Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives at the BRICS Summit, in Kazan, Russia, on Oct. 24.Alexander Zemlianichenko/Reuters
Since becoming paramount leader of China, Xi Jinping has consolidated power like no Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, reaffirmed the party’s leadership over all aspects of life and asserted an increasingly aggressive nationalism.
But few people have personal insight into his decision-making, with more and more policy set within a black box that has only grown increasingly opaque.
Yet, Mr. Xi is an incredibly prolific writer and speaker. He has authored dozens of books, while the party’s premier ideological journal, Seeking Truth, is almost entirely filled with analyzing and explaining Xi Jinping Thought, the Chinese leader’s signature ideology.
Much of this output is impenetrable to those not well-versed in Chinese Communist theory, and often mind-numbing even to those who are. This can make it tempting to dismiss.
But to ignore the importance of ideology in Mr. Xi’s China is to disregard a huge tool for understanding the country and its leaders’ decisions, argues Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia (and current ambassador to the U.S.) and author of the new book On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World.
“Marxism-Leninism has always been a complex ideological framework not to be entered into lightly,” Mr. Rudd said in an interview, speaking in his personal rather than ambassadorial capacity. “But it is important to the CCP system, and whatever we think of the value of this methodology, if the Chinese system pays so much attention to it, we need to start paying more attention to it.”
Mr. Rudd said Western policy-makers focused on China should follow the lead of party members, who are “trained in how to read changes in the ideological line” by parsing various speeches and other pronouncements.
Through a detailed study of Mr. Xi’s output – begun as a doctoral study at Oxford University – Mr. Rudd has written “the most comprehensive analysis of Xi to date – one that will set the bar for future studies of Xi’s governing philosophy,” in the words of reviewer Jude Blanchette, another esteemed scholar of the CCP, who notes Mr. Rudd is also the only one of Mr. Xi’s various biographers “to have spent time alone with his subject, as he did when Xi visited Canberra in 2010, when Rudd was serving as Prime Minister.”
While acknowledging that reading Chinese theory often requires “putting on a hair shirt,” Mr. Rudd argues it is important to understand what the party is saying to itself – and to the world – in order to avoid “grand cultural generalizations often generated by those who have never studied a word of Chinese in their lives.”
“If you look during the Mao Zedong period, the body of scholarship right across Western Sinology was large and deep,” he said, focusing on intricacies such as understanding “the differences between Chinese and Soviet Marxism.”
Ideology arguably was less important under Mao’s reform-minded successor Deng Xiaoping, and especially the technocrats that followed him, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, but it has come roaring back under Mr. Xi. Mr. Rudd identifies the Chinese leader as moving his country toward the Marxist left economically, reimplementing tight Leninist control of the party and state, and advocating a right-wing nationalist foreign policy.
The West, Mr. Rudd said, is often guilty of “projectionism,” attempting to understand China by “what we would do in the same circumstances.”
Mr. Rudd gave as an example Chinese policy toward the Global South, which is often framed in the West in terms of the Belt and Road Initiative or the recent expansion of BRICS as a simple play for political influence or attempt to secure resources. But this ignores the reams of texts on Mr. Xi’s “Global Civilization Initiative” and other policies, which demonstrate a “theoretical dimension to this as well.”
“There is a body of work which is seeking to develop a new Marxism for the 21st century for the Global South,” Mr. Rudd said. “This is not just a totalizing Chinese global strategy, but there’s also a totalizing Chinese ideological world view underpinning that strategy.”
In his book, Mr. Rudd quotes a 2022 speech by Mr. Xi in which he said a “sound strategy is to be executed through proper tactics, which are dictated by the former and serve the former.”
“They are in a dialectical relationship,” Mr. Xi said, “in which the strategy stays consistent while the tactics can be flexible.”
It is that strategy that can be better understood by trying to understand Mr. Xi’s ideology, Mr. Rudd argues. Failing to do so – focusing only on tactics, which might change by the year – deprives the West of insight and leaves policy-makers “looking through a glass darkly” when it comes to their relationship with the world’s second superpower.