China’s Leninist: ‘On Xi Jinping’ by Kevin Rudd

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China’s Leninist: ‘On Xi Jinping’ by Kevin Rudd

In November 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. The brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising was a pivotal moment in communist history, reinforcing Moscow’s iron grip over Eastern Europe for decades to come. 

But just a few months prior, the seeds of an arguably even more profound and epoch-making revolution were quietly planted in Beijing at the CCP’s 8 th party congress. Its resolution heralded Communist China’s first great reset: the party’s new central task would be to unleash the country’s underdeveloped factors of production, rather than obsess over relations of production. In layman’s terms, economic growth would trump class struggle.

Yet the dramatic and deadly leftward lurch under Mao Zedong meant that what became known as “reform and opening-up” had to wait until Deng Xiaoping’s rise to the top in 1978. His theory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” sought to build a strong state on the back of a strong “socialist market economy”, while taking care not to provoke the US by contesting its regional or global leadership. This was articulated in his famous maxim that China should “hide [its] capacities and bide [its] time”.

Deng’s approach was faithfully carried out by his successors into the 2000s. During this period, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, many in the West believed China should be incorporated into the capitalist international order. In those halcyon days when globalisation reigned supreme in a unipolar world, suffused with Cobdenite faith in the peace-promoting powers of free trade, the protectionist concerns of the Ur-MAGA camp (then primarily among blue-collar Democrats), who criticised the wholesale offshoring of American manufacturing, could be loftily dismissed. 

But today “derisking” or “decoupling” is the order of the day. Since the appointment of Xi Jinping as party general secretary (later also President) in 2012, China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy, suppression of Hong Kong’s activists, handling of the Covid outbreak, bid for technological and industrial supremacy, and support for Putin in the Ukraine War have led to significant tensions with neighbours and Western countries alike. No longer does Beijing mask its behemoth might or ambition. Fears of a potential confrontation between the US and China, caught in the Thucydides Trap, are commonplace. 

HONG KONG – JUNE 16, 2019: Hong Kong’s biggest anti-extradition protest. Around two million people protesting the extradition bill and demanding the resignation of Chief Executive Carrie Lam.

Accordingly, there has been a flurry of books in recent years trying to understand the Middle Kingdom and its elusive princeling leader, who embarked on a historic third presidential term in 2022, paving the path to rival Mao himself by becoming ruler for life. Now the former Australian Prime Minister and noted China expert Kevin Rudd has made a pre-eminent contribution to this field with his latest work: On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World (OUP, £26.99). Unlike many other publications, which focus on Xi’s psychological and personal background, Rudd makes it clear he has written a strictly intellectual biography, replete with extensive and (as he admits) “at-times excruciating” examination of primary documents, reflecting the book’s origins as a PhD dissertation.

Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister

Rudd’s core argument is as follows. Xi has pursued a radical change in political and policy direction, both at home and abroad, compared to his post-Mao predecessors. While the substantive differences are important, a key meta-difference lies in the revival of the role of ideology in Xi’s worldview – as an organising principle and a methodology for understanding the world, including China’s role in it – which had fallen in relevance under Deng’s pragmatism. 

Ideology may not be the only explanatory mechanism, but Rudd believes it is too often neglected by China analysts, who fail to see that Xi’s “blueprint for the future is… hiding in plain sight”, albeit buried in the turgid, labyrinthine prose of official party proclamations. Fortunately, like Ariadne’s thread, Xi’s ideological worldview provides a unifying “red thread” that illuminates the underlying ideational drive to China’s new strategic direction.

Painstakingly combing through numerous speeches and articles, Rudd argues that Xi has embarked on an integrated ideological campaign of “Marxist-Leninist Nationalism”. First, he has taken Chinese politics to the “Leninist left”, reasserting the primacy of both the CCP and its leader, while deploying ideology as a disciplinary tool to reinforce party control. Second, economic policy has shifted to the “Marxist left”, with much greater emphasis on central planning, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and reducing inequality through income redistribution. Finally, foreign policy has moved towards the “nationalist right”, adopting a more confrontational and assertive stance that seeks to realise “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” amidst the relative decline of the West.

Xi’s address in July 2013 on the ideological unravelling within the party first gave an inkling of the new strategic direction to come. It is evident that Xi is deeply traumatised by the implosion of the Soviet Union, which he attributes to the decay of party discipline and ideological cohesion. He regards “struggle” as necessary to maintain the legitimacy – and thus survival – of the CCP. But Rudd identifies the 19 th party congress of 2017, which launched the “new era” of Xi Jinping Thought, as “the most significant shift in the CCP’s official worldview since 1982”. 

A core element of this was Xi’s redefinition of the “principal contradiction” (i.e., central challenge) facing the party. In the domestic sphere, Xi believes the unrestrained economic growth of the “reform and opening-up” era has led to widespread spiritual desiccation, with the CCP itself in a state of ideological disrepair. Meanwhile, the new class of capitalists risks undermining the politics of the superstructure by demanding liberal-democratic political reforms. 

Internationally, Xi regards China as engaged in a Manichaean ideological struggle with the West. In contrast to his immediate predecessors, Xi calls for a fully-fledged ideological offensive , buttressed by the moral righteousness and superiority of the Marxist-Leninist cause compared to the manifold failures of Western capitalism. A self-confident China should take a leading role in re-writing the international system in its own image for the benefit of all, encapsulated by its slogan: “community of common destiny for all humankind”.

