What Xi Jinping Wants

Summary

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The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: “What Xi Jinping Wants”

Date: July 14, 2026
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: Kevin Rudd (President of the Asia Society, former Prime Minister of Australia, former ambassador to the US, Mandarin speaker, scholar of Chinese politics)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the ideology, ambitions, and governing style of Xi Jinping, China’s preeminent leader since 2012. Through a wide-ranging interview with Kevin Rudd—one of the West’s most experienced China-watchers, fluent Mandarin speaker, and author of a major work on Xi’s worldview—Ezra Klein seeks to unpack what truly motivates Xi, how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) functions under his rule, the meaning behind China’s domestic and international posture, and what all of this means for US-China relations, Taiwan, and the future shape of global power.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Kevin Rudd’s Unique China Trajectory

• [02:54] Rudd discusses his unusual career, from diplomat and PM to grad student in his late 50s (“I seem to have this permanent appetite for career demotion” – Rudd, 03:06), and what drove him to academically parse Xi’s writings and ideology.
• He met Xi in the 1980s as a young vice mayor and again as Australian PM, gaining rare, direct insights into Xi’s historical worldview.

2. Xi Jinping’s Worldview and Evolution

• Early Encounters & Background:
  [05:07] Xi was not the obvious “man of destiny” at first encounter. His historical sense became clear during substantive, private conversations:
  “All of his references were about his place in the context of unfolding Chinese history.” (Rudd, 07:17)
• The Legacy of Xi’s Father:
  Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was both a major Party figure and a victim of Maoist purges. Rather than breed resentment, purges reinforced loyalty—a crucial insight into Xi’s own attitudes toward the Party. Rudd compares the psychological outcome to “Winston in 1984”:
  “Despite being purged, always coming back to the Party because the Party knows best, a true Leninist.” (Rudd, 11:25)
• Leninism in Modern China:
  [14:49] Rudd explains Leninism not as pure Marxism, but as the toolset for a party-centric, history-accelerating national project—“Stalinism frozen in time,” demanding absolute party and leader loyalty.

3. Historical Periods of the CCP

• Post-Mao Reform:
  [16:53] Deng Xiaoping liberalized China’s economy, accepting inequality and opening it to the world, while strictly maintaining political control.
• Xi’s Turn:
  [18:56] “He has changed that ideological script again back to what I would call the Marxist left. A much more state-driven and party-driven economy and with much tighter levels of Leninist control.”
• Xi’s career mirrored a “Machiavellian” rise: methodical, steady, masking ambition, accumulating posts in strategic provinces and developing a reputation as “safe hands.” (21:10–24:09)
• The Bo Xilai Rivalry was significant—a sign of deep politics and factional contests beneath the surface, not just “lockstep” party movement.
  [22:34] “In the Chinese Communist Party ecosystem, it is invariably advantageous to be what they call Hong e Dai, second generation red.”

4. Consolidation of Power and Anti-Corruption

• [29:01] Xi’s anti-corruption purges are both real and a mechanism for Party discipline and for eliminating rivals at all levels—"the ability of the system to deploy a corruption file against anybody... is large."
• Inspired in part by the collapse of the Soviet Union—Xi sees ideological and material corruption as a party-destroying disease (32:00–33:28).

5. Repression and Surveillance

• [39:22] Under Xi, genuine crackdowns on civil society, rights lawyers, journalists, religious believers, NGOs: “From his first year in office from 2013, you could already see the directives going out to pull in on the reins of control over the exercise of freedom in multiple domains... Vastly less free than it was a decade before.” (39:47)

6. Economic Policy: From Growth to Industrial Power

• [56:01] Xi has deprioritized rapid growth in favor of “supply side” dominance—manufacturing, technology, industrial supply chains—seeking economic self-reliance, especially relevant in a Taiwan crisis scenario.
• Private entrepreneur Jack Ma’s rise and fall is symbolic: “He became bigger than the party.” (65:17) Xi’s Party clamped down on tech giants, implemented “party secretaries” in major firms, and enforced state equity purchases.
• After initial severe crackdowns, there’s been some correction to bring private sector innovation back, but “the fundamental, shall I say, move to the Marxist left... is still predominant.” (68:21)

7. China’s Industrial Juggernaut and Global Power

• [73:38+] China has achieved dominance in electric vehicles, batteries, critical minerals, and rare earths—not by “copying,” but by executing massive, state-coordinated industrial policies and subsidies.
• Massive overcapacity in manufacturing means China “exports” cheap goods, endangering overseas competitors. “The alternative is you simply allow the Chinese industrial juggernaut to dominate every single industrial and sub industrial sector.” (77:14)

8. Dialectics, Nationalism, and Historical Destiny

• Rudd lays out the twin drivers of Xi’s worldview: “Marxist dialectician”—history is an inexorable clash of opposing forces, with the CCP as the vanguard accelerating the process; and Chinese nationalism—the return and vindication of the “middle kingdom” (49:36–54:52).
• “Bear with me for a moment. This is turgid stuff...” (Rudd, 49:48–49:52).
• Xi expects China to “emerge on top,” both in civilization and in state power.

9. The CCP's View of America

• [80:07] Xi sees the US as “the only country in the world potentially standing in the way of his national political and economic and geopolitical ambition.”
• [82:27] Chinese analysts and propaganda view the world as entering an era of “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.”
• US policy toward China has transformed dramatically, especially since the Trump era, from “strategic engagement” to “strategic competition” (85:24).

10. Managed Strategic Competition vs. Zero-Sum Thinking

• Rudd advocates for “managed strategic competition”:
  a) Clear red lines and sustained deterrence (esp. over Taiwan)
  b) Open, head-to-head economy, tech, and idea competition
  c) “Cooperate where you can”: AI governance, public health, limited but genuine areas of global mutual benefit.
• “We can walk and chew gum at the same time in these three different domains, while recognizing that we’re not ultimately engaged with those organizing a Sunday school picnic.” (Rudd, 91:45)

11. The Taiwan Flashpoint

• [93:22] Xi is explicit: “He wants... reunification with Taiwan before the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic, and that's in 2049... His policy towards Taiwan is increasingly hard and sharp.”
• US–China–Taiwan relations are entering a period of maximum danger, particularly around 2028 (Taiwan presidential elections, likely Xi reappointment, US presidential elections).
• “What I fear? A miscalculation by Xi Jinping about the level of American resolve.” (97:41)
• The risk: Xi may believe US political division, war-weariness post-Iran, and historical determinism make a move on Taiwan low-risk.
• Why Taiwan matters:
  • The US’s global credibility and alliance system would likely collapse if it failed to deter a takeover.
  • East Asia would “go nuclear.”
  • The idea of American strategic reliability would vanish (101:00+).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Xi’s historic sense:
  "All of his references were about his place in the context of unfolding Chinese history." (Rudd, 07:17)
• On the anti-corruption campaign:
  "He very quickly draws out the analogies with the collapse of the CPSU... he saw that as fundamental to the collapse of the Soviet Union." (Rudd, 30:29)
• On ideology:
  "I've read enough of Xi Jinping to conclude that he is a convinced Marxist dialectician." (Rudd, 47:36)
• On controlled debate and surveillance:
  “You can say ‘eat bitterness’ with some effect because the system will be out there to round you up if you don't do so accordingly and with a smile on your face.” (Rudd, 63:32)
• On industrial strategy:
  "This is a very elaborately thought through strategy on the part of the Chinese. And so far, to give them credit, it has worked remarkably well. But they cannot sustain it indefinitely." (Rudd, 74:03)
• On managed strategic competition:
  “It’s far better than unmanaged strategic competition which can end in crisis, conflict and war.” (Rudd, 89:44)
• On the stakes of Taiwan:
  "At that point, the notion of Pax Americana disappears in the collective consciousness of allies around the world." (Rudd, 101:13)

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Important Timestamps

• Rudd’s career and meeting Xi: 02:54–08:35
• The Party’s history, Leninism explained: 14:49–16:53
• Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms & Xi’s reversal: 16:53–19:36
• Xi’s consolidation of power: 24:46–29:01
• Corruption campaigns, Soviet collapse: 29:01–33:28
• Human rights and crackdown under Xi: 39:22–41:14
• Surveillance and youth protest: 57:42–61:56
• Jack Ma and the private sector: 64:39–69:29
• China’s industrial strategy & tariffs: 71:42–77:14
• China’s view of America and ideology: 80:07–84:29
• Managed strategic competition (the “third way”): 89:37–92:16
• Taiwan as the potential flashpoint: 93:22–104:05
• Book recommendations: 104:27

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Book Recommendations (104:27)

1. Joseph Torigian, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxin, Father of Xi Jinping
2. Ian Johnson, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao
3. Pope Leo XIV, The Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence

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Episode Tone & Style

• Inquisitive and clear: Ezra and Rudd both strive to preserve nuance and avoid sensationalism.
• Wry humor: Occasional self-deprecation (“I seem to have this permanent appetite for career demotion…”), gentle jabs at turgid theory, and storytelling from personal experience keep the episode lively.
• Analytical and granular: The episode is dense with context, named Chinese leaders, and theoretical frameworks, but always translated back to practical implications for listeners (e.g., why Taiwan matters).
• Warning against complacency: Rudd repeatedly cautions Americans not to underestimate Xi Jinping or assume inevitable Chinese decline.

