Mingze, 33, a Harvard graduate, has consistently kept out of the spotlight: her presence at an official dinner with Lukashenko was revealed by the Belarusian news agency, which was forced to immediately delete the photos. Perhaps the Chinese leader wanted to send a signal to Washington.
A working dinner was organized in Zhongnanhai, which is also the center of Chinese communist power in Beijing. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has made fifteen state visits to China, was also invited to this dinner.
As Corriere della Sera writes, at this surprise dinner, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made the first public introduction of his daughter, Xi Mingze, who has been kept out of the spotlight for years.
The event took place in early summer and was reported by the Belarusian news agency BelTA, which wrote that on this evening Xi told Lukashenko: “My dear friend, our relationship is special, so today we will eat as a family and for the first time my daughter is attending a dinner with a foreign leader.”
The source of this story was the Deputy Prime Minister of Minsk, Nikolai Snopkov, and BelTA also published several images from the dinner.
One of the mysteries that Xi Jinping has carefully kept is his only daughter, born from his marriage to the famous singer Peng Liyuan. The ordinary Chinese public knows only that her name is Mingze, she was born in 1992 in Fuzhou, in Fujian province where her father was a party secretary, and she graduated in French language and literature.
Chinese propaganda has only mentioned her once, in 2008, when she volunteered to help with relief efforts after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. In 2010, it was revealed that she studied at Harvard under a pseudonym to protect her privacy and security.
In 2014, she graduated from Harvard with a degree in philosophy and then returned to Beijing, again out of the public eye. Even during Michelle Obama’s visit to China in 2014, her daughters were mentioned by Chinese media, but Mingze did not appear. In 2019, she was rumored to be pursuing a PhD at Harvard, but without much fanfare.
However, Mingze’s appearance at the dinner with Lukashenko remained mysterious. Chinese media did not report on it, indicating that Xi did not want to expose the girl to the general public.
Photos of the event were quickly deleted from the Belarusian agency’s website, possibly for security reasons: in 2019 an IT technician was sentenced to 14 years in prison for publishing a photo of Mingze from her identity card.
The international media has only a few photos believed to be of her, but none are certain; the only official photo is from the Xinhua agency and shows Mingze on the seat of her father’s bicycle as a child; the others are questionable.
Why did Xi introduce Mingze to the dinner? Western analysts believe it was a signal to Washington. Rumors have circulated recently that the girl could return to Harvard in secret, to maintain a channel of communication between the Chinese and American academic elites.
But after Donald Trump’s campaign against foreign students at Harvard, the plan was canceled. By “revealing” Mingze’s presence to Belarusian friends, Xi may have wanted to show the Americans that his daughter is doing very well at home.