Interestingly, another distinctive component of Xi’s ideological worldview is the Sinicisation of Marxism. CCP leaders since Mao had long advocated the need to adapt the enduring principles of Marxism-Leninism to the practical circumstances of the Chinese revolution. But Xi goes a step further, seamlessly conflating Marxist concepts with classical Chinese ones, such that the latter can be said to “both predate[] and separately validate[] Marxism’s central ideological claims to objective, progressive truth”. One example is Xi’s assertion that yin , yang , and dao “underscor[e] the universal truth of the unity of opposites, the laws of motion, and the reconciliation of contradictions”, all of which characterise Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism. 

Rudd ends with a series of predictive chapters. He notes that, despite the “double messaging” of the CCP in 2023, there has been no discernible evidence of fundamental ideological change, without which there is unlikely to be any long-term strategic change. This means that, in all probability, market forces will continue to be sidelined, leading to sluggish economic growth; control over the party will tighten; and conflict with the US will remain a possibility (especially since “national power” has grown in importance as a source of domestic political legitimacy, limiting the room for pragmatic manoeuvring). 

The crystal ball becomes cloudier when thinking about a post-Xi future. Rudd rejects the thesis that the changes since 2012 simply reflect the underlying nature of the CCP or are the inevitable consequences of China’s growing national wealth and power. Instead, he underlines the indispensable role of Xi himself – both his ideological worldview and the force of his political leadership. Still sprightly at just 71 years old (his parents lived to be 88 and 98), Xi may well stick around for a while yet, overseeing decisive decades where centuries may happen.

On Xi Jinping is a highly impressive tome – scholarly, authoritative, and surprisingly lucid for such a dense endeavour. The pages and pages of exegesis dazzlingly overlay one another, argument building upon argument, until their sheer weight and momentum make his core thesis at least appear incontrovertible.

But while Xi’s fervid commitment to China’s national rejuvenation and to Leninism is indisputable, his Marxism seems far more questionable. Of course, the book is not intended to be a work of political theory. Briskly defining the key terms in an early chapter, Rudd clarifies that his “principal objective here is to understand what Xi actually believes and why, rather than to debate whether he happens to be right or not”. Yet after digesting second-hand hundreds of pages of Xi Jinping Thought, the reader is left with the impression that – despite Rudd’s insistence on the centrality of Marxism to Xi’s worldview – “Leninist Nationalism” might serve as a more accurate label.

No doubt Xi is genuinely committed to aspects of Marxism. It’s true he frequently extols Marx in speeches (far more than his predecessors) and is certainly hostile to rampant capitalism’s corrosive effects on the individual and the natural world. But while Rudd contends that Xi moved to the “Marxist left” by rebalancing the economy in favour of SOEs, state planning, and greater income equality, much of this could also be interpreted as a manifestation of his Leninist disposition that seeks to impose party control on all aspects of society. Even his high-profile poverty alleviation campaign is relatively half-hearted, especially when compared to the energy devoted to national security, for which Xi has been willing to incur the discontent of China’s powerful capitalists and entrepreneurs.

A far stronger case can be made that Xi is actually wedded to what Rudd describes as the “irreducible elements” of Marxism, namely: dialectical materialism, based on the theory of contradiction. According to this framework, change takes place when opposites collide, with the contradiction resolved through either violent or non-violent “struggle”. For Xi, this universal law applies as much between states as within them and is a crucial lens through which he interprets the world “as it objectively is”. Both the internal struggle against the CCP’s ideological rot and the external one against the US are regarded as the inevitable outcome of this tectonic process. 

From the vantage point of Beijing, however, the great gyrations of History lead not so much towards a communist utopia as a modern-day realisation of Tianxia (“All under Heaven”): a Sino-centric world order radiating outwards to tributary states and beyond, rooted in Confucian norms of hierarchy and morality. With any developed notion of proletarian liberation conspicuous by its absence, Xi seems to be using a Sinicised Marxism as a tool of statecraft. His ideology is part of his project of national revival. 

Nationalism emerges as the primary component of the trio, buttressed by the other two, which act as its loyal handmaiden. Leninism provides a strong and disciplined party, unified by a coherent set of ideological beliefs, that can exert effective control over the rest of the country. Meanwhile, Marxism crowns this party-centric nationalism not only with the splendour of moral purpose and legitimacy as a movement aimed at changing the world for the benefit of ordinary people everywhere, but also the quasi-religious conviction in the ineluctability of China’s rise and triumph on the world stage.

Although CCP ideologues claim they are simply discerning the “objective” and “scientific” truths about the direction of the world, like many religions, there is a curious tendency for the “facts” to slot suspiciously neatly into the desired end-state. Needless to say, only the party priests are endowed with the authority to peer into the tea leaves of history. Ultimately, Xi’s worldview is neither pragmatic nor ideological: to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, what might have been and what has been both conveniently point to one end. 

Tactical U-turns can always be explained as part of some longer-term strategic plan. Just as George Washington believed Providence had “willed” the founding of the American Republic, so Xi believes the determinist forces of History will propel a rejuvenated China to glorious heights of power and influence in the service of a deeply moral cause, amidst the eventual decline of the US-led capitalist order. 

As Rudd himself repeatedly stresses, Xi’s ideological worldview is syncretic, combining pragmatic realism, nationalist-revisionism, Marxism-Leninism, and traditional Chinese thought (including Confucianism and Tianxia ). Yet while dialectical materialism may remain the “intellectual engine room” of Xi Jinping Thought, mechanically and methodically churning China’s ship onwards, her port of destination is increasingly revealed to be a different kind of red: not a socialist but a Sino-centric utopia. 

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Member ratings
  • Well argued: 86%
  • Interesting points: 81%
  • Agree with arguments: 76%
15 ratings - view all

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