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Summary Takeaways

• Xi Jinping is driven by an unusually strong mix of historical consciousness, Marxist-Leninist belief, and relentless nationalism.
• His government seeks not only internal control but global industrial and technological preeminence.
• The CCP, under Xi, is repressive, disciplined, and far more ideologically driven than many Western observers appreciate.
• A major challenge for the US and its allies is to avoid wishful thinking and instead pursue “managed strategic competition”—deterring war, especially over Taiwan, while competing openly and vigorously in economics, tech, and ideas.
• The next several years, especially around the 2028 election cycle in the US and Taiwan, may prove dangerously volatile.

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Transcript

[A]

Gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Some people avoid talking about gun violence because they don't think they can make a difference. But every conversation matters. When it comes to gun violence, we agree on more than we think. And having productive conversations about gun violence can help protect children and teens. Learn how to have the [e-mail] brought to you by the Ad Council. Since 2012, Xi Jinping has been the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He has consolidated power to a level very few people ever expected. And under his rule, China has strengthened technologically, diplomatically, militarily. It is now widely understood to be an industrial juggernaut on a scale the world has never seen in a way the world does not quite know how to respond to. But Xi Jinping's ambitions for China go far beyond that. In the long term, he wants China to be the preeminent world power. In the near term, he wants it to control Taiwan. You cannot understand modern China, what it is now and where it is going without understanding Xi Jinping and the power he wields and the ideology that drives him. My guest today is Kevin Rudd, who has had a unique way of trying to understand that ideology from many different angles. Rudd has this kind of amazing biography, began as an Australian foreign service officer serving in China. He's a fluent Mandarin speaker who rose to be Prime Minister of Australia in the late 2000s. Along that rise, he got to know Xi personally in a way very few other world leaders have. Then, after serving as prime minister, Rudd went on to pursue a doctorate at Oxford, and he wrote his dissertation on Xi Jinping's ideology, reading everything that has come out under Xi's name, which is quite a lot. He's published that in a book on Xi Jinping. He's also the author of the Avoidable War. He recently served as the Australian ambassador to the US and he is now the president of the Asia Society. And so he has a really rare set of perspectives. He has an academic perspective, a diplomatic perspective, a political perspective on China and Xi Jinping and the US China relationship. He's really an amazing person to get to talk to about this. As always. My email ezreklineshowytimes.com. Kevin Rudd, welcome to the show.

[B]

Thanks for having me on the show.

[A]

So before we get to Xi, I want to talk a bit about your career. Not that many people go from being prime minister of a major country to getting a PhD and being a grad student again. So tell me a little bit about Your path?

[B]

You. Yeah, well, I seem to have this permanent appetite for career demotion. So I was Prime Minister, then foreign Minister, and then did a PhD, became ambassador, and now I'm running a think tank. So it's one steady slide for me. Why did I do a PhD? A lot of folks in the world, and particularly my former counterparts as international political leaders, would ask me this question, hey, Kevin, you're a China guy. What does Xi Jinping think? And I thought I knew pretty well the answers to that until I began to have doubts myself about the authenticity of my answers. So I decided to force myself to read everything that this guy had ever written. And I thought the best way to force myself to read everything this guy had ever written was to enroll in a DPHIL at Oxford at the age of 59. And that's exactly what I did. And the principle at play was this, the male vanity principle, which is it would be too humiliating and too embarrassing, having enrolled in such a program, to then withdraw because you'd lost enthusiasm.

[A]

It's a commitment device.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

But you also had a history on China. You had begun your career working in the Foreign Service. Do I have that right?

[B]

Yeah. No. As a kid, I started first year university with Modern Chinese Language, Classical Chinese Language and Chinese History. I'd done four or five years of that, and then, because I was essentially unemployable in the 1980s, found that the only place that had an interest in taking on my talents was the Australian Foreign Service. And eventually I ended up in Beijing as one of their better Chinese linguists at the time. They did send me to Sweden first, just to make sure I would lose my language.

[A]

What year were you in Beijing at that time?

[B]

In Beijing, from 84 through until virtually the beginning of 87.

[A]

So what was it like then?

[B]

It was China at its most dynamic. It was China opening up to the world for the very first time where all things were possible under heaven. And so this was almost the high days and holy days of China's international engagement. And it was fully two years before Tiananmen, which was the first great Leninist wake up call.

[A]

And when I think it's after this period. But when do you first come across Xi Jinping?

[B]

What's interesting, when I was a junior woodchuck in the Australian Embassy at the time.

[A]

Is that a official term?

[B]

Increasingly, yes. And so basically the guy does the photocopying. So when I was there, our Prime Minister was visiting at the time, a guy called Bob Hawke. And Bob wanted to go to Places other than Beijing. So we organized for him to go to one of the newly opening up cities, what they called a Special Economic Zone, at a place called Xiamen. So I went to Xiamen to do the advance work and I met with the then vice mayor of Xiamen, who was a guy by the name of Xi, given name Jinping. And that's where we first met. Was it a long and extensive boozy dinner? No, but it was the first time I met the guy.

[A]

I've met a lot of politicians in my time, for my sins. Sometimes you run across somebody and you can feel the gravity of history warping around them. First time I met Obama, you could feel the weight in the room. It shifted things. Trump has this quality. There are people who have him, but people have had them early. I've met people early in their careers and they just have that quality. I met other people who don't, even though they rise quite far. What was she like? Did he feel different to you than other mayors and vice mayors and party bureaucrats? Would you have told me after that meeting? I just met somebody and that young man is going somewhere?

[B]

Because I was a student of contemporary Chinese politics. I knew of his father, Xi Zhongxun, who was already a member of the Politburo. But I'd be fibbing to you if I said to you today that the room shook for me when I first met him, much later on, when I was Prime Minister of Australia and he was visiting Australia as Vice President of China. And I remember sitting in front of the fireplace in the Prime Minister's residence in Canberra, it was winter, and spending a couple of hours over a glass of Australian bread, talking about the state of the world with him in Chinese. That's when I sensed that this was a man of history. For the simple reason that all of his references were about his place in the context of unfolding Chinese history. So that's the first time in which I had that sense we were dealing with something, somebody, some person who was unique.

[A]

Say more on that. When you say that he referenced himself in the unfolding, what was he unfolding and what was his self understood role? Because this was before he was leader of the party.

[B]

That's true. And when his position was still somewhat contested, it wasn't absolutely clear that he would become paramount leader. And the conversation, which as I said ran for a couple of hours, was free flowing. We didn't have interpreters. And essentially his thesis was that China intrinsically is a great power, historically, was demonstrated as such throughout a couple of thousand years of recorded history. Not the 5,000 that the Chinese often boast about, but just a couple of thousand, which, given we're up to the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country as a republic, a couple of thousand is pretty, pretty good. And certainly measured against Australia, it's very good. But he saw that the trend of Chinese history was China was a great power when it was A, unified and B, able to keep foreign adversaries under control and divided. And China collapsed as a great power when neither of those propositions held true. For those reasons, spinning it into the 20th century and then into the 21st century. When I was meeting with him, he saw the contemporary mandate of the Chinese Communist Party, which is to maintain China's domestic unity and to keep it free from external pressure, so that it could once again become a global great power. Whereas he wouldn't say, I, Xi Jinping, therefore, have a unique mandate to do this on behalf of 1.4 billion Chinese people. For me, the subtext is pretty clear.

[A]

So she's a man with a sense of history and also a man with a very particular history. You mentioned his father a moment ago. Tell me his story.

[B]

His father, Xi Zhongxin, is a fascinating figure in modern Chinese politics. So in the period of the Party's crucible, which was when they had to retreat to a place called Yan' an in northwestern China, where they holed up effectively for the better part of 10 or 15 years, that's when Xi Zhongxun comes to the fore as a trusted military lieutenant in Mao's system. But Xi Zhongxin also runs through a period whereby he is repeatedly criticized and, in fact, purged by Mao, including during the Cultural Revolution. 66 to 76. And as we know from our study of human psychology, particularly in authoritarian states, such experiences of purges from the Party center can either have one of two consequences. One, it makes you even more loyal to the Party because you have recognized your errors through this process of criticism and self criticism. Or the second is you turn absolutely hostile to the Party as an abuse of Leninist power. Xi Jiangxun, Xi Jinping's father, was very much in the first category. In fact, he reminds me of that last scene in Orwell's novel with Winston, where he realizes as he disappears into oblivion, that he loved Big Brother all along, and the Party always comes first. That's where Shijong Shin fits, despite being purged, always coming back to the Party because the Party knows best, a true Leninist.

[A]

I think Americans who hear that story and given our particular culture, which has a bit less experience with purges and likes stories of people. I was going to, when you were saying that, I was thinking about a number of people who have been purged or nearly purged from Donald Trump's Republican Party, and having watched some of them go down alternative paths. So I agree with you so far. But I think we have a somewhat naive sense that the natural reaction is the second reaction, hostility to the party, recognition of the tyranny. And even if you have to buckle under for a little bit, you're always plotting in your heart. So you imagine being the son of a person who is purged somewhat repeatedly, whose family, in a way, is humiliated

[B]

by the party and has physically suffered, has been sent down to the countryside and lived in quite impoverished circumstances for several years. Xi Jinping was, as a young Xi Jinping was.

[A]

So I think people imagine that would create a hatred, you're saying for many people it does the opposite. What did it do for Xi Jinping and why?

