Watch These Foreign Students Express Their Love for China’s President Xi Jinping

To accompany Chinese President Xi Jinping’s weeklong trip across the U.S., the Chinese state newspaper People’s Daily has released an English-language video featuring a chipper cadre of foreign students in Beijing cheerfully singing the leader’s praises. “Xi Dada,” they call him, which translates roughly to “Daddy Xi” — because, as Papius from Kenya explains, “he is not just a leader; he is like a part of the family.”

Never mind that many in the international press have warily raised their eyebrows at Xi’s authoritative leadership. These kids — all of whom appear to have crawled out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad — can’t get enough of him.

“His face is a little bit cute,” Benedikt from Austria says. Jang Ji-hye from South Korea confesses that if her “future husband is like him, [she] will be happy.” One girl wants us to know that when Xi came to her school, she read him a poem. Many of them invited him home to Spain, or France, or to share a pizza in Chicago.

The three-and-a-half-minute video is set in part to a smooth jazz-polka rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, the bespectacled late folk singer who has always been something of a pop demigod in China. (In the early 1990s, he was one of the first Western artists to tour the country.)