Boris has the greatest global clout

Ni hao. In recent days, Boris, Ken and Brian have all leapt headlong onto Weibo, China’s highly popular version of Twitter. It’s an obvious effort to win the votes of Chinese-speakers living in London. Boris was the first — which, I suppose, says all you want to know about his sense of initiative, brio, élan, and whatever the Chinese word is for ‘mojo’. Ken and Brian both jumped in about two weeks later, around April 21.
 
Inevitably, because the vast majority of Weibo users live in China, our three London mandarins have ended up attracting followers based in the Middle Kingdom. A look at the mayoral candidates’ individual Weibo accounts gives a pretty accurate picture of the recognition and popularity they hold abroad.
 
Boris amassed 80,000 Weibo followers from the get-go — even though they were somewhat mystified at first — and has been adding to this at a rate of 6,821 a day. Currently his Sino fan club stands at 100,800, and his last tweet offered a free Boris-signed T-shirt (presumably this will be dispatched to Shanghai, Suzhou, Shoreditch or wherever the winner happens to be). Boris’s strategy is Olympian — ‘I always passionately support the Chinese community and the Olympics is a great link between Beijing and London’, goes one tweet in Chinese and English. 
 
Brian Paddick has 30,500 Chinese-language fans and he’s collecting 5,669 fans a day. Ken, however Red he may be, is only garnering around 4,774 a day. He’s got 32,500 followers.
 
Now, the Mayor of London serves the people of London and what the rest of the world feels is neither here nor there. At the same time though, London is a global capital (indeed, Neil O’Brien argued in our cover story recently that it’s, sadly, increasingly divorced from the goings-on of the rest of the UK). The Mayor of London is a global figurehead, an international representative for the city and for Britain.
 
One suspects that, bad manners at the Beijing Games closing ceremony or no, many people in China — and indeed, most parts of the planet — would rather see Boris at the opening of London 2012 than Ken or Brian. If they even know who the other two candidates are, that is.