President Park fever sweeps China

“She created an extraordinary life amid a miserable situation.”

“This book showcases how a woman has realized her dream in a male-dominated society.”

These are some of Internet posts on President Park Geun-hye’s biography “Hopelessness Creates Hope,” which is on sale at Dang Dang Net, an online book store in China. The 10,000 copies of the Chinese version of the book, published in the first printing on March 15, were sold out in a matter of 15 days, and an additional 8,000 copies have been printed. This illustrates that Chinese people have keen interest in President Park.

Chinese people’s positive feeling towards Park is affected by factors such as her unfortunate situation as a female leader and her foreign policy that emphasizes China. “Politicians are mostly males at advanced ages, who wear dark suits, but President Park tends to draw attention as a female president when appearing on Chinese TV,” said Wang Liuzhu, 25, an office worker who studied in Korea.

As many as five different books regarding President Park, which are translated into Chinese, are being sold on online book stores in China. The book entitled “Hopelessness Trains Me,” released in May, ranked top in sales in the “foreign politicians” category in early this month. The late former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s biography, released around that time, ranked third.

Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, even has a “Park Geun-hye fan club.” Considering that the manager of this account resides in Seoul, the manager is believed to a Chinese national living in Korea. After launching on February 8, the Internet community had 6,426 followers as of Tuesday. It is quite unusual that a fan club for a foreign leader has been created in China. Other than Park, U.S. President Barack Obama has a fan club in China, but with only 155 followers.

With Park’s visit to China getting imminent, Chinese media outlets are beefing up their attention on the Korean president. In its Tuesday edition, the state-run Global Times reported that Korea-China relationship will likely usher in a honeymoon period, by highlighting that President Park is visiting China accompanied by a 71-member economic entourage, the largest ever scale. The newspaper also reported that 83 percent of (South) Koreans showed a positive outlook on Korea-China relations in a recent survey, saying that positive sentiment towards China increasingly prevails in Korea.

Takungpao, a pro-China newspaper in Hong Kong, reported on Saturday last week that President Park will stay at Room 18 in Diaowitai State Guesthouse during her visit to China. Room 18, dubbed the “Presidential Suite,” is the place where Queen Elizabeth II of Britain and former U.S. President Richard Nixon stayed, according to the newspaper. President Park`s stay in the room is nothing special in that former Korean presidents also stayed there, but it is unusual that Chinese media outlets have reported a detailed itinerary of China visit by a foreign head of state.

In an article entitled “Guiding Light of My Life that I Accidently Encountered: Eastern Philosophy” on Thursday last week, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that President Park was deeply moved when she read “History of Chinese philosophy” authored by Feng Youlan. This article was written based on an op-ed piece Park contributed to the May 2007 issue of Monthly Essay, a monthly magazine in Korea. By illustrating that Park respects China’s mental world, the article underscores emotional homogeneity between Korea and China. An announcement on an online book store suggests that “History of Chinese Philosophy” was a book that President Park read when she was experiencing the toughest period in her life.

Chinese media is also shedding light on personal relationship between President Park and Chinese President Xi Jinping. In an article entitled “Park boasts extensive overseas personnel network, close ties with President Xi Jinping” filed in January, the semiofficial China News (chinanews.com) introduced a meeting between Park and Xi in Seoul in 2005. Since that encounter, President Xi invited Park to China three times, but no visit has been arranged due to conflicting schedules. Including Park’s upcoming state visit to China, Xi has effectively offered to invite Park four times.

The Korean Embassy in China is proactively staging a “presidential marketing” campaign in a bid to narrow differences between peoples of the two countries and boost the mood of friendly ties by using Park’s visit as a watershed. In its news reports filed on Thursday last week, Xinhua bothered to make translations of Park’s past op-ed pieces (to Korean media) into Chinese and transmit them to Chinese media organizations.

In the diplomatic community in Beijing, Park’s upcoming visit will prove to more successful than ever before because the leaders of Korea and China have little difference in their views on how to cope with North Korea’s nuclear issue.