Twelve years after he emerged from an internal power struggle to become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping’s position as his country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong is uncontested. His image is everywhere in China, on billboards, on newspaper front pages and above the many books under his name that are displayed prominently in every bookshop.
Yet he remains an enigmatic figure whose public demeanour and personal engagements with foreign leaders give little away about what is driving him. This has left the outside world guessing about where Xi wants to take China domestically and how far he is willing to go in challenging the hegemony of the United States on the world stage.
The son of one of Mao’s top lieutenants who grew up in privilege in Beijing, Xi’s life was turned upside down as a teenager by the Cultural Revolution. He was send down to the countryside to work with peasant farmers for seven years before returning to the capital when his father was rehabilitated in 1978.
Xi’s official biographies identify his experience as one of the “educated youth” as formative in giving him a deep understanding of life in poor, rural China. Western biographers excavate those years for signs of trauma and a fear of instability that would inform his focus on security as a political leader.
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In his book, On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the World, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd suggests that more useful information is lying in plain sight in Xi’s own words. He argues that a study of the ideological speeches and writings that make up Xi Jinping Thought is essential to understanding changes that are shaping our century.
“Something new is happening with Xi’s China. It is also being worked out on a grand scale. More fundamentally, there are big ideas behind all this which we must equally understand. Otherwise, we are merely dealing with the tip of the Chinese iceberg – the manifestation of change rather than its causation and construction,” Rudd writes.
Rudd views ideology as a “band of meaning” within which high-level political communication is conducted across CCP elites. A fluent Chinese speaker who had served as his country’s ambassador to Beijing, Rudd completed a doctorate at Oxford University on Xi’s ideology and is now Australia’s ambassador to Washington DC.
That doctorate forms the basis of this book, which argues that Xi is taking China in a new ideological direction that Rudd calls Marxist-Leninist Nationalism. He says that Xi has also reified the role of ideology as a means of enhancing the CCP’s control of the state and his role as its leader and to foreshadow broad policy change.
Rudd sees in Xi’s reassertion of the leader’s power, which saw him overturn a 30-year norm by assuming a third term in office and his reinforcing of the CCP’s dominance of the state machinery, a shift to the Leninist left. The restoration of party discipline through an anti-corruption campaign that has investigated millions of CCP members and the rectification campaigns to ensure ideological conformity are part of the same process.
Xi’s economic policies, which have sought to reduce inequality and to tame “disorderly capital” in recent years are for Rudd a move to the Marxist left. But he maintains that Xi has moved to the right on foreign policy, embracing an assertive nationalism that seeks to reshape the global order.
In the first years after he took office, Xi declared war on the corruption that he feared was undermining the CCP’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The campaign also served to neutralise potential internal rivals and, by targeting current and former members of the politburo, made clear that nobody was beyond the reach of the leader.
[ Money still oils the wheels of business and justice in China, in spite of Xi’s corruption clampdown ]
But he was more cautious at first on policy, tinkering at the edges of the economic consensus that had prevailed since 1978 when Deng Xiaoping shifted the Party’s focus from class struggle and revolution to economic development and improving living standards. Deng expressed the change in Marxist theoretical terms by redefining the “principal contradiction” or main challenge facing Chinese society as “the contradiction between people’s ever-growing material and cultural needs and the backwardness of social production”.
Rudd identifies 2017 as the ideological tipping point in Xi’s leadership after a financial market crisis reinforced his view that “capital has expanded in a disorderly way”. The breakneck speed of China’s economic growth, particularly since it became a full participant in the global trading system, had created a new class of super-rich who appeared to care little about the common good.
Now it was Xi’s turn to redefine the principal contradiction as that “between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life”. From now on, the focus would shift to reducing inequality, improving environmental protection and making business more socially responsible.
‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is mostly, if not exclusively, about the security of the regime and Xi himself
In common with his predecessors as party leader, Xi has maintained a narrative of continuity as he pursued sometimes dramatic shifts in direction. But he has gone further, drawing a thread through 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation to the present and asserting that concepts such as yin, yang and dao underscore the universal truth of the unity of opposites, the laws of motion and the reconciliation of contradictions in Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism.
If China’s primary domestic contradiction under Xi is economic inequality, its primary external contradiction is the economic and strategic competition with the United States. In addressing this challenge, Xi has abandoned Deng’s injunction to “hide our light and bide our time” in favour of “striving for achievement”.
This has seen a rapid build-up in China’s military capabilities, a more assertive approach to territorial disputes in its neighbourhood and greater use of economic coercion in pursuit of diplomatic goals. China has also been more active at the United Nations and other multilateral forums as it works with other non-western states to develop a new global order to replace the “rules-based international order” championed by the US and its allies.
Rudd believes that as the CCP moves closer to achieving its goal of making China prosperous and powerful, it would now deploy its influence around the world. Like John Winthrop’s vision of America as a “city upon a hill” and a moral beacon for other nations, Xi’s China would be an example for other developing countries in eliminating poverty and regaining national pride after suffering the humiliations of imperialism.
Rudd hedges on whether Xi will use military force to reincorporate Taiwan, noting the constraints imposed by the continuing US military presence in the region. And the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the uncertainty surrounding China’s economic performance makes the fate of Taiwan even more unpredictable.
Rudd’s book follows the publication last year of Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung’s The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, for which the authors read all of Xi’s speeches and everything written under his name. Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London, coined the phrase “consultative Leninism” to describe the Chinese system which combines strict control by the party with limited consultation with societal groups.
Much of Tsang and Cheung’s focus is on Xi’s approach to the party and governance and they see that ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is mostly, if not exclusively, about the security of the regime and Xi himself, without a real commitment to delivering socialist ideals.
“The elements in Marxism-Leninism central to Xi Thought come not from Marxist teachings, but from the Leninist principles of organisation, control, and discipline,” they write.
Like Rudd, Tsang and Cheung believe that Xi Jinping Thought is unlikely to survive after he leaves office, but they see no prospect of him losing power except voluntarily or through death. He has taken no apparent steps to prepare for a succession in advance of the next CCP congress in 2027, which could see him endorsed as leader for a further five years.
“The reality that Xi Thought has created many problems and structural weaknesses for China should not be deemed as sufficient for it or the Xi era to collapse,” they write.
“Xi has effective control over the party apparatus, the state machinery, the security services and the military and has never wavered in his determination to sustain the party-state and his hold on power. Equally importantly, there is nothing in Xi Thought that suggests he will ever admit he is wrong and will make way for anyone or an alternative approach. In Xi Thought, there is only one way that China is allowed to follow, the Xi way.”
China’s economic and diplomatic support for Russia since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago has fuelled fears that the world is dividing along ideological lines with democracies on one side and autocracies on the other.
In The New Cold War: How the Contest Between the US and China will Shape our Century, Robin Niblett maps the differences between this Cold War and the last one.
While the nucleus of the old Cold War was in Europe, America’s contest with China will be played out in the Global South. And the struggle this time is between two great powers that are economically integrated and are likely to remain so despite Trump’s threatened tariffs on Chinese goods.
In reality, economic competition is at the centre of the new Cold War, and Niblett notes that the near-unanimous consensus in Washington is that China is using its economic strength to advance its geopolitical interests in ways that are inimical to those of the US. And as the custodians of the collective West’s security interests in the Asia-Pacific, the Americans believe that they should set the terms of western policy towards China, with the Europeans falling into line.
Niblett offers some advice to the US and its allies on how to manage the contest with China and reduce the risk of a conflict that would be devastating for everyone. These include not creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about the inevitability of conflict and building a framework for peaceful economic competition.
He calls for a rallying of the liberal democracies and deeper engagement with the Global South to counteract China’s growing influence. Trump’s return and the western powers’ support for Israel’s war on Gaza have made that challenge more difficult than ever.
