The subject of this study is the mechanisms of the media legitimation of Xi Jinping’s political leadership in Chinese state media as an institutionally organized space of official political communication. The focus is not only on the set of positive characteristics attributed to the political leader, but above all on the symbolic, thematic, and discursive ways in which his image is consolidated within the official media space of the People’s Republic of China. The article examines how Chinese state media incorporate the figure of Xi Jinping into a stable system of political representation in which notions of effective governance, the moral and normative justification of authority, ideological leadership, historical mission, and China’s foreign-policy agency are brought together. Particular attention is paid to thematic blocks related to anti-corruption policy, poverty alleviation, the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of the “Chinese Dream,” “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as issues of national sovereignty and China’s international positioning. The methodological framework of the article combines directed content analysis, elements of framing analysis, and discourse analysis of a corpus of 99 publications from central Chinese state media published between 2012 and 2024, followed by analytical triangulation of thematic and interpretive indicators. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that Xi Jinping’s media image in Chinese state media is interpreted not as a collection of separate reputational characteristics, but as an integral model of the symbolic legitimation of political leadership formed under conditions of digital mediatization and institutional coordination of official discourse. Unlike more general descriptions of the personalization of power, the article proposes an operationalized understanding of legitimation through observable indicators of performance, moral-normative justification, ideological normativity, and foreign-policy strategic agency. The analysis demonstrates that Xi Jinping’s image is built through the thematic convergence of domestic political, ideological, and foreign-policy dimensions. It is shown that the stability of this image is ensured by the repetition of key semantic formulas, genre integration, temporal coherence, and the digital circulation of official narratives. The study concludes that in the Chinese media system legitimation is produced not by isolated positive messages, but by the cumulative effect of a coherent representational environment.
Yuqi Wei (Wed,) studied this question.