[B]

Well, my analysis is that Xi Jinping, like his father, Xi Zhongxin, concluded ultimately that the party knows best and that the party ultimately has the nation's interests at heart. It's not to say that the party is infallible, they will make mistakes, but in the full sweep of history that we owe our loyalty to the party. And you're right, most Americans would say this is just nuts. In fact, all Australians will think it was completely nutso. Simply not within our realm of lived experience, if you'd been treated that way. But there's something about Leninist induction which creates these veins of steel in these folks. And Xi Jinping is of that ilk. So ultimately unemotional about these things. Ultimately absolutely hard headed, some would say cold hearted, but absolutely resolute that this beast called the Party is the engine which takes China into the 21st century, not just as a country barely surviving against the external predations of the west or whoever else, but on its trajectory to become a global great power. And that's why I always say to American interlocutors, never underestimate Xi Jinping, never ever underestimate him.

[A]

You talked about Leninism creating, I think you called it, veins of steel. I don't think most Americans are very familiar with Leninism either. In its initial form, how it modifies Marxism, to say nothing of its Chinese form, which is a modification on top of that. So what is this Leninism of which you speak?

[B]

Marxism, as we know, is an economic ideology. And it's all about creating ultimately an equalitarian or equal society through an equal distribution of goods, but to be achieved through a process of, quote, dialectical changes. A Leninist party is designed to accelerate the natural historical forces of change through the active intervention of a vanguard party which accelerates the course of history through its own violent actions. And therefore it's a history accelerator. That's as they see it. Of course, when applied to China's own circumstances. This Leninism essentially has all the hallmarks of Stalin's party. It's like Stalinism frozen in time. It is an unrelenting discipline anchored in absolute loyalty to the leader himself. And this is rehearsed time and time and time again in the party's internal ideological discourse and reflected in what the party does in practice.

[A]

So we talked a bit about how Xi's father is purged. He also becomes at certain times unpurged. Mao dies, Deng takes over. And I think this gets into something worth talking about, which is the party. You described it as a bit like the Stalinist party frozen in time, but it also is then, because of its fealty to the leader, able to make quite radical changes. So how does the Communist Party in China and beyond that, China itself change after Mao?

[B]

It's gone through, I think, two big changes. The first reaction under Deng Xiaoping, who effectively replaced Mao in 78, was called the great period of reform and opening. And reform meant basically introducing market disciplines into the economy rather than state planning. And opening meant we, in order to grow, need to open to the outside world. He didn't fundamentally change its Leninism, he certainly changed its Marxism. He changed the economic ideology in a quite artful way by saying that at this period of economic history, that the factors of production needed to be fully unleashed in order to pull China out of poverty. And therefore it was necessary to contemplate and embrace a long period of inequality while that occurred. And when asked how long, he said dozens of generations, which you don't have to be a mathematical genius to work out. That's hundreds of years, dozens of generations. And that orthodoxy effectively enabled market based reforms in the economy domestically and in engage with the capitalist world externally, which is how frankly a generation or two of Americans and Australians for that matter, became familiar with Deng's China, Jiang Zemin's China, Deng's successor, and Hu Jintao's China, who was Jiang Zemin's successor. Because the overriding ambition was to grow the economy, bring people out of poverty, and make China a global economic great power effectively for 35 years, right through until 2012, starting way back in 1978. The second big change after Mao though is with Xi Jinping. He becomes General Secretary of the Party at the end of 2012. And he has changed that ideological script again back to what I would call the Marxist left. A much more state driven and party driven economy and with much tighter levels of Leninist control.

[A]

I want to track how he gets into position to do that. So I was just doing my simple math. I think when Mao dies, she is 23 or so.

[B]

Thereabouts. Yeah.

[A]

So what are the positions he holds? A young guy, he'd been in the countryside a bunch. His father, a complicated figure. What is his path upwards and what makes him a figure who keeps getting promoted upwards by the Chinese Communist Party

[B]

through this period of reform and opening, which is quite interesting if we've looked at our Machiavelli carefully. In the Prince, Machiavelli often speaks of the need to mask one's own ambitions and to mask one's own ideas, while being a loyal servant of the Prince of the time before you yourself end up in power. And of course there are parallel axioms in Chinese traditional political wisdom about that as well. So bear that in mind as we trip through his political career. By the late 70s, early 80s, he lands a position as a private secretary to the then Minister for Defense, whose name is Geng Biao. And this was before I met the guy down in Xiamen. He spent a couple of years doing that and he's always prided himself and therefore having something of a military grounding or military background. He then undertakes prefecture level positions as Party secretary, where he often refers to how much he learned from working closely with the peasants on the ground. As party secretary in a prefecture, it's to raise local living standards, to organize, shall we say, agricultural production, to ensure that agricultural surpluses are able to be sold on private markets on weekends. And so that you begin to see the emergence of a local, as it were, semi capitalist economy.

[A]

So kind of technocratic governance job.

[B]

Technocratic governance. And it's a standard pathway to ultimate advancement. He then is elevated to become Vice mayor of Xiamen, which is one of China's four Special Economic Zones, at the forefront not of just domestic economic reform like in the countryside, but of opening the outside world. Where I encountered him for the first time, I'm sure he does not recall meeting me. I'm sure he met a whole bunch of foreign barbarians at the time. And then he slowly is elevated to the point that he ends up as the provincial party secretary of the entire province of Fujian. He then ends up for a long period of time as provincial party secretary of the province of Zhejiang. And then he ultimately goes to Shanghai as party secretary before he's then elevated by Jiang Zemin to the center when he ultimately becomes, in 2008, Vice President of the country, vice chairman in time of the Central Military Commission.

[A]

So what is his reputation in this period, the Chinese Communist Party, 110 million members, many, many, many people vying in various bureaucratic positions for advancement. Why is Xi almost unique among them, moving up and up and up and up? What are other people saying about him? What does he consider to be good at?

[B]

In the Chinese Communist Party ecosystem, it is invariably advantageous to be what they call Hong e Dai, which is second generation red, because his father is Xi Jiangxun and his father has been obviously rehabilitated in the reform and opening period. It is of no small advantage in your own career elevation, mind you. His major competitor for the job at the top, a guy called Bo Xilai, he was also the son of another revolutionary leader called Bo Yibo, and he was on a similar, as it were, career trajectory. And for those of us in the China analytical world, these two careers were moving towards a point of collision. And of course, those in and around Xi Jinping and those otherwise opposed to Bo Xilai dealt with Bo Xilai. So that's one element of his advancement. The other is at a technocratic level in terms of the growth data. Coming out of Xiamen, coming out of Fujian, coming out of Zhejiang and coming out of Shanghai. He has an impressive set of numbers to demonstrate to the party center that he's not just a political show pony. I think he's always, as I reflect back on his career, been a safe hands sort of guy, keeping his provinces stable while allowing the private sector to do its bit.

[A]

I think sometimes from the outside, we look at the Chinese Communist Party and don't see politics. We just see kind of a lockstep organization. We don't understand its internal workings very well. But it does have politics, it does have factions, it has a lot of people in it. Why him? What is his pitch to the party and what do his supporters want from him? What do the other factions fear in him? What is the understanding of how he becomes a leader and why he becomes a leader and what it means that he is the one chosen to be the leader?

[B]

And this is the question that many of us in the analytical world are least equipped to answer because we weren't in the room. But let me have a go anyway. The kingmaker at this stage is Jiang Zemin, even though he'd been formally out of the position for a decade. Jiang Zemin, wise old bird. I mean, I met him a couple of times in my political life. And who loved to sing, by the way. We once had him in Sydney when he was mayor of Shanghai himself. He insisted on performing on stage at the Sydney Opera House. So we made sure there was no one else in the Opera House at the time. But he liked it. He was performing on stage at the Opera House. He could say he'd sung there. That's a good singer. The Chinese would say Mama Hoohoo, which is. Yeah, okay. Bit like me in the shower. Sure.

[A]

A confident singer.

[B]

A confident singer, a man who likes to sing.

[A]

I admire that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. It requires a limited level of self awareness in order to really enjoy it. But anyway,

[A]

or analogy can purge whoever doesn't like the way you sounded.

[B]

That's true. Mind you, as a junior Australian diplomatic official at the time, I appropriately applauded this performance at the Opera House. That's kind of what you do, but anyway, you roll the clock along. I think Jiang Zemin has worked out that there are problems in terms of party corruption, that there are problems in terms of indiscipline, and there are problems in terms of allowing any further, as it were, slide in control. Given where they ended up in 89. So against the alternatives that they were faced with at the time, I think they saw in Xi Jinping someone who was a party guy first and foremost. And secondly, having presided over a couple of or three heavily reformist provinces, Shanghai, Fujian and Zhejiang, which were very much at the cutting edge of economic progress, that the economic reform program would be safe, the opening to the outside world's economies would be safe, as it would be safe in terms of party political control. I think that's why they made their bet with Xi Jinping. And I think Jiang Zemin, by the time he died only a couple of years ago, would have been deeply surprised by how much Xi Jinping then set out to change the center of gravity of the Chinese political economy in a big way.

[A]

Why would he have been surprised by that?

