Understanding Xi Jinping’s Ideological Clarity of Purpose

BOOK REVIEW: On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World

By Kevin Rudd / Oxford University Press

Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole

The Reviewer — Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.

REVIEW — In his new mammoth of a book, On Xi Jinping, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd takes Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology seriously. This book seeks, at first glance, to understand how the party communicates within itself by decrypting the complex code language of its internal Marxist-Leninist discourse.

Strangely enough, this book is not, as we shall see, an abstract exercise in political theory, however interesting that may be. Rather it goes to the core, practical questions of what shapes Chinese public policy in the real world. It also goes to the critical, longer-term question of what happens in a post-Xi Jinping.

This book began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford China Centre, completed between 2017 and 2022. It is thus a slightly harder read than his previous book, The Avoidable War, for which I provided the Cipher Brief community of readers and experts with a thorough review.

Of note, The Avoidable War has apparently proved remarkably popular since then. It has now been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Swedish. And his author has been asked to write an updated version for 2025.

As our readers and experts may then recall, the Honorable Kevin Rudd, Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) is the former 26th Australian Prime Minister. He held office as the leader of the Australian Labor Party from December 2007 to June 2010 and again from June to September 2013.

Since March 2023, Mr. Rudd has assumed his role as Australia’s Ambassador to the United States in Washington DC. Prior to his ambassadorship, he served as the inaugural President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, from 2015. In 2020, he was appointed President and CEO of the Asia Society globally and, in 2022, he founded the Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

He is internationally recognized as one of the leading Western scholars on China. Mr. Rudd majored in Mandarin Chinese and classical and modern Chinese history at the Australian National University. He has lived and worked in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei through different diplomatic postings before entering in politics.

The book under review here, On Xi Jinping, seeks, logically and precisely, to define Xi Jinping’s underlying ideology, how it is different from his post-Mao predecessors, and how it is reflected in the overall direction of China’s domestic and foreign policy during his first decade in power. It also explores how an understanding of Xi ’s ideology may help us see where he wants to take China and the world in the years ahead. The book is also designed to be readily digestible for the intelligent reader but is also intended to contribute to the wider body of academic literature focusing on Xi Jinping’s China.

In other words, the book expertly addresses the problem affecting much of western Sinology, namely the paucity of synthesis compared to the abundance of analysis; in short, it makes sense of Xi’s enterprise, by asking “why” it is headed that way, where it is likely to go next, and what, therefore, can usefully be done about it.

The book, therefore, is primarily a textual analysis of ideological change, relying on an at-times excruciating examination of the primary documents. The book also, from time to time, includes long extracts from Xi’s speeches and articles to familiarize the reader with how China’s paramount leader actually communicates change, however stilted and sometimes-unreadable for a Western audience Xi ’s prose may appear to be.

If we follow Mr. Rudd’s reasoning, this is something we are all going to have to get used to. It is different from having Western scholars simply interpreting the text for the benefit of the reader. Instead, Mr. Rudd has chosen to provide both: distilled analyses of what Xi is saying, reinforced, where necessary, with selections from the raw, primary text.

In doing so, Mr. Rudd’s principal objective is to understand what Xi actually believes and why, rather than to debate whether he happens to be right or not. From this realist point of view, the beginning of wisdom in politics and international relations is indeed to understand what the other party thinks and to describe it accurately and effectively.

This brings us to the book’s thesis per se: Xi has embarked on an integrated ideological campaign of what Mr. Rudd calls “Marxist Nationalism” – taking Chinese politics to the Leninist left, Chinese economics to the Marxist left, and Chinese foreign policy to the nationalist right. For some, this will seem controversial because, at first blush, it is intuitively impossible for a Communist Party to move simultaneously both to the left and the right.

Comparatively speaking, the student of contemporary European history is then left with an insidious question when considering this kind of ideological and political innovations: is the traditional Chinese communist, and already totalitarian, system currently mutating and evolving towards an even more dangerous, pragmatic and ubiquitous variety, a sort of Chinese imperial revisionist neofascism (akin to its Italian opportunist precursor of the 1920s)?

While Mr. Rudd does not elaborate using these definitions or categories, given the developments that we have seen happening in Russia and Ukraine in the last decade, both domestically and internationally, one cannot help but wonder: who is really influencing who in the authoritarian sphere?

Despite this obvious paradox, the core point remains: Xi ’s ideological blueprint for the future is out there on the Chinese public record for all to see – assuming, of course, we have the eyes to see it, read it and understand it within its own terms. Indeed, the outline of Xi ’s brave new world is now hiding in plain sight for us all.

One thing is also unique regarding what Mr. Rudd calls the individual “agency” of Xi’s particular form of political statecraft that has been a major force in changing China’s national direction: these changes, together with those in foreign policy and national security policy, have been driven from the top. Or as Xi himself has often proclaimed, through the agency of “top-level design”.

In preparing this book review, we followed Mr. Rudd’s own suggestion and used the provided guidance; we skimmed through the detailed textual analysis of the Chinese official sources that makes up the bulk of the book’s middle chapters. Instead, we focused and read in priority chapters 1, 3 and 4, followed by chapters 14, 15 and 16 as a sort of “cheats’ guide”.

Chapter 1 summarizes the book ’s main arguments and concludes with shorter summaries of each of the chapters that follow. Chapter 3 provides a short historical survey of China’s evolving ideological worldviews in both the classical and Communist periods. Chapter 4 outlines the basic tenets of Xi’s ideological framework based on an examination of five major texts that bear his name and which occupy a prominent place in the party’s theoretical literature.

Chapters 14 and 15 fast-forward to the time of publication (2024) and look at how Xi has responded to recent challenges – the outbreak of Covid-19, the slowing of the economy, and the rolling crises in US-China relations – and whether these have prompted any deeper ideological and political reappraisal of China’s future course. Chapter 16 looks to the longer-term future and asks what Xi’s ideological framework can tell us about China’s likely political, economic and foreign policy trajectory for the decade ahead, and what a post-Xi China might look like.

What is great about Mr. Rudd’s book is that it seeks to peer into the immediate future by interpreting the recent past through the lens of Xi Jinping’s changing ideological worldview.

Faced with such a rigorous demonstration and authoritative mastery of what remains a complex, fascinating and yet arcane subject of interest, the reader is left with awe, fear and admiration when considering its conclusion.

In that sense, I agree with Mr. Rudd when he writes that since the stakes for China and the world are now so high and the possibility of large-scale geo-political conflict so great, it is more urgent than ever to deploy every intellectual effort to get to the truth of what is unfolding before us, why it is happening and, for policymakers, what can intelligently be done in response to it.

Let me conclude by repeating this crucial point for emphasis: this book finds there is already sufficient, if not absolute, clarity on the shape of Xi’s ideational universe and its deep inter-relationship with China’s changing policy posture. Mr. Rudd argues brilliantly and definitively that we ignore Xi’s clarity of purpose at our peril.

Last, but not least, Mr. Rudd writes in beautiful, yet understandable, English style; clear, to the point, without the pomposity or verbose grandiloquence that so often plagues the historical work of former government officials. It makes his reading not only easy but highly enjoyable despite the inherent complexity of the subject within.

On Xi Jinping earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats

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