This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘The ideology behind Xi Jinping’s China’
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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times.
This week’s podcast is about China’s leader, Xi Jinping. My guest is Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia who’s currently his country’s ambassador to the United States. Rudd is also the author of a new book, On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World. President Xi’s been in power for more than a decade. He may well run China for another decade or more. So what Xi’s vision for China and the world?
I met Kevin Rudd at his residence in Washington on the morning of November 5th, election day. There are few hours of calm before the results came out, so we have time to talk. Trump’s victory later that night potentially puts Kevin Rudd in a difficult position — the Australian media were quick to dig out some rude comments he’s made about Trump in the past.
Kevin Rudd voice clip
In the last four years, it’s been run by a village idiot and the United States increasingly incompetent in international statecraft under Trump.
Gideon Rachman
But Rudd is hardly alone in having once condemned Donald Trump. That’s also true of half the Republican Party, including some people who look set to join Trump’s cabinet. For what it’s worth, I think Rudd will survive in large part because his expertise on China is respected across the board in Washington. And how to deal with China is even more of an obsession for the Republicans than the Democrats. So when I met Kevin Rudd in Washington, I began our conversation by asking him why he thinks Xi’s presidency marked a fundamental break with the past.
Kevin Rudd
Yeah, there have been two skills I’ve thought about how China has evolved and the direction in which it has over the last decade or so. The first is this is a natural product to the evolution of Chinese power as opposed to the argument which I put forward, which is the agency of Xi Jinping’s leadership has in fact been decisive in bringing about this change. Looking carefully at the Communist party itself, Xi Jinping has deliberately set about moving Chinese politics towards the Leninist left. That is more power for the party in all domains. And he’s been quite explicit about that. And this hasn’t simply been a set of nostrums put out there for the delectation of the intellectual class. It’s been reflected in day-to-day life in the economy and society and culture and elsewhere.
The second big change is moving the centre of gravity of Chinese economic policy more to the Marxist left. We trace that through not just divide between the relative roles of state and enterprises in the private sector, but also industrial policy vs the market and national self-reliance vs international economic integration, as well as a new doctrine of common prosperity on wealth distribution.
And the third and final ideological change is the deliberate moving of the pendulum in Chinese foreign and security policy towards the nationalist right. And this partly is anchored into a celebration of the rise of China’s comprehensive national power as they define it internally. The series of nationalist narratives along the lines that our time has come. Therefore, it’s time for China to assert its interests and its values much more assertively, in some would say, aggressively in the region and the world.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, so he’s moved to the left economically — more statist — and to the right on foreign policy, more nationalist. I mean, I know it’s a specifically Chinese thing, but is there something going on globally that the state is coming back economically but also as a unit of loyalty? Nationalism is back as well. I mean, it’s a bit Trumpist.
Kevin Rudd
If you look worldwide and certainly across the democracies, there is a greater and greater appeal to the state for a combination of intervention and protection. For a whole range of challenges to physical security, whether it’s terrorism, concerns about border security, cyber intrusion as well as economic security, because the vagaries of domestic and international markets. Of course, my study is about one country alone and that’s China. But I certainly do track these quite profound changes from where China was in 2012 to where China now is in 2024.
Gideon Rachman
It’s interesting you mention 2012 because I don’t know if you recall, but we were both at the same meeting with Xi Jinping in 2013. You were sitting up the front, I was at the back.
Kevin Rudd
Got a better view, Gideon.
Gideon Rachman
(Laughter) Back then, how evident do you think it was that Xi would become the person that he became and the ideologue that he became? Because I remember, I don’t think was you, but others at that meeting were still seeing him very much as an economic reformer and actually as a free marketeer in the Chinese context and that just turned out to be wrong.
Kevin Rudd
None of us picked it at that stage, including yours truly. And I think there is a couple of reasons for that. To prevail a Marxist-Leninist political system, one always keeps one’s cards very close to one’s chest. And I think Xi Jinping had done that through his political career. But secondly, in terms of the unfolding of the vision — leaving aside his Leninism — on his Marxism on the economy, as I trace in this book, it went through a couple of phases. And that is when he was elected in 2013, 14, there is a central reform document called the Decision, which sought to overcome the flagging nature of the market reform program of the previous decade.
Then Xi Jinping seems to have been mugged by financial and economic reality himself, with China’s own domestic financial market implosion in 2015. And then if we trace that through to 2017, we see a fundamental revision of the central direction of Chinese economic policy. No longer this reformist blueprint of 2013, which he’d largely inherited from his predecessors, but then added things too. But as he really focused on the lack of the party-state’s control on the economy, that’s where we see the beginnings, back in 2017, the series of real changes and economic policy settings, which I would argue largely contributed to the slowdown in China’s growth performance.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, so isn’t it an unusual . . . Chinese leader or at least a break with the Deng tradition in that he doesn’t say economic growth at all costs. He starts looking for other things.