[B]

Because he assumed that the economic reform program would continue, that there would still be a lot of space for the Chinese entrepreneurial class, that China's international economic engagement would continue, that China would progressively integrate itself with the global economy. And instead what he saw, certainly by the time we get to 2015, is Xi Jinping turning the levers very much towards the Marxist left. Greater role for Central planning, lesser role for, shall we say, interim inequality, as Deng had conceived of it originally. And at the center of this, Xi Jinping's rehabilitation of an old Maoist saying, which was along these lines, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about north, south, east and west, whether we're talking about the government, the military, the academy, or commerce or society. The Party leads in all. And Xi Jinping pronounced that and brought it back with a certain Maoist flourish. That's what would have surprised Jiang Zemin.

[A]

The thing that I had heard of him as being known for was a series of anti corruption campaigns. So tell me about that side of his story.

[B]

I think during the period in which he was Party Secretary, I haven't seen a strong evidence trail that he has led at the provincial level, crackdowns against corruption. At the same time, as soon as he takes over as Party General Secretary for the entire Communist Party at the end of 2012, the first thing he does almost is to launch a nationwide anti corruption campaign. So he has been, I think, observing, noting, seeing how corruption under his predecessors had moved from a retail level to a commercial level, to an industrial scale. And he very quickly draws out the analogies with the collapse of the cpsu, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and says in effect, that the fish rots from the head. And what happens when a fish rots from the head is that ideological corruption gives rise to physical corruption gives rise to the dissipation of all forms of political discipline. And he saw that as fundamental to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union has become this sort of long playing training video for various folks in the Chinese Communist Party of everything that you should not do.

[A]

Tell me the way as you understand it, because he's written quite a lot about it. Xi Jinping would narrate the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party because I think here the story that is largely believed is the Soviet Union collapsed under its own contradictions and Ronald Reagan's defense buildup and moral leadership. I think that's not how they see it in China. So how does Xi jinping See it?

[B]

1 Remember in the Gorbachev period, it was governed by these dual disciplines of glasnost and perestroika, which translated effectively mean glasnost opening and perestroika reform. Sound familiar? To reform an opening under Deng Xiaoping. So he's got this rolling around on the back of his head that, that if you unleash too much of the capitalist impulses of the Chinese people, like the Russian people, then ultimately you're going to shake the inherent disciplinary structures of the ruling party.1.2 what he said more specifically, particularly in a remarkable speech he gave, I think in 2013 to a meeting of funsters otherwise called the Propaganda and Ideology Department Department of the ccp. That should be a fun conference if ever you want to go to one. I've never been invited, but I think that's where they really get into their Marxism and Leninism and propaganda together. And that's where he spoke most clearly about the corrosive influence of capitalist values and about the attrition of Communist ideological values in the last days of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union. The third reason he gives in his extensive corpus of writings and teachings is his wistful reflection that there was not one single man prepared to stand up in the Soviet Red army to defend the Party when things got to extremists in 1991. And so it has caused him again to double down in terms of his determination that the Party will always be in control of the army. Absolute control of the Army. This podcast is supported by Squarespace.

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[A]

You mentioned being in China not long before Tiananmen Square, and I've certainly read many histories of China where the sense is that the Chinese Communist Party's response to Tiananmen Square very different from how it's understood in the US as this moment of horrific crackdown and barbarity is in another sense the moment the Chinese Communist Party decided not to be the Soviet Union, that it was not going to allow an economic opening to lead to the kind of social rights and discontent that could shake their power.

[B]

Yeah, I'd finished my diplomatic posting by then, but I happened to be back in Beijing at the time, working in a different incarnation. And we arrived in Beijing on 20 May, which was the day they declared martial law, and were already into those massive set of student protests within the square. And of course, the crackdown, the military crackdown, and when all the students were killed was on the 4th of June. So because our entire program of whatever else we were supposed to be doing was canceled because of chaos under heaven, I then went wandering in the square for a week and to talk to all these kids. And it was remarkable to see the spontaneous outburst from kids, and not just kids, not just university students, but from other units of the Chinese Communist Party calling out for freedom and democracy. I remember, if you've been to Beijing, walking to the square for the first time, coming down across the ceremonial bridges in front of Mao's portrait beneath the Gate of Heavenly Peace to look at the square for the first time. And I'd seen the square multiple occasions when it's full of the normal Communist Party paraphernalia. And this time it was like a massive comprehensive exercise in iconoclasm. That is, to the left was the history of the museum for the history of the Chinese Revolution, which had one giant flag planted on top in the Chinese characters saying democracy Great hall of the People, full of big character posters, as they call them, calling for the purge of a whole bunch of people within the Chinese leadership who are old fashioned leftists. And then in front of you, there was this crowd of, I think on our particular day, half a million kids in the middle. It's quite a large gathering.

[A]

Yeah, the scale is unbelievable.

[B]

And then in front of them, as I looked, there were these parade marshals who were organizing individual, shall I say, protest marches of various units of the party. And I looked to see which ones they were. One protest group from the Central Party school, another protest group from such and such a foreign policy academy. And so it went on. And so as I wandered around the square and saw this site for the first time as a scholar or as a student of Chinese modern Chinese history in particular, but classical Chinese history as well, I could see the instinctive reaction, feel the instinctive reaction of someone like Dengue, an old fashioned Leninist who would just say, this is gao luan, Chinese expression meaning creating chaos. And I had this enormous sense of foreboding that the clock was already ticking. So why did they do it? I think Deng had concluded that unless he drew parameters around this, that the party would rapidly lose power and furthermore that you would have this sort of chaos spread right across China. And so they acted. But then through the rest of the 90s, through until probably about 2000, there continues this internal debate within the Chinese Communist Party about whether we could execute a form of political transition to a Singaporean style long term democracy or guided democracy as they would see it, in order to create an exit ramp for the Chinese Communist Party over time. After Deng died in 97, that debate rapidly reached its conclusion. And they said, no, we're hanging on for the long term. And that's where I see the fundamental changes having occurred. And remember, that's a decade before Xi Jinping comes to power.

[A]

So one thing we've seen under Xi is first a lot of consolidation of power, but also a pretty hard crackdown on Chinese civil society rights. Lawyers, labor organizers, journalists, international NGO workers. Tell me about freedom in China under Xi and why he has felt the need to do this.

[B]

From his first year in office from 2013, you could already see the directives going out to pull in on the reins of control over the exercise of freedom in multiple domains. Religious freedom, for example, the independence of journalists to the extent that they had it before. But they did have some. There was some investigative reporting underway, the legal system, the independence of lawyers, and also those who had been engaged in academic level discussions about, shall we say, other forms of democratic governance experimentation in China at the village level. Xi Jinping's conclusion was that all these added up to an erosion of the Leninist control of the party and therefore crackdowns unfolded. In the case of religion, because religious practice is so widespread in China, it's not an abolition of all forms of religious expression, not at all, but reining in anything which was not authorized. So that if you were to look at it in 2026, it's vastly less free than it was a decade before.

[A]

More recently, we've seen some purging happening in the military. What have you made of that?

[B]

With the military in particular, he has sought to reassert his control. It's not just that we've seen multiple senior Chinese commanders, including those in the central military, removed. But in the last several years, we've seen a hundred senior PLA generals purged as well. What's it about? Why has he done it? A, he genuinely thinks that corruption in the military impedes the professional capacity of the military to execute its mission in relation to Taiwan or other contingencies. The second is, and here it's harder for us to reach these judgments, but I have some confidence in them. He's not really prepared to brook a whole lot of internal dissent within the military or alternative views. The most recent purge, for example, of Zhang Youxia, who was the effectively deputy commander of the Central Military Commission, a lifelong friend of Xi Jinping's, going way back when and through their fathers, reflected an ultimately unemotional view that unless you are 1000% on board the Xi Jinping bus, then it's not the place for you.

[A]

And in what ways were these figures, these officers, not fully on the Xi Jinping bus?

[B]

Here we have to speculate. It's not as if they were engaged in preparations for a military coup. That's not the nature of the beast. It's more internal disagreement, I suspect, about the nature of levels of military preparedness for, shall we say, deploying the PLA against and into Taiwan contingencies.

[A]

So an officer who says in a meeting, I think this would be a disaster is not long for the world.

[B]

Or an officer who says, senior officer who may say, comrade Chairman, I think we have two or three capability sets which need to be further improved. That would be the more cautious way of putting it. Whereas my suspicion is that Xi Jinping's response to that will be to say, you guys are supposed to be providing absolute confidence in the system that we're ready. How can I therefore be trustful of your leadership of the system when you yourself are the sources of doubt? Now, that I have to say, is hypothesis. I do not have strong evidence points of that. But it's not just a corruption equation. I've also seen American analysts say, for example, that the purges in the military therefore make it much less likely that Xi Jinping would deploy the PLA against Taiwan in the coming years. My experience of these things is that for everyone who is purged, there's a queue of 100 people waiting to take the job. PLA is a very big beast.

[A]

How much are the corruption purges, the corruption campaigns about corruption, and how much are they about control?

[B]

I think it's control being the dominant factor in the equation and therefore the ability of the system to be able to deploy a corruption file against anybody on anything is large in a formidable security apparatus. Remember, in the organization department of the Chinese Communist Party, which is basically the uber personnel department, everyone has a file, and on that file goes a whole bunch of stuff, and some of it may well be fabricated. So it is ultimately about whether I choose to pull your file out.

[A]

So you for this PhD thesis, this book. You read everything Xi Jinping has written, which is quite a lot. I find this to be an interesting thing about him. He is much more well published than most world leaders.

[B]

That's true. Of course, at the end of the day, we don't know how much is the hand of Xi Jinping, how much is it his writing group of people who may get two or three lines of instruction and off they go. And how much of it is actually formal party document which simply has his imprimatur later on.

[A]

I'm often not sure that matters. I have a belief that is not always shared in my profession that the things politicians say in public are much more important than the things they say in private.

[B]

You're absolutely right. Having been a political practitioner myself, you are very mindful as a political practitioner of the parameters you set for yourself for the future, for your party, for the future and for the country. As opposed to private ruminations over a beer.

[A]

Yeah. Politicians will tell you all kinds of things. They shade to the audience in private, they muse when they say things in public. It is a steadier signal of where they're actually going to go. And we treat it the opposite. We in my profession, we love the off the record comment. We love what is said over a beer. We think that is a guide to the truth. And it's often, I think, a way in which we badly get the future wrong. If I understood the Republican Party from what Republican members of Congress told me privately over the course of the Trump era, I would have predicted it completely wrongly. Whereas if you take seriously what they do in public and their speeches, you get a fairly good sense of where it's going. Which is all to say, what is the ideology of Xi Jinping that emerges out of these documents? You've described it as Marxist Leninist nationalism, a turn to the Marxist left. For an American audience who's not that familiar with these terms we've been banding around. What's your synthesis of it?

[B]

Let me answer it at two levels. The first is I've read enough of Xi Jinping to conclude that he is a convinced Marxist dialectician. What do I mean by that? Because it's not a term that we bandy around at Starbucks much here in New York. But it's important we understand how the other person thinks. But more importantly, their methodology, their epistemology, the way in which they reach conclusions about that which is real and that which is not, that which is true and that which is false. But when a dialectician, it sounds like A horrible word comes from Hegel, the German philosopher adopted by Marx and Engels. And it is essentially a view of history that there are two fundamental sets of forces changing historical developments over time. One's called dialectical materialism, and the second is called historical materialism. So what the hell is that? That dialectical materialism is a worldview by Marxists which says that change in society, the economy and politics, occurs between this constant push between progressive forces and reactionary forces, which they ultimately describe as the forces of the working class versus the capitalist class. And ultimately one pushes hard against the other, overturns the other, and creates a new synthesis, which ultimately is a communist state. And so that's dialectical materialism. And the Chinese Communist Party says basically

[A]

the inevitable historical engine that pushes through the capital state to communism.

[B]

That's true. And through the agency of what they call class struggle or just struggle. By the way, one of the things that Xi Jinping has rehabilitated as a term in China's political discourse today is struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle. A term which largely disappeared during the Deng, Zhang and Hu period. So bear with me for a moment. This is turgid stuff, and I apologize to your listeners.

[A]

This is a safe space for turgidity.

[B]

This is seriously.

[A]

They know what to expect.

[B]

This is seriously turgid, and I've had to read this stuff, and I wouldn't recommend it to any of you unless you're suffering from deep insomnia, and I can give you the relevant chapters of my book which will send you off to sleep. But historical materialism is the parallel discipline which asks Marxist historians this question. Where are we in this current historical moment, in the evolution of this inexorable struggle between progressive and reactionary forces, between working class and the capitalist class, between working class nation states and capitalist nation states in producing this final resolution through struggle of an evolution towards a socialist and communist society? Where they say through historical materialism China has reached, is that they are now moving out of what they call the primitive stage or the primary stage of socialism into something higher than that. And that the role of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi's leadership is to further accelerate that change. Change, and applied to the nation state, not just China's society and economic experiment. Domestically, when they talk about changes not seen in 100 years, a favorite phrase of Xi Jinping, when they talk about the rise of the east and the decline of the west, these are all euphemisms for an historically materialist view that China's time has come in this inexorable process of dialectical change to emerge on top. So the reason I say all that is that it may sound like gobbledygook to you and me, and I don't really subscribe to any of it, but we would be wrong to conclude that this is not the analytical mechanism used in the central organs of the ccp, the Chinese Communist Party, to understand where China is today and where the rest of the world is today. Well, I.

[A]

Let me try to build that empathic bridge, I think, to most of us in the US Even the socialists in the US are sometimes they pretend to be Marxists. I've met relatively few who truly believe in dialectical materialism or historical materialism. And I think if you're here and you're trained in the way we see our society, the way we do our thinking, the idea that history is linear in that way, teleological in that way, that there are forces playing out that fairly inevitably are moving towards a certain end state, I actually find this the hardest thing to believe, that other people believe. Right. This is the belief. I can imagine why you believe a communist state is better or a social state is better, but the belief that it is driving in that way, that history has a direction is, I think often the hardest part of the pill to swallow. But as I understand what you're saying is that Xi Jinping and the Communist Party do believe that history has a shape and that that shape is very important to the way they understand their role and structure their governance and direct their society. Is that fair?

[B]

That is a fair summary. Remember this, shall we say, teleological trajectory of which you spoke just before has not historically been unique to Marxism, Leninism. There's been Judeo Christian variants of this at various times in history, moving towards an ultimate telos, which is the realization of the kingdom of heaven on earth, et cetera. I'm a bit like you. I'm somewhat skeptical about both these propositions. But when you describe and said just before this is the way they think, that history has its own force, that it is moving and you can make it move more rapidly through the agency of a Leninist party, that is precisely what they think and would be analytically derelict if we didn't not explain that to others as saying this underpins their ultimate analysis of where the rest of us fit in the world and where they think they are taking China today. They call it scientific socialism.

[A]

But there's the other dimension that it is also, for Xi Jinping, specifically Chinese. And so attached to this theory of this communist theory of History, this Marxist theory of history is also a theory of China's history and its role in history. So how does Xi's nationalism, his story of China and its role in the world, play into this?

[B]

I argue in the book that simultaneously to these shifts to the Marxist and Leninist left, there's been a shift to the nationalist right, by which I mean a permanent and growing appeal to China's own inherent nationalism, anchored in its civilizational achievements in the past, anchored in we've been badly done by the rest of the world during the hundred years of foreign humiliation, from the Opium wars through the end of the war with Japan in 1945. And now we're on this trajectory to make China once again a global great power and the global superpower. And be proud about that. Be super proud about that. So you have this turbocharge of history in the nation, the nation now being the vessel or the vehicle through which this great ideological enterprise of Marxism, Leninism is therefore realized into the future and will become the vehicle through which that is then taken into the world.

[A]

It has been much longer than I would like it to have been since I've been in China. My hope is to go back sometime the next year or two. But when I was there, it was 2010, 2011, and the most common thing that members of the party and members of the private sector said to me was that China was not going to be stable beneath something like 8% growth. The way they described China to me was almost as a transaction between the party and the public. And the public support for the party was dependent on this roaring growth rate. And then I watched over time as that growth rate began to fall, and then under Xi, as the growth rate began to be deprioritized, as he began to do things that were clearly about control ideology, and we're sacrificing that level of prosperity. And I've wondered how much has been a turn from this growth above all, to nationalism as the new way you hold the country together. I mean, everybody seemed obsessed to me with the question of how do you hold together a country as big as China? How do you keep it to the point she made about when China's great, how do you keep it unified? Is that accurate? I have always found this puzzling because it seemed to happen very fast, this thing everybody was talking about to, oh, we're just going to experiment with actually letting the economy be much weaker than that and doing so fairly successfully.

[B]

I think Xi's response to the dilemma of national control is at two or three levels One, his first impulse is always ideological. Remember the analogy with the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, we just need to get these kids to read more Xi Jinping thought and that'll brighten up their day in my view. Not an enormous recipe for success. But that's his first impulse. Double down on ideology and double down on ideological propaganda. And there's the whole view that they can produce a whole new generation of what they call little pinks, that is little reds, Xiao Fenghong who will capture this vision and transcend them into the future. The second response to the challenges of national control, political control during a period of sliding growth is simply the surveillance state. The so called white card movement was a protest movement where people didn't hold up protest signs, they just held up blank white cards. Well, those people all tracked down through surveillance systems, their phone locations, et cetera, and whisked away. And so understand that the surveillance state, through iris recognition, gate recognition, facial recognition, the monitoring of all your payments, which are all done electronically, means that frankly the tools available to the surveillance state today, stuff that Mao and Stalin would have dreamed of way back when. So that's number two. Number three goes to the core of the economic dilemma which the party faces at present effectively through a series of central economic policy decisions. What Xi Jinping has said and what they are now doing is placing an absolute priority on, let's call it the supply side of the economy rather than the private demand side of the economy as the growth vehicle. And the supply side of the economy is manufacturing its industry, it's high technology. It's ensuring that we have complete control over our own supply chains and that we progressively control the supply chains of the world. That's what we're doing because against a future national security crisis over Taiwan, we will not allow our country to be vulnerable to external pressure. And that's what they're doing that is therefore sacrificing the normal evolution of private domestic consumption as the driver of growth. And if you look at China's domestic savings rate, which remains high, the private domestic consumption rate which remains low relative to where they would normally be as a low middle income country. There is a direct trade off here. So we are likely to see continued lower growth in pursuit of these national economic, industrial policy, national security objectives in the economy with this trade off. But the problem is lower levels of employment, higher levels of youth unemployment, and people frankly becoming increasingly disenchanted.

[A]

I want to zoom in on youth protest movements like the white cards. You also have the, the sort of people just laying down right there's the sort of quiet quitting, so to speak, lying flat. Lying flat. It's hard to know from the outside how meaningful things like this are. But typically when you begin to think about a society with sustained levels of youth unemployment, you imagine a certain ferment to that, a certain space of dissatisfaction. Now there's a lot of surveillance, a very, very powerful central party, but it's also a party that does have to respond at some level to a public if it is disenchanted. So what is the theory of this? Does the Chinese Communist Party see this as a problem, just see it as a discontent to be managed?

[B]

They see it as a problem, but in Xi Jinping's calculus, they see it as the lesser problem against the greater problem, which is national economic self reliance and national economic dominance in the driving technologies of the future. What they call in the party's discourse the new productive forces, which is essentially AI quantum and everything else. If you want evidence of this, just look at China's Made in China 2025 strategy, which is the largest, largest scale exercise in any nation's industrial policy seen in economic history. So what's their theory of the case? This massive investment in industry and in leading edge technologies will ultimately produce a new wave of productivity in the economy, which will create a new wave of wealth, including in the related services sectors. But this will take a while to wash through. In the meantime, maintain surveillance and do a certain amount to keep the economy and growth as stable as possible. For example, the property sector has been the one in which most Chinese citizens have had their savings over the last 20 years. Over the last five years, the property market has collapsed through the floor through a series of policy and political interventions by Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping, rather than allowing the property sector to collapse completely, decided as of about 2024 to put a floor under it to rescue some of the property development firms and also to ensure that people were not going to lose anything and everything. So there's an awareness that you can't just allow private consumption to be destroyed completely. You can't allow that. But has that dissipated his fundamental ideological resolve to build this all powerful Chinese industrial state which controls supply chains at home and abroad? Nah, hasn't compromised that one bit. The bottom line is Xi Jinping's response to a very disgruntled body politic was what you need to do is to learn how to, which is eat bitterness. That's what we've done throughout the most difficult periods of party history. Of course, if you've got a Formidable, all seeing, all dancing surveillance system across the country run by the security intelligence authorities. You can say eat bitterness with some effect because the system will be out there to round you up if you don't do so accordingly and with a smile on your face.

[A]

Well, let's talk about the way he's building that industrial juggernaut. Because. Because there was a way of looking at Xi Jinping's economic policy a few years ago which made it seem like he was in many ways decapitating the productive factors of the Chinese economy. This is maybe a good place to talk about Jack Ma and Alibaba, which was the Chinese national champion, globally competitive, until Ma was seen as getting too big for his britches. And then something happened. I mean, what happened to Jack Ma?

[B]

Well, Jack was always larger than life. And I've known Jack quite a lot over the years in one form or another. If you ever listen to Jack's English, you'll notice an Australian twang. It's not from me, but as a young person, he went off to Australia to learn some English. So we're responsible for Jack's version of the English language. But the bottom line is this, Jack became adulated across China as the symbol of this new entrepreneurial class. That is this poor boy from nowhere could build up this extraordinary firm to become world leading. But in the party's view, and in Xi Jinping's view, he became bigger than the party. Party where all this came to a head was a number of years ago at what's called the Bund Conference in Shanghai, which is an annual conference. Jack decided to publicly attack the party's financial management policies and how constricting it was on new forms of innovation in the Chinese financial services sector, where ANT Financial, one of Jack's subsidiaries, would be a major participant. Xi Jinping just cracked right down, and not just on him, but what was then called the collectivity of the platform companies. And that included others, including Tencent and a number of other firms. And then there began a series of, quote, anti monopoly or antitrust moves against the size which these companies had reached. And then that spilled over into a broader campaign against, shall we say, the excessive display of private wealth, private influence, ostentation, and the private sector writ large. And that led to a further campaign to implant party secretaries in each of these private firms. And to say to these private firms, by the way, we think it's a good idea under a mixed economy model that the state begins to take equity in your companies. So needless to say, this didn't lead to a set of happy campers amongst the Chinese private sector. And as a result of that you began to see not only this trend that I referred to before, which is static or declining figures for private domestic consumption consumers driving the future of growth, but private fixed capital investment also began to slide as well. Both these things created a dilemma for the party's overall growth discipline. You correctly said before the unofficial social contract used to be 8% growth. It then became 6% growth. Hey, 4% would be okay, but it was beginning to slide south of that. So they've tried to stabilize both these things since about 2024. You may remember this high level meeting in early 25 when Jack was finally brought in from the cold together with other.

[A]

He had sort of been disappeared for a while.

[B]

Yeah, you didn't see him anymore. Yeah, he'd been actively studying texts and I'm sure that included Xi Jinping thought I'm not quite sure. But you know, he wasn't arrested but he was not exactly completely free to move either. So there's been an effort to bring these folks back into the circle. And also because even under Xi Jinping's industrial policy with cutting edge new technologies led by artificial intelligence being at the forefront and Xi Jinping realizes that guess what? State owned enterprises can't do all of this. In fact most of the juice lies within the Chinese private sector. We'd better re embrace them. So there's been an attempt to correct but we should not lose sight of the fact that the fundamental, shall I say, move to the Marxist left, move to industrial policy uber alles, move to the China controlling global supply chains, national party states view of the world is still predominant. It is these other two corrections for consumers and for private entrepreneurs have been more at the margins.

[A]

Well, let me speak from what I think to be the American perception of China and how it's changed in this, let's call it five year period since post Covid and there was a period when Jack Ma was suddenly gone and you could see she cracking down on a bunch of these companies where many people in the US I think had the view and zero Covid was considered to have gone on way too long had been something of a disaster that we are finally seeing the thing that had been long predicted which is countries with that strong of a centralized government called authoritarian, called communist, however you want to frame it that eventually they begin to break because the leader can make bad decisions and eventually will paranoid decisions, power consolidating decisions. And that you saw China's growth rate going down and that maybe this period of Chinese rise was coming to an end. This was very much as the Biden people left off, as how they felt things were. And then I would say over the last two years that shifted again. This is my perception of the Zeitgeist to a sense now that, that China's industrial juggernaut has jumped a series of levels such that it is no longer just copying America, but it can now do things America, to say nothing of the Europeans or others, cannot do. It is nearly level with us in AI, but much more able to build some of the underlying infrastructure of AI, like energy. But its ability to produce electric vehicles, its ability to produce functionality, anything, because of its manufacturing ecosystems is now actually beyond where we are. And so it was wrong, this sense a few years ago that the Chinese model is beginning to break down. And in fact, whatever its problems, it has developed perhaps not economic prosperity, but economic power that is very, very real. In some ways all these stories seem true to me. And I'm curious how you think about that kind of whiplash that has been happening in the American story of the Chinese economy and its power.

[B]

Well, I think, Ezra, you're right to describe that evolution of American perceptions. And American perceptions are not entirely detached from the underpinning Chinese economic reality. Sometimes I worry, though, in this country where I've lived among you now for the better part of 10 years, sometimes hope becomes a substitute for analysis and strategy. In this country that Americans, or at least those in administrations of one hue or another, look at Chinese demography, they look at the slowing of growth and they say, yeah, we told you so, problem fixed, and we move on. It ain't fixed. China is formidable, and particularly under a leader like Xi Jinping, it's doubly formidable. And given his surveillance apparatus, it's trebly formidable. I think in terms of the periods you're talking about, yes, post Covid growth slowed, but underpinning it all was always this continued red thread of Xi Jinping's core organizing principle, which is, I'm building the world's most powerful industrial state and I'm not going to let any bunch of private entrepreneurs, all consumers, get in the road of that I'm just going to do it. That was made in China 2025. The 10 technology objectives he set for himself in 2015. If you look at the double down in the current 15th Five Year Plan announced in only these are technologies like semiconductors, EVs, aeronautics, EVs, batteries. If you look at the list of where they were in 2015, which was nowhere much. And where they were by 2025 and the end of last year, frankly, as an exercise in industrial policy alone. Whatever the economic inefficiency may have been in getting there, Xi Jinping regards that as a bit of loose change compared with obtaining the commanding heights of these new driving.

[A]

America is keeping Chinese electric vehicles out not because they're bad cars. It's because they're such good cars. And if they came in here at their cost, they would annihilate the American electric vehicle sector. I think this is a change, and people have not for so long. Our theory was they're copying us or stealing our intellectual property. Now we are quite afraid in some cases of their intellectual property.

[B]

I think this has been a big evolution in the reality. Does China engage in industrial espionage? Yes. Does China copy stuff which is obviously available through open patent? Of course. And they have the great advantage of scale. Scale. And they scale up. They scale up rapidly given the automatic leverage of their domestic market. But given their domestic market is still flat because of problems with disposable income, then deploying this surplus capacity, this surplus production on global markets is their next best step. And since America has erected the tariff wall, all roads lead to Europe, which is why you see such huge reaction now from European political leaders. That's what's unfolding. And it's all of those things everywhere at once and at a pace of knots, like this thing is happening at speed now. Is it sustainable for China itself? Ultimately, there is a problem of finance, and we need to think this through. How does China finance this level of industrial subsidy? For them, in their calculus, this is a temporary exercise. That is, we will, through our level of industrial subsidy, ultimately destroy the world's competition and opposition. Those will fold. Then we can restore prices at a level which makes sense for us in terms of the cost of production domestically. But by then, the alternative sources of production have gone. This is a very elaborately thought through strategy on the part of the Chinese. And so far, to give them credit, it has worked remarkably well. But they cannot sustain it indefinitely. They're currently borrowing from Chinese consumers and their personal savings in banks to keep this whole thing afloat. But industrial subsidy, which is of an order of magnitude not seen in economic history before, cannot be sustained forever.

