Kevin Rudd’s new book, On Xi Jinping, explores the ideology and worldview of Chinese president Xi Jinping, more formally known as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and state chairman of China. The book’s title echoes Henry’s Kissinger’s On China (2011), a magisterial study of China as a global player that made a grand subject, China, even grander than it was.
Rudd’s study, comparably magisterial, runs a similar risk of making one man’s thoughts seem far grander than they are. In the space of six hundred pages he explores Xi’s worldview and traces ideological changes that bear on domestic politics, macro- and microeconomic policy, nationalism, foreign policy, and recent statements and policy actions, considering what each indicates about where China is heading under Xi and beyond.
For those more interested in China-watchers than in China itself, the book also has something to tell us about Kevin Rudd. In tracing the party’s shifting ideological positions he offers useful glimpses into his own shifting views of Xi’s China.
To this day, the most intimate and revealing account of Xi Jinping remains the brief US government record of a 2009 interview with a former roommate from his student days exposed on Wikileaks. “Xi is supremely pragmatic and a realist, driven not by ideology but by a combination of ambition and self-protection,” it reads. “Our contact is convinced that Xi has a genuine sense of ‘entitlement,’ believing that members of his generation are the ‘legitimate heirs’ to the revolutionary achievements of their parents and therefore ‘deserve to rule China.’”
Rudd is not offering an alternative biography, but he is challenging that American assessment of the man and his motives with the claim that ideology is an underlying driver of Xi’s new strategic direction. Without quite specifying or demonstrating the connection, he argues for a causal nexus or “level of ideological causation” between Xi’s ideological prescriptions and his real-world policy choices. This seems unlikely. Xi’s ideological speeches to party congresses and work conferences signal where he is taking the party and the country, and in that sense are reasonably predictive of policy actions without quite “causing” them.
His presentations, for example, are often followed by the ranking official in attendance thanking him for his lofty intentions, commending his profound thinking, expressing appreciation for refined arguments that guide a path for the golden decade ahead, and promising they will be closely studied and implemented by cadres in all regions, departments and territorial units.
In other words, Xi’s major ideological statements communicate instructions in the expectation they will be followed across all five levels of the administrative system, among all arms of state, and to the farthest reaches of the realm.
As Rudd points out, Xi couches his formal statements in bolder Marxist ideological terms than his recent predecessors. But again this need not indicate causation, for it communicates instructions of a different kind.
To his cadres, it signals that his commands are carved in ideological stone and not open to question or challenge, however unreasonable or unrealistic they may appear. To ordinary people, the message is that what you see is what you get, a communist party behaving like a communist party and a party leader behaving like party leaders of old. Forget any lingering aspirations towards civic freedoms, open government, civic equality, rule of law and constitutional rule that may have seemed in the offing before Xi took command.
As a rule, the formal Marxist terminology in which Xi couches his directives is intended not for the general public but for the eyes and ears of China’s ninety million party members, or more particularly the forty million cadres among them who staff the country’s vast administrative machinery and are obliged to tap into the Xi Jinping Thought app and leave a real-time record of their progress absorbing Xi Jinping Thought.
Rudd saves us downloading the app by ploughing through acres of documents before delivering his findings in sixteen chapters. With disarming candour, he urges readers looking for a cheat’s guide to his book to limit their reading to three of the opening chapters and three closing ones, skipping the ten chapters in between, replete as they are with “excruciating examination of primary documents.” In fact, the intervening chapters offer incisive coverage of a wide array of political initiatives, institutional adjustments, policy changes and regulatory and other measures that Xi has undertaken over his first decade in office.
Readers who follow the cheat-sheet advice will find arguments in the opening and closing chapters familiar from other studies. One is that ideology matters for Xi Jinping in policy making, enhancing party control and building political legitimacy for the party. Another is that Marxism–Leninism is increasingly infused with nationalism in Xi’s worldview. A third is that Xi Thought challenges the values underpinning the postwar international order by offering an alternative authoritarian development model for the world.
Rudd’s particular contribution lies in his taxonomy. He identifies and classifies ideological shifts along a left–right axis, with politics heading to the Leninist left, economic policy to the Marxist left and international relations shifting to the nationalist right with patriotic chest-thumping, assertive territorial claims and a massive push to advance China’s national interests globally. To allay any misunderstanding over his pairing of Xi’s nationalism and Marxism, Rudd introduces the composite concept of Marxist nationalism to describe Xi’s overall belief system.