Kevin Rudd
Yeah. The bottom line is if we look at the way in which Deng undertook market-based reform and captured in his phrase of reform and opening, these four Chinese characters became emblematic of a 35-year period and Chinese political and economic history. In Chinese, (speaks Chinese) gaige, reform, kaifeng, to open. In other words, opening to markets at home and markets abroad. This was the encapsulation of everything which Deng sought to do.
But how did he do that? Back in 1981, coming out of the Mao steering, Deng said, hey, guess what, comrades? Our responsibility in the primary stage of socialism is to unleash the factors of production, to grow the economy and to grow living standards. And we shall therefore relegate the relations of production otherwise termed class equality. Roll the clock on 35 years and we get to the 19th party congress, Xi Jinping — formerly within the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the party — revisits this decision and says, well, we’ve just had 35 years of that stuff. And guess what? It created massive imbalances in the economy and in society and by implication, in politics. So our central ideological challenge is to rectify all these imbalances by a stronger party-state control, certainly in the economy, but also in society.
Gideon Rachman
But do you think he also makes a break with Deng in the sense that Deng made another famous statement which was relegated in ideology, where he says it doesn’t matter if the cat’s black or white, as long as it catches mice? I don’t know whether that’s a good translation. Whereas you’re saying that Xi puts ideology really central to what he’s doing.
Kevin Rudd
The Marxist-Leninist ideology has always been the central organising principle, not just as a party disciplinary technique, but also as a totalising belief structure. Deng actually took the framework and said, we’ve just got the balance wrong within this ideological structure. So because we’re now lifting the factors of production, yes, it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. Or famously, he had this other three characters which he said, (speaks Chinese) bujiang lun, stop talking about theory. And that basically gave everybody an opportunity to (inaudible) and get on with becoming the Jack Mas of this world.
It’s that which Xi Jinping turned on its head in 2017 with this change of the central ideological line. Policy change and behavioural change flows from that. It’s sometimes hard for the western mind to get this, but my underlying argument in this book is that ideology has always mattered in shaping what then happens in policy and behaviour in the real world.
Gideon Rachman
OK. Just to challenge that briefly, I mean, another interpretation of what happens in 2017 is he abolishes term limits and this is really all about just the centralisation of power around him. And the ideology is just a fancy explanation for him saying, OK, I’m the guy and I’m gonna stay here forever.
Kevin Rudd
What I say in this book is that these two propositions are not mutually incompatible. And depending on the issue, the ideological tenants, in particular, we’re talking about, all the policy change we’re seeking to identify, the interspersion of ideological foundations, plus, shall we say, policy and political rationales of a different nature, is relatively clear throughout.
My overall argument about ideology, and there’s a British sinologist of great standing, Kerry Brown, who I think in his writings defines ideology best, he says it’s a band of meaning. It’s not a specific prescription to do X, but it is a prescribed band of meaning within which the political and policy both can occur. And that’s what he’s done in terms of resetting the ideological parameters. Does it preclude basic Machiavellian impulse? Of course not in terms of power concentration.
Gideon Rachman
And so, you know, if you look at a real-world decision, the very striking decision to go after Jack Ma, the most successful entrepreneur in China, I guess my initial interpretation would be this guy was getting too powerful. He was an alternative source of power and Xi cuts him off. But you’re saying that’s completely compatible with there also being an ideological thing about the state running the show.
Kevin Rudd
Absolutely. I mean, my argument to those who are sceptical about the proposition that ideology matters still in the Chinese Communist party is that this system spends an inordinate amount of time among its most senior leaders on ideology. I mean, if I was to present you, Gideon, now with a folder full of Xi Jinping’s ideological speeches . . .
Gideon Rachman
You sound like you’re one of the few people who read those for fun.
Kevin Rudd
Well, it helps having grown up as a Roman Catholic, you have an automatic taste for self-flagellation. And this has been part of my self-flagellation for the last, well, five years that took me to research and to complete this piece at Oxford at the China centre there. And then to write it up and put it into normal English. Well, semi-normal English, that’s the book. But the bottom line is that the party itself, if it was of no use to them, that is ideology, why the hell do they spend so much time on it? So it is of utility to them, but it doesn’t preclude other factors in what I described in the policy decision-making or political decision-making process. Where I think it’s useful for us in the analytical community is it is a reasonable predictive tool about where China is going.