[A]

So I want to slow this part down because I think it's really important. You were saying earlier, where you describe the problem, the Americans just hope the problem is solved. And what is the problem? How does one define the problem? And we're not always very clear about that. But I think it's something quite close to this that the challenge China poses to the rest of the world is it is able to suppress domestic prosperity, take money from its own people, keep their wages down, in order to put it into these industries to attain scale, which would functionally make it impossible for other countries to compete in these industries because they will just be too far behind and the Chinese goods will be too much cheaper. I mean, that is the theory in part of the tariffs you saw come out in the Biden administration and obviously even more in the Trump administration, which is if China is going to make its products artificially cheap, we are going to make them artificially expensive. From that perspective, is that a wise strategy?

[B]

It is a perfectly logical response to the challenge which China's industrial policy, which exists on the basis of massive industrial subsidies, poses. The alternative is you simply allow the Chinese industrial juggernaut to dominate every single industrial and sub industrial sector. We've already seen that in terms of critical minerals and rare earths, both raw and processed. If you want a case study of what that looks like in practice, look at that sector.

[A]

Not only did they dominate that, they were so dominant in it that they were able to break break Trump's tariff policy, break his trade war by simply threatening to remove our access to their rare earths and magnets and so on. They had leverage over us that we did not have over them.

[B]

The Chinese are highly intelligent, highly disciplined, masters of economic statecraft, and they know where leverage lies. And because their political culture is dominated by a culture of engineers, they understand precisely, instinctively. Before you get an elaborate dumbed down briefing to your average western cabinet about where they stand against the periodic table of critical minerals and rare earths, how many they've got both on the extraction side and the processing side and where they therefore will end up to by year X in their ability to, shall we say, exercise leverage elsewhere.

[C]

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[A]

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[A]

So I think I want to flip the question of what Xi Jinping believes for men. Minute we've been talking about what he believes about China, what does he believe about the United States of America and about Donald Trump?

[B]

He hasn't told me. So again, we're into the realm of speculation here. But his view of America. Let me start with that and then we'll move on to the President. His view of America is that it's the only country in the world world potentially standing in the way of his national political and economic and geopolitical ambition. Why? Simply because of your scale. And secondly, for 100 years, you guys have represented, since the early days of Dewey, liberalism, an alternative script for how you construct the politics of a country. And so when Xi Jinping looks at America, he looks at it through these two lenses. You represent this massive alternative ideational force, the attraction to the idea that still causes many successful Chinese to go and live in the United States and the rest of the collective West. Because freedom is not a hackneyed phrase, particularly if you've lived in a country where there is none, but at the level of raw national power, the power of the US Military, the power of Indo Pacific Command, the power of what you have in cyber and space and your nuclear forces, and the power of American innovation reflected through Silicon Valley cubed. He looks at that and says, that's the only thing that can get in my road. And that's why America occupies this unique position, whether you're run by Republicans or whether you're run by Democrats.

[A]

We've talked about how Xi Jinping has a dialectical historical view of China's rise and communism's rise. Does that extend to a similarly inevitableist view of American decline? Does the Chinese Communist Party, does its sort of mainstream of thought believe America to be in a kind of structural decline?

[B]

They do have this belief, and it's expressed in two different ways. There is a Chinese concept of what they call comprehensive national power. It's a standard analytical framework for aggregate American power v. Aggregate Chinese power against all indices of power. They look at the size of the US military, the size of allied militaries, the size of their own military, and they make their own calculus. They also make calculus about the solidity of, shall we say, U.S. alliances abroad. And when those are under pressure or when they're beginning to fracture, they also look at the solidity of the US domestic body politic and the degree of unity and disunity against, shall we say, the predetermined unity of the Chinese unitary state. Interestingly, they stopped publishing this stuff for the rest of the world to see what their conclusions were about 12 years ago, I think, because the results were beginning to look increasingly indicative, that China was really rising rather rapidly. The second is in a propagandistic phrase, which is in Chinese, it's dongsheng xi jiang, which is the rise of the east and the decline of the West. And in Chinese political parlance, that's a euphemism for China and the United States. If there's a third phrase, it's probably Xi Jinping's oft used phrase, including during the summit with President Trump most recently. The world is now experiencing changes not seen in a hundred years. He first began using that phrase in 2017, on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. And the internal interpretation of the phrase is that we, the Chinese, now with our own revolution, now going out into the world at large, represent as seminal shaking an event of the certainties and certitudes of global politics today as the Bolshevik Revolution portended back in 1917.

[A]

And so then there's, I guess, two things here. One is that in the time Xi Jinping has been leader, American policy towards China, American political elite thinking towards China has changed dramatically. It's become far more antagonistic. The sense that China would become more liberal and democratic as it became richer has dissolved. The sense that we allowed China to take advantage of us has become a bipartisan theory, and that we are locked in a great competition with them, possibly a Thucydides trap leading to war has become fairly widely believed and certainly widely prepared for. And of course, American politics itself has changed, you know, falling into this period of. Of Trumpism and much more internal division. I mean, you wrote a book called the Avoidable War that was at least partly about this. What is their narrative of us in this era?

[B]

They saw a sea change just under 10 years ago during the first Trump administration, when the official American strategy towards China changed from strategic engagement to strategic competition. H.R. mcMaster, then Trump's national security advisor, wrote that in the National Security Strategy, I think December of 2017. And that wasn't just a piece of language. You could almost hear the creaking of the entire machinery of the US State across all agencies of power.

[A]

Before that, Obama talked about his pivot to Asia.

[B]

That's true. But he did not have an organizing principle, which is that we are in a competitive relationship with China about which country becomes the dominant power in the Indo Pacific and in the world world. So that's the big change that dominated second half of Trump's term. First term dominated really Biden administration and then through until the most recently convened summit in Beijing, where we now have a different organizing principle announced for the first time, this time by the Chinese, called constructive strategic stability. And the White House briefing paper, which came back at the conclusion of the visit, said, yeah, that's the framework we accept, so long as it's fair and reciprocal. So what does that mean if you decode it? I think what the Chinese are seeking to do is to cause the United States to be more stable, less unpredictable and less antagonistic going forward. What is it going to mean in practice? I don't know. One of the advantages may be the two sides begin to have an active and substantive negotiation on the regulation of the most dangerous and destabilizing forms of artificial intelligence, which is what came out of Scott Besant's conversations with his counterpart, He Li Fung, for the rest of the relationship. Beyond AI governance, I'm not sure yet

[A]

I find policy towards China, the US orientation to China to be one of maybe the most major area of US policy where my own thoughts are most unsettled. There's one story that I think has become a more popular story, and I think you could extract it out of at least part of our conversation, which is to say Xi Jinping and the CCP under him are highly ideological organizations and individuals bent on eventually attaining Chinese supremacy, particularly economically and industrially. And you need to understand the relationship as having a competition and an antagonism at its heart. You can manage that better and worse, you can manage it more erratically or more systematically. The Biden administration, I think, was trying to do it very systematically, build up American industries, impose very targeted tariffs, boundary certain kinds of technologies. The Trump administration, I think, has managed it more erratically. But fundamentally, openness towards China in this telling is very dangerous. You don't want their technologies here, you don't want their industries with too much penetration here, and you are trying to compete with them, not learn from them. So another argument that in partly for me, I get nervous whenever anything becomes too bipartisan in Washington that says this is a mistake. You actually need to learn right now from things like Chinese CV manufacturers, you Want technology exchanges, you want to understand their manufacturing systems. You don't want to make antagonism self fulfilling. You don't want to create a lot of room for misinterpretation. There are advantages economically and otherwise that the openness creates. That the shift towards seeing it as fundamentally opposed is actually missing a lot of positive sum opportunities in trade innovation. If China, they have a lot of actually really interesting bio research coming out. If they invent new medications, that's wonderful for us. Where do you fall on this spectrum?

[B]

The third way. And let me explain what I mean by that one. As I've said before, don't mistake the fundamentals here, which is that Xi Jinping and the party he leads is Leninist and they have a very clear eyed view of where they wish to be at home and abroad. And at home and abroad. It's for China to become a fully developed economy. Economy and abroad for China to be the most powerful state in the Indo Pacific region and in the world and to surpass the United States. So let's just be clear about that. It's an unemotional, clear headed, realist but ideologically driven view of the world. What I've argued for a long period of time, and I think there are levels of agreement and disagreement with this approach, is what I call managed strategic competition. Accept the reality of the competition and manage it. It's far better than unmanaged strategic competition which can end in crisis, conflict and war. What do I mean by that? Three points really. A accept the fact that there are fundamental strategic red lines which they can't cross and we can't cross and that managing those red lines, particularly over the question of Taiwan, the South China Sea and the East China Sea is the meat and potatoes of sustained deterrence and that actually creates the strategic stability for the rest of the management of the relationship to ensue. The second element of strategic managed strategic competition is for the economy writ large, whether it's trade, investment, capital markets, currency markets, technology markets, talent markets, ideas markets, the ideation of the future, the liberal international rules based order or one headquartered in Beijing. Make this a full and open competition and may the best system win. The third component of managed strategic competition is those areas which we define as in our mutual interest to cooperate on future of AI governance, preventing the next global pandemic. Given how much we all screwed up on the last one, particularly the Chinese, the future of other forms of global public health like cancer research and biotech and these are quite rich areas for collaboration and my view is we can walk and chew gum at the same time in these three different domains, while recognizing that we're not ultimately engaged with those organizing a Sunday school picnic.

