Kevin Rudd, On Xi Jinping. How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)
In On Xi Jinping, a work based upon his PhD research, Kevin Rudd has provided perhaps the most thorough account yet available of the rise to dominance in China of Xi Jinping’s ideological thinking. In brief, Rudd has documented in extraordinary detail Xