How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC
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Xi Jinping.
There are countless online suggestions for how to pronounce the name of the Great Helmsman. Most of them are well intended, but I fear that so far they have failed. People who are well informed about Chinese affairs still murder the Paramount Leader's name. So as not to muddy the waters, I will give a completely non-technical transcription. No phonology, no semantics, no frills.
What I'm going to suggest on the next page is intended for the English-speaking layperson who has no specialized knowledge of Chinese language. It will not be exactly the same as Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) spoken by a native, but it will get you close — sans tones, which would take a long time to explain and practice
Remember, there are countless Sinitic topolects, dialects, and idiolects, and endless variations even among MSM speakers. Be confident. If you pronounce the Paramount Leader's name the way I advise on the next page, any well-disposed/intended speaker of MSM will understand whom you're referring to.
Oh, by the way, if you haven't formally studied Mandarin and try to pronounce the "X" in some linguistically sophisticated way, you will most likely miserably fail.
Don't try to make it fancy or exotic.
Pronounce the words the way you would in English.
Here goes:
SHE GIN PING
That's it. Keep it simple.
Selected readings
- "How to say 'Xi Jinping' en français" (4/16/18) — very short, but it makes me laugh every time I hear it. Must watch / listen. "Sissy Ping".
- "The political dangers of mispronunciation" (4/5/17)
- "Why we say 'Beizhing' and not 'Beijing'" (5/2/19)
jhh said,
October 16, 2025 @ 7:06 am
SHE GIN PING: The G of Gin is a hard G, like Gold? Gin as in the alcoholic drink?
Coby said,
October 16, 2025 @ 8:23 am
Wouldn't JEAN be better than GIN?
Jerry Packard said,
October 16, 2025 @ 9:09 am
‘Wouldn't JEAN be better than GIN?’
The in is phonetically neither [i] (JEAN) nor [ɪ] (GIN), but rather about halfway between the height of the two of them – as far as I know there is no symbol that represents that phone.
Jerry Packard said,
October 16, 2025 @ 9:15 am
Hmm… I seem to have run afoul of HTML syntax by using angle brackets to represent a written form.
Without the angle brackets it should say ‘the i in jin is phonetically neither…’
Victor Mair said,
October 16, 2025 @ 9:38 am
closer to "gin" than to "jean"
Victor Mair said,
October 16, 2025 @ 9:39 am
not the hard "g" of "gold"
wgj said,
October 16, 2025 @ 9:42 am
This reminds me of the theory I once read that there's such a thing as a "feminine dialect" in Mandarin, and that one of the most prominent expression of this dialect is to pronounce "x" close to "s". Xiexie (thank you) would be pronounced "siesie", and Xi would be pronounce like the English letter C. I don't remember much about the details of this theory, but I can tell from experience that I know people pronouncing "x" that way, and they are in fact nearly all women. They include both native Mandarin speaker and language learners, but the fraction of the latter is disproportionately high.
Geographically, both "x" and "h" are pronounced harder in Northern China, and become softer heading southward, where "x" gets close to "s" and even close to "h". Curiously, this mirrors the pronunciation gradient of "ch" in German, which is a very similar sound. It's close to "x" in Hamburg and close to "h" in Vienna.
Philip Taylor said,
October 16, 2025 @ 10:18 am
I would respectfully propose "She djinn ping".
Joe said,
October 16, 2025 @ 10:25 am
It's the "G" as in "GIF".
Victor Mair said,
October 16, 2025 @ 10:31 am
That's funny and interesting, but not respectful.
"djinn" [ جِنّ (jinn)] is not a well-known English word.
Jerry Packard said,
October 16, 2025 @ 10:33 am
@wgj
There are currently young Beijing Mandarin speakers who pronounce the palatal consonants/tɕ, tɕʰ, ɕ/(pinyin ,
Jerry Packard said,
October 16, 2025 @ 10:34 am
whoops, I once again pissed off HTML
Jonathan Smith said,
October 16, 2025 @ 11:07 am
If you want to say the vowel of Mand. e.g. jin is lax*er* than that in e.g. ji, I can agree — but it is not lax compared to the vowel of Am. Eng. e.g. gin. Some F1/F2s I see are from S-Y. Wang (1963): Mand. -i 277/2015, -in 294/1977; cf. Am. Eng. [i] 280/2250, [ɪ] 400/1920 from (internet suggests) Ladefoged & Johnson (2011). One should certainly prefer Eng. "jean/gene" to "gin" as a crude approximation for Mand. jin.
Daniel said,
October 16, 2025 @ 11:42 am
In my perception, sequence "jin" in mandarin pinyin has a diphthong for the vowel, like [iɪ], so it's not pure [i] or [ɪ], but I think [ɪ] is closer to the sense of mandarin than the long "e" vowel in English.
Philip Taylor said,
October 16, 2025 @ 11:46 am
Most Britons of my age will have been reared on Kipling's Just So Stories, and will therefore be familiar with the story of "How the Camel got his Hump", in which they will have read (at a very early age) :
M. Paul Shore said,
October 16, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
One suggestion that might resonate with some English speakers would be: Think of his name as being the name of a type of Sloe Gin Fizz, with the normal tartness of sloe modified to a smoother, more feminine sort of flavor (therefore “She”), and the continual fizziness somehow replaced by intermittent bursts of carbonation (therefore “Ping”). Maybe some bars somewhere would want to actually create that and serve it.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 16, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
For fun, via Youglish, the same vowel twice in the word "pinyin" in
Scottish English: link
English English: link
U.S. English: link
Chinese (female speaker): link
Chinese (male speaker): link
The English vowel [ɪ] is well, quite wrong…
Chris Button said,
October 16, 2025 @ 12:54 pm
English has long [iː] versus short [ɪ]. The distinction involves quantity and quality
For "Jin", I think unelongated [i] works fine.
mesmer said,
October 16, 2025 @ 1:41 pm
Any chance of expanding the explanation so we can get the tones nearly right?
Margaret said,
October 16, 2025 @ 2:22 pm
What I hear and what irritates me most is the Xi/She being pronounced as Ji, i.e. no attempt at all to produce a hs or whatever, but a complete collapse (e.g. Alistair Campbell in the podcast The Rest is Politics). The Gin is usually OK (for me).
Then there's Beijing pronounced with a zh in the middle.
Philip Taylor said,
October 16, 2025 @ 3:23 pm
I believe that it is Xí Jìnpíng, Mesmer ("Xi" rising, "Jin" falling, "Ping" rising).
wgj said,
October 17, 2025 @ 12:06 am
@Jerry: I've heard "x" pronounced close to "s" from both urban and rural women, but now I'm wondering whether the same phenomenon might have separate origins – specifically, whether the urban pronouncers are influenced by foreigners (including people from Hong Kong and Taiwan) who are unable to pronounce "x" in the Standard Mandarin way, and are adopting this exotic pronunciation in order to appear more hip.
A. Barmazel said,
October 17, 2025 @ 2:52 am
> English has long [iː] versus short [ɪ]. The distinction involves quantity and quality
Reportedly, the distinction in quantity is preserved in some dialects, but no longer in GA, and it's sort of optional and speech-register-dependent in RP.
Thomas said,
October 17, 2025 @ 5:19 am
With the most common foreign pronunciation “shee” and ghe less common variant “hee” (not so prevalent in the anglosphere), I am always reminded of the recent gendered pronoun remarks and discussions.
The pronounce of the president of the PRC are she and he.
Chris Button said,
October 17, 2025 @ 5:27 am
I think what you're noting is that American dictionaries (and linguists who aren't focusing on surface phonetics) tend not to note the length distinction, while British dictionaries/linguists do note it. The American approach is not an oversight since a vowel length is not phonemic in English (and as in any language will vary based on the conditioning environment), but it is liable to misinterpretation when talking about phonetic reality.
Margaret said,
October 17, 2025 @ 5:42 am
It's not a question of understanding the mispronunciation of Xi as Ji – the person is simply aware that he or she does not know how to pronounce it and in a temporary panic just goes for some other foreign sound that happens to be completely different but is easier to pronounce.
Jerry Packard said,
October 17, 2025 @ 8:40 am
@wgj It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Jerry Packard said,
October 17, 2025 @ 8:57 am
@Thomas
Very clever.
David Marjanović said,
October 17, 2025 @ 5:12 pm
Rather, Jean has a diphthong somewhere around [ɪ̯i] that is noticeably longer than [ɪ] as in gin. For a short and steady [i], which is hard to find in English, try French or Polish.
Yes! I've noticed young women going for a "cutesy" pronunciation of x that approaches [sʲ] (a very common sound in Russian, as it happens – сь).
…No. Not remotely. However, in Hamburg it has a uvular allophone, [χ], in addition to the velar [x] and palatal [ç] ones; in Vienna the uvular one is absent (the velar one is used instead), and there's a length distinction that is absent in Hamburg. If anything, the lack of the length distinction in northern and central German can make intervocalic /x/ approach [h].
It is now – Aladdin and the Magic Lamp is a Disney blockbuster.
She? Gin! Ping? (But faster than that implies.)
I consider my day saved!
(…As a matter of phonetic detail, I think the northern/Standard Mandarin x is a dorso-palatal sibilant, something that does not have an IPA symbol. Acoustically it fills the triangle between the abovementioned [ç] and [sʲ] as well as [ɕ]. [ç] is how /hj/, as in hue, comes out in some Englishes, and it appears in here sometimes, too. [ç] is in the middle between [s] and [ʃ]; it is the usual pronunciation of x in southern Mandarin accents that merge sh, zh, ch into s, z, c.)
Michael Watts said,
October 17, 2025 @ 5:32 pm
No such film. The Disney blockbuster is Aladdin, and the word "djinn" does not appear within it — the word used is genie /dʒi.ni/. To learn the word "djinn", you'd have to read a book.
Chris Button said,
October 17, 2025 @ 8:06 pm
@ David Marjanović
Presumably you mean for those speakers who don't have a more monophthongal [iː]?
I'm not quite following what you mean here. How is [ɕ] not working here?
@ A. Barmazel
I wonder now if your source might actually be referring to the variation of the elongated monophthong [iː] with the narrow diphthong [ɪ̯i] (mentioned by David M.) above ?
Jonathan Smith said,
October 17, 2025 @ 8:18 pm
re: "x" or "laminal or anterodorsal postalveolar or alveolo-postalveolar" in work that literally spreads charcoal/oil on people's tongues/palates…
but in the spirit of the post, the everyman takeaways from such work re: this series ("x" etc.) are (1) the nature of the tongue contact (above "laminal or anterodorsal") is really the trick at least from the English speaker POV and (2) they are articulatory twins of (pinyin) onset "y" i.e. ≈[j], totally unsurprising as they co-occur with / are coarticulated with following -j-, -i-.
Arthur Baker said,
October 17, 2025 @ 11:35 pm
"sans tones, which would take a long time to explain and practice". Why the français? Why the noun form of practice instead of the verb form?
Michael Watts said,
October 17, 2025 @ 11:36 pm
Well, I still see several responses to my earlier comment, but the comment itself has disappeared.
Philip Taylor said,
October 18, 2025 @ 2:42 am
My first Manadarin Chinese teacher (Zhang Xin — herself a woman), made the same observation, citing as example xiè xie, which she said men and older women pronounced (very broad approximation) "shèh-sheh" but some younger women and girls pronounced "syèh-syeh".