets that described a handful of known times when President Xi Jinping of China had shed tears.

The story did not portray Xi as weepy — with just four documented cries since the 1960s, he is no John Boehner, the former House speaker. Rather, it sought to show him as someone who feels deeply about family, friends, average citizens and model officials.

It appears to be part of a broad effort to humanize Xi and build a cult of personality around him, an endeavor that has gone beyond anything dedicated to recent Chinese leaders. State and Communist Party news outlets as well as Chinese social media have carried cartoons, songs and photos of the daily life of Xi Dada, a nickname for the Chinese leader that means Daddy or Uncle Xi.

A video of a new song that holds up Xi as the ideal sort of man a woman should marry has been widely viewed on Chinese websites in recent weeks. It is the sort of praise that would be unimaginable for his predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Last month, Xi visited some of the country’s biggest news outlets and delivered a message about the party’s dominance over the media. His words were reinforced days later when three editors were apparently punished at a newspaper that juxtaposed a headline outlining Xi’s message to the media with another about a funeral, possibly as a lament over the demise of aggressive news outlets in China.

The story about Xi’s crying was first carried by a public WeChat account dedicated to reporting on the president. According to state media reports, the WeChat account is run by a group of journalists from the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the party’s flagship newspaper. The article was picked up by the website of CCTV, the state broadcaster. Then it was widely republished by other Chinese news outlets including Xinhua, the state news agency, an indication that it has high-level approval from the propaganda authorities.

The piece includes an interview with Xi in 2004, when he was party secretary of Zhejiang province, in which he lists two of the times he has cried. Once was after the death of an elder sister. He does not detail the circumstances, but she is believed to have killed herself because of persecution by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

The other incident Xi relates was in 1975, during his time in rural Shaanxi province. He had been sent there in 1969 as part of the “send down” movement, in which urban youth were ordered to go to the countryside to learn from farmers. Many presumably cried when they arrived. Xi himself has spoken of the difficulties he experienced adjusting to hard farm labor and incessant flea bites.

But the tears Xi describes were not attributed to hardship. Rather, he says they were the result of his sadness at leaving the people who had taken him in and welcomed him. At that time Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, had been purged of his leadership positions and his family was under attack.

He tells of the party the locals held for him on his departure, killing a sheep to eat and giving him a notebook filled with good wishes. The next morning, as everyone gathered to wish him goodbye, he cried.

“I went away, but I left my heart there,” he said.

An earlier incident, which Xi spoke of during an event two years ago, involved his time as a student in February 1966, months before the official start of the Cultural Revolution, when a teacher read an article from People’s Daily.

The article described Jiao Yulu, a model official of that era, who tirelessly worked alongside the poor farmers in his county. The middle-school teacher began to cry as he read the article, as did the students in Xi’s class. In 1990, Xi wrote a poem in memory of Jiao that describes the struggle of being an upright official.

A final round of tears was shed over a close friend, Jia Dashan, a writer who was Xi’s friend when he was an official in Hebei province in the early 1980s. The two men often had long talks, and both cried when Xi left to take up a position in Fujian province in 1985. Xi stayed close with Jia and wrote a long eulogy after his death in 1997. Guangming Daily, a party-run national newspaper, reprinted the eulogy in 2014, with an accompanying article that said the tribute showed Xi’s “sincere friendship” and “personal charisma.”