One appeal of On Xi Jinping is the big questions it raises. Is China Marxist? Is Marxist ideology causal? Is Xi’s Marxist ideology constraining policy choices and predicting China’s future?
A starting point for big questions of this kind is domestic politics, largely overlooked here. The one chapter devoted to domestic politics is confined to ideological and institutional changes bearing on the reorganisation of party and government affairs. In fact, there’s little politics here in the sense of give and take among competing personalities, views, interest and institutions.
That one chapter does, however, offer a chilling account of the “securitisation of everything.” Xi’s security mania arises from his concern over internal and external challenges to the party’s domestic authority — not challenges to China’s territory or sovereignty, that is to say, but perceived threats to the party’s grip on the country. This is the point at which the party’s domestic and international politics converge. As Rudd notes, Xi’s heightened security regime is “not just about national security but also about the security of the regime and Xi himself.”
This is worth probing further. The party’s first priority is national security, which in Xi’s hands has become a holistic concept covering multiple domains of public life including political, economic, social, cultural and technological security — the list runs to seventeen domains — all said to be interrelated and many of connected with international security. Any conventional separation of domestic and foreign policy collapses under this framework, because the top national security priority is the same for both: preserving the status and power of the party and all that goes with it, including “China’s form of government and political system and stability, namely the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the socialist system and socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
In foreign policy terms, upholding the status and power of the party is known as a red line not to be challenged. The first red line of this kind was laid down on the sidelines of a China–US strategic dialogue around fifteen years ago, when foreign governments and entities were warned off questioning CCP rule. Xi redrew that line again during a meeting with US president Joe Biden in November 2024 when he referred to preserving the party’s domestic “system and path” as one of the “red lines that must not be challenged.”
The red lines the party now lays down for foreign governments — the injunctions to tread warily around the party’s “system and path” — were laid down domestically forty-five years ago, among Deng Xiaoping’s Four Cardinal Principles, to counter ideological deviation and silence domestic criticism of the party and its leadership. Back then, foreigners were an afterthought. Now they are subjected to the kind of coercion that applied to China’s citizens in the decade ending with the Beijing massacre of 1989.
In Australia, for example, the party’s representatives routinely issues instructions about what can and cannot be said about China and the party in newspapers, think tanks and governments. They warn of trade penalties and other punishments for failure to comply, just as dissidents in China are denied the right to make a living after release from jail. Surveillance systems that were initially designed to secure the party’s domestic grip on China are in place around Australia to secure the party’s place here. Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao recently recounted what that feels like living in Melbourne and it’s as chilling as it is in China.
This is not a result of high Marxist dialectics or even Rudd’s composite Marxist nationalism. For Xi, national security and regime security are one and the same because the party is implicitly identified with China. Securing the one secures the other. Xi is positioning the party as China’s sovereign subject, with himself as sovereign person, and drawing on the immense resources at his disposal to extend the party’s domestic security regime wherever he must in defence of party sovereignty. Rather than Marxism blended with nationalism, this is full-throated nationalism with the party masquerading as a nation and exercising sovereign authority. Nothing, anywhere, is permitted to restrain the party’s exercise of that sovereignty.
This phenomenon is better described as party nationalism than Marxist nationalism. And it comes with a broader ideological reconstruction on a scale to match the economic reconstruction the country underwent during the reform era. Xi believes economic growth in that earlier period came at the cost of a spiritual contraction that needs to be reversed. For cadres tapping into the Xi Thought App, this means invoking Marxism. At a more colloquial level, it involves orchestrated appeals to family sentiment, to blood ties and to a sense of national belonging that is more Hegelian than Marxist. The will of history is manifest not through class struggle but through struggles among nations under the leadership of great men — Napoleon in Hegel’s time, Xi Jinping in ours.
Again, the main trigger for this shift is concern over regime security, in Xi’s case a concern that the party could collapse unless a strong man stepped in to save it. Xi played a key role in internal party debates over why the Soviet communists failed in Russia. There were sound strategic reasons for asking that question and useful tactical lessons to be drawn from any answers, but the ideological significance of the debate was just as important.
Ideologically, the fall of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dealt a near-mortal blow to party confidence in Marx’s immutable laws of history which predict that communism must prevail. Not in Soviet Russia apparently. Xi found counter-intuitively that the Soviet experience confirmed Marx’s iron laws of history by default: it was the Soviet party’s failure to stress ideology and discipline and produce a powerful leader who could see the party through tough times that precipitated its collapse. He doubled down on his faith in ideology and took the reins himself to lead China to its historical destiny. The current historical struggle is one waged through contests of big ideas and conflicts among nations led by great men. Ideology is a big idea if nothing else.