[A]

Well, that brings up, I think, Taiwan, which is something we should talk at least a little bit about before we end. What I hear in your strategic managed competition framework is a. The orientation towards clarity. Where do we compete, where do we cooperate? Taiwan. The fundamental nature of that is ambiguity. America has a studied, ambiguous description of what Taiwan is and what is going on with it, and even what our policy towards it may be. We don't really know what. We know what Xi Jinping wants, which is ultimately unification and control of Taiwan, but we don't know what he will do to get it or when. That's the one where I hear the most constant concern, because neither side, I think, really understands the other. So I guess how do you think about where the Chinese are on Taiwan and then how do you think about the overall framework for managing that strategic competition appropriately?

[B]

Really, Ezra, this is a really important element of our overall conversation because it's the most time relevant in terms of problems which could arise before you and I look much grayer. I look much grayer than you, by the way. My hair turned white because of the global financial crisis. I was in office at the time. It might fall out if we have a Taiwan crisis. So where's Chinese thinking up to on Taiwan? Xi Jinping has made it clear that he wants Taiwanese. A reunification with Taiwan before the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic, and that's in 2049. That sounds like an eternity away. It's now 23 years away, so that's not exactly an eternity. Secondly, his policy towards Taiwan is increasingly hard and sharp.

[A]

Give me an example of what you mean by that. What is he actually saying?

[B]

He is saying that on the question of Taiwan and his most recent engagements with President Trump in Beijing, that unless this is handled prudently, this is a very dangerous issue which could result in collision and conflict. He hasn't used those formulations before. So these are not just, I'm shooting the breeze with my best pal Don, and this is what I felt like this morning after I'd had my waffle.

[A]

And he's not like Trump, he speaks very carefully.

[B]

Yeah, because he's a Leninist and, you know, words are bullets for these guys and they often result in bullets. And then thirdly, what do we see? The increasingly the patterns of Chinese military exercises in relation to the Taiwan strike rates move from just being, shall we say, abstract exercises of China's military preparedness against, for example, a Taiwanese unilateral declaration of independence, which is, I think, a 0.0% possibility to exercises which increasingly resemble rehearsals for either taking a Taiwanese offshore island, imposing a blockade or a full scale invasion.

[A]

At the moment, don't we have satellite imagery of very precise replicas of various Taiwanese buildings for military exercises?

[B]

Well, because I'm still, shall I say, subject to various national security requirements, given my most recent job. You can speculate on that. I couldn't possibly comment.

[A]

I'm just saying we've come across reporting on that.

[B]

That's good. I'm glad that you've so reflected. Anyway, we've moved from abstraction to reality. We've moved from ahistoric time to historic time. And she'. Calculus. He's now 73 years old. He's up for reappointment at the end of next year. He probably has a couple of terms in him yet. But he's also, as a good Marxist Leninist, looking to where the dialectical forces take him in terms of unique periods of opportunity. Does he perceive 2028 as a unique period of opportunity? I don't know. But I do notice a sharp happening in his levels of preparedness.

[A]

Something you said at the beginning of this conversation is his view is that you want China unified and its enemies divided. And say what you will about Trump, whatever you believe about him, this is, and he is divisive time and force in American life. 2028 is going to be presidential election year. There is going to be not a lot of appetite among the American people for foreign adventurism, particularly after the Iran war proved something of a disaster. There's not a high level of commitment to Taiwan in America. It's not a place we think about. And I'm not saying that Xi Jinping is going to choose to invade Taiwan at that moment, but he and the Chinese Communist Party see America is in a kind of political and even terminal decline. Your historical materialism. And so I wonder how he sees this. And this is a sort of moment of opportunity.

[B]

Yeah. I'm worried very much that Xi Jinping could miscalculate in 2028. Why do I say 2028, by the way, and not 2027 or 2026, is that the Taiwanese have their own presidential elections in January of 28. And if the existing Democratic Progress Party, which is anathema to Xi Jinping, gets re elected, it'll be for its fourth term and it has run consistently on a, shall we say, independence leaning platform, will they get reelected in January 28th? I don't know, but I think it's a 5050 possibility. Does this therefore become a trigger for Xi Jinping to say enough is enough? Open question. Given he would just been reappointed as General Secretary of the party the previous October November, he's aware that 2028 is and presidential election year here in the United States. What do I fear? A miscalculation by Xi Jinping about the level of American resolve. Do they, the Chinese conclude post Iran for example, that the likelihood of any American leadership to deploy forces in the event of a Taiwan crisis would be reduced as a result of the Iran experience. And then there's the more mechanical question, the extent to which the American arsenal depth magazine depth capability set has been impaired as a result of Iran. My concern as an analyst is could he arrive at a conclusion through a bout of excessive self confidence that a unique opportunity has arisen? The danger is that he actually miscalculates. To act against Taiwan would be to cause President Trump to look weak. And the one thing I've observed about President Trump in the last several years I've been in Washington, the last thing President Trump likes is to look weak. So I think we are in potentially dangerous territory.

[A]

One question that I hear from Americans is well, why should we care about Taiwan? Why is this our problem? When you say what if they miscalculate American political will, they might calculate it correctly. There is an American elite commitment to Taiwan. Do swing voters in Ohio care about Taiwan? Does the American public in general care about Taiwan? And so what is your actual answer to that? Why is the answer to Taiwan being a flashpoint actually to say maybe it shouldn't be, maybe it's not America's problem.

[B]

I think the reason why you've had such buy in to deterrence over Taiwan is not because of some feel good American emotional commitment to those nice folks over there. It's actually much more hard headed than you would give credit to. Number one, it was the Congress that framed the Taiwan Relations act back in 1979 at the time of diplomatic recognition of the mainland, which is a de facto form of security guarantee for the Taiwanese. And that's an act of your Congress. And therefore if you go to the congressional leadership, Democrat and Republican, they have seen themselves the long term custodians of that set of arrangements. But the second is this. Let's hypothetically assume, Ezra, that Xi Jinping walks into Taiwan tomorrow, decapitates the leadership. It's gone. It's now become China's province, fully fledged Red flag goes up over the presidential building in downtown Taipei and the first party secretary arrives to take over the administration of the province and the suppression of the locals, having there having been much bloodshed in the process. I think at that point, what Americans need to consider is what happens to the rest of the world's perception and conclusion about US Strategic reliability worldwide. At that point, it becomes very much the point at which the notion of Pax Americana goes disappears in the collective consciousness of allies around the world. The Japanese, for example, may then conclude it's a time for them to go nuclear. If they go nuclear, the Koreans will conclude, well, if the Japanese are going nuclear, we'll be going nuclear. In other words, the whole dynamic of this region changes. And the third thing for Americans to consider is, is it the conclusion here in the United States that China, already having assembled the world's largest surface fleet, for example, having taken Taiwan, that it's time then to deliver to the Chinese people a grand peace dividend, will then reduce the size of the Chinese military by 2/3 because we've achieved our historical mission and will all therefore have better Social Security payments as a result? Unlikely, because Xi Jinping's made plain that China's power projection should be pan regional beyond the Taiwan Straits and because of existing behaviors, increasingly global. Then I think there's this final point, which is, if you guys still see yourselves as the light on the hill, if you do, are you indifferent to places which have, of their own volition, evolved into democracies and to open societies and to open economies around the world, like the 23 million people on Taiwan? And if you're indifferent to that, what does it say about your indifference to freedom worldwide? I think those are active considerations for or the American body politic. But as a barbarian living in your midst, far be it for me to tell you what's right or wrong.

[A]

And so then, what is a wise policy behind those considerations?

[B]

The wise policy is in fact the least expensive and most effective sustained deterrence. If you sustain deterrence, and we therefore sustain the status quo across the Taiwan Straits, as Deng Xiaoping once said said, we kick the ball down the road for future generations who will be much wiser than us to resolve this intractable

[A]

problem, I think that is a good place to end always. Our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?

[B]

Because we've been talking a little bit about China today, you'll be pleased to know, Ezra, I'm not recommending a text on dialectical materialism, but one I thought may be of interest given your line of questioning and perhaps those who are listening is so where did Xi Jinping come from? So there's a great book by Joseph Turigian, the Party's interests come first, the Life of Xi Zhongxin, Father of Xi Jinping. It's a great book and a great read. The second is Ian Johnson, the Souls of China, the Return of Religion After Mao. It's about what has occurred on the grounds and the grassroots with the rise of various forms of Taoism, Buddhism, Protestant Christianity and other forms of religious belief as a reaction to the uber materialism of, let's call it China's Ideological orthodoxy. And that is a great read. The third one's by another American author, Pope Leo xiv, or as we would call him in Australia, Pope Bob I, a guy from Chicago, and the encyclical on artificial intelligence, which I've been working my way through. It's a great read about the essential dignity of the human person and how AI uplifts that dignity or how it may impair that dignity.

[A]

Kevin Rudd, thank you very much.

[B]

Good to be with you, Ezra.

[C]

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