Gideon Rachman
OK, well, I’ll ask in a second about what you think it does predict about what’s gonna happen. But just briefly on the ideology, you describe it as Marxist nationalism, and that sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. I mean, isn’t the Marxist anthem The Internationale?
Kevin Rudd
Well, that’s because you and I grew up in a particular era and an age, Gideon, where we saw these things in contradictory terms. But I’m an old-fashioned Australian empiricist, I just follow the evidence where it takes me. And what do I see is the Leninism file is clear. There has been a power maximisation exercise around rebuilding the party. Terrified, by the way, of what happened to the Communist party in the Soviet Union, terrified by the death of ideology within that operation in the late 80s and the (inaudible) perestroika. We can see it also with Marxism in terms of the shift away from the market and the repudiation of the unbridled power in the market of the platform economies, including Alibaba and Jack Ma, which you just spoke of.
But on the nationalism agenda, what we see is China now asserting infinitely more vigorously its outstanding territorial claims against its neighbours and certainly in relation to Taiwan. And secondly, if you look at the internal nationalist narratives, they are strongly emphasising China’s own ethnonationalism. And you see that very much in nationalist campaigns that China has now moved to the centre of the global stage — campaigns which now talk about the rise of the east and the decline of the west. The fact that they now talk about that China is presiding over changes not seen in 100 years, meaning since the Bolshevik Revolution. These are appeals to the Chinese nation and the Chinese ethno-centricity as well.
On the nationalism-Marxism contradiction, as you said, it doesn’t quite ring true with The Internationale. At the same time, when you begin to map Xi Jinping’s ideological work, on the conceptual architecture of a 21st-century international order writ large, you begin to see a new form of Chinese Communist party internationalism around the traditional internationalist claims of Marxism-Leninism as well. When you hear Xi Jinping’s proposals for a global civilisation initiative, a global security initiative, a global development initiative, even the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese ideological literature is beginning to cast these within the frame of the international Marxism of the 21st century. So there is what I describe as a separate tenet to this, yet to be fully manifest, of which we only see glimpses. But in 23, 24, we start to see that emerge in the theoretical literature of the Chinese Communist party as well.
Gideon Rachman
I’m just interested where you said there’s this assertion of confidence, how real do you think the confidence is? Or put another way, is there any question beneath the surface because China’s now got some problems: the economy is slowing, they’ve got a incipient financial crisis and real demographic problems. Plus, high youth unemployment. Do you think Xi lies awake at night worrying about those kinds of things?
Kevin Rudd
The bottom line is you can be nationally self-confident about China’s strategic mission on the one hand, while being aware that there are a rolling series of problems in the real world economy and society at the same time. The thing about historical determinism as a Marxist-Leninist tool of analysis is that if you believe analytically that that’s where you’ve arrived in history as the party in the Chinese nation now playing this role in the region and in the world, it of itself produces a level of ideological self-confidence in Xi Jinping’s mind about where the strategic mission is up to and where it’s going.
I see that redolent across the literature. At the same time, Xi Jinping — as a Chinese strategic realist — is infinitely aware of the fact that the United States hasn’t rolled over and died. The United States remains the world’s largest economy, remains the world’s most potent military in terms of old theatres of operation and all dimensions of warfare. But in their analysis of comprehensive national power, a Chinese term, it’s their way of assessing all the elements of national power, which in their public literature they describe as now putting China much more in a position of emerging parity with the United States. But they do see and recognise what they call as tactical problems on the way, including a slowing economy.
Gideon Rachman
And for them, what is the big milestone? Is . . . as people in this town often talk about . . . is it Taiwan? Essentially that to mark their coming of age as a real global power, they have to take Taiwan back?
Kevin Rudd
The unification with Taiwan has been a matter of Chinese Communist party dogma from the get-go from 1949. Under Xi Jinping, we do see an intensification of that particular nationalist narrative. In fact, his language that we cannot achieve the renaissance of the Chinese nation, his central organising mantra by 2049, the centenary of the creation of the People’s Republic in the absence of Taiwan. If you add to that the hardening of, shall I say, policy postures like unification means one country, two systems. And then military postures, particularly post-22 and the Pelosi visit, where you see regular exercises now east, north and south of the island, and not just in the Taiwan Strait and regular crossings of the so-called median line by Chinese aircraft in the Taiwan Strait, they are moving in a much harder direction. So this is part of the national aspiration, the nationalist aspiration. Of course, it will always be tempered by the strategic realism factors we talked about before. But they see this correlation of forces moving in their direction over time.
Gideon Rachman
And so, again, the question that’s debated here a lot is will they invade? And how central is the effort to deter China from invading Taiwan now to western policy, do you think?