Xi places great store in his ability to restore “self-confidence” (zixin) in the party by reasserting its faith in Marxist ideology; he even built a political campaign around it, the Four Self-Confidences campaign. His self-confidence is founded in the belief that expressing his commitment to Marxist dogma places the party on the right side of history in the terrible conflict among nations to come. Like expressions of faith among god-fearing nations in the wars that shook the twentieth century, he suffixes his comments on ideological self-confidence with the statement “truth is on our side.”
Rudd draws several sobering conclusions from close reading of Xi’s ideological pronouncements of this kind, and towards the end of the book concludes that the party is “no longer ruling out the possibility of a major war.”
This is a significant statement. Rudd is a player, up there with some of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers and Joe Biden’s outer cabinet, so the value of the book lies not just in mapping Xi Jinping Thought but in tracking Rudd’s own assessments over the decade. He has been speaking and writing with dazzling virtuosity about China in the United States for almost as long as Xi has been in office. In a major report delivered in 2015, at a time when American China scholar David Shambaugh first hinted the China model might be reaching the end of its useful life, Rudd dismissed Shambaugh’s assessment, and reassured Americans that China’s economic model was (“sorry”) sustainable.
To assume that China’s governing elites will be any less successful in guiding the economy in future than they had been in the recent past was “just plain wrong,” he went on. China’s economy would surpass that of the United States within the decade. A decade on, China’s GDP is around two-thirds that of the US and falling, relatively speaking. The China model is in crisis and the country’s managerial elite is doing little to fix it.
The same virtuosity is on display in On Xi Jinping and, on the whole, the analysis is consistent with Rudd’s statements and publications since relocating to the US. He counselled Americans then, as he does today, that there is little to be gained by projecting liberal assumptions onto an apparently reforming China. China is a different country, coming from a different place. Xi Jinping is a communist, a nationalist, and bent on changing the world order at the expense of the US. Xi could only agree.
Back then, however, Rudd urged greater American empathy for China’s historical grievances. Where he saw differences between the two governments he positioned himself as a friend of both, “here to help.” In tendering his advice he would play the part of impartial umpire, calling for fair and open competition between rival teams with his signature refrain “may the best system win.”
At other times he played the linesman, calling for clear guidelines and guardrails. He said he didn’t wish to take sides and urged the two to develop a common strategic framework to help avert conflict. In particular, he spoke of the need to develop strategic trust, a term that Xi first introduced to the US during a brief visit in 2012 (as far as I can tell), ahead of his appointment as party general secretary later that year. As late as 2021 Rudd continued to call for “strategic trust.”
That’s not the message of this book. If the two-word takeaway from his earlier writings was trust and guardrails, the takeaway from On Xi is obfuscation and deterrence. Rudd has finally come around to recognising that two sides are on a collision course leading to conflict that can be averted, from Xi’s perspective, only if the US and its allies get out of his way. Now that much is clear, it’s also clear that guardrails are not going to be of much use after all. One possible flashpoint is Taiwan. The only strategy that can dissuade Xi from taking the island, Rudd now concludes, “would be effective and credible US, Taiwanese, and allied military deterrence.” That advice comes a decade late.
Strategic trust is beyond its use-by date too. In a book talk following publication, Rudd suggested confusion is the better strategic option, commending AUKUS and other US military arrangements in the region for clouding and cluttering the strategic picture and denying absolute clarity to Beijing. Xi has not budged but Rudd has come a long way.
There can be no denying the importance of ideology to Xi Jinping for his command of the party and his sense of the strategic direction in which he is leading the country. His overpowering emphasis on the party’s Marxist–Leninist ideology in particular crowds out millions of voices with different takes on the country’s future much less bound up with the fate of its vanguard party.
Yet there’s is a crack in everything. When the body of Xi Jinping Thought hinges on one man’s confidence in his inherited right to rule and the associated right to pontificate ad nauseum, any damage to his confidence or standing in China risks bringing the whole edifice down. On Xi Jinping is a masterly study of something that matters because Xi says it does. One day it won’t matter a whit. •
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World
By Kevin Rudd | Oxford University Press | $63.99 | 624 pages