Kevin Rudd
The reunification of Taiwan by peaceful or by military means is an article of faith within the Chinese system under Xi Jinping. We should take that as a given. On the question of timing, none of us know other than we now have, as it were, a deadline of by 2049. What are the material factors weighing on his mind in the timing of any such endeavour? One, through his measures short of war — like military exercises, like cyber activity against the Taiwanese, like a range of other coercive actions — is that these have been intensifying in recent years with the object of bringing the Taiwanese to the negotiating table.
As a political realist, my own private assessment is that is having an equal and opposite effect on the Taiwanese. It’s making it less likely that they will come to the negotiating table on some future political pact or contact with the mainland. So therefore you go to the military dimensions. The central article of faith under successive US administrations has been military deterrence. The deterrence equation is that if Xi Jinping was to pull the lever one day, that the risk of him losing against the combined force of Taiwan, the United States and possibly its allies, will be of sufficient deterrent effect in Xi’s mind to prevent him from pulling that lever in the first place. Up until today, it’s been effective. It’s prevented that from occurring.
Of course, looking into the future, as China believes its own military capabilities are becoming more formidable, its naval projection power greater and its ability in the cyber domain even more lethal, deterrence is therefore a rolling equation day by day, week by week, in order to cause Xi to conclude the risks are far greater than any benefits that he would achieve.
Gideon Rachman
And now Australia, I think, has become a central part of a combined western deterrence, particularly through the Aukus pact which happened during the Biden administration. And I guess that’s a large part of what you do here in Washington, is turning that into a reality of the nuclear submarines, but also all the other forms of co-operation with the UK and the US.
Now, there are some people in your party, notably Paul Keating, the former prime minister, who say, Aukus is a terrible mistake and that Australia shouldn’t have gone in on this venture. You take the opposite line, obviously. So what do you say to those people in Australia, in your party, who say we’ve got it wrong?
Kevin Rudd
Well, here again, I’m Kevin Rudd, the private scholar. I’m talking about a book I’ve written and in fact concluded before I came here to Washington as ambassador. I think the core reality, which all of us need to wrap our heads around fully, is the fact that the China of Xi Jinping is not the China of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. I was first posted to Beijing as a young diplomat in 1984 when Deng Xiaoping was barely two or three years into his reform and opening project. Those of us, including corporations and previous political leaders who have been engaged with China over those decades, have seen China increasingly opening its markets and integrating with global markets.
My simple point with this book is that script has changed under the Xi Jinping of the post-2012, post-2013 order. And the counterargument, which many put, is that while Xi Jinping has changed China in reaction to the policies of the United States, its allies and others, what I have tracked in the ideological narratives that I’ve been examining in Xi Jinping’s period in office is that these shifts in ideology predated these shifts, which came in the first or second year of the Trump administration. They were well-entrenched prior to that date.
Gideon Rachman
Last question, a personal one, if I may. I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine who’s come out of academia, is working in government in the UK, and he said to me in a tone of some shock, we were talking about his bosses and how they thought. He said, you know, politicians are not intellectuals. But you seem to be an exception to that. You clearly are an intellectual, and yet you combine this with a political career of being prime minister of Australia — twice — foreign secretary, now an ambassador. Are they two separate spheres or is it help or a hindrance having this intellectual interest and also having to make tough decisions under political pressure?
Kevin Rudd
Well, firstly, I mean, it’s my melancholy duty to inform you there are stacks of serving politicians who are intimately engaged in intellectual debates, both domestic and international. As you know, it’s often unfashionable to actually reflect the fact that you engage in, shall I say, intellectual pursuits, because it’s not seen to be effective in retail politics and may be, in fact, damaging.
So I suppose what I simply say about what I try to do today, because we are living through such fundamental seismic global challenges and changes — geopolitics being one, not just the China factor, but the Russia factor — seismic changes in global technology, the transformational effect of artificial intelligence in everything we do, and then the rolling challenge of climate change, which continues apace, there is an imperative for those of us who engage in the public policy process to try and bring these threads together.
As I say in the introduction to the book, as Australian prime minister, I never suffered from a lack of analysis being put to me. I did suffer from a lack of intelligence syntheses being put to me. That is people in the academy or in the bureaucracy over in the intelligence community being able to draw these threads together. The Marxist-Leninist system, the Chinese, for all of its faults, they do have a discipline about themselves, where they actually, through their own internal processes, wrap these threads together into synthesised analysis of what in the main is happening and what in the main strategically we must do about it. Our challenge in the west is to do the same. And this is a very small contribution to that task.
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Gideon Rachman
That was Kevin Rudd ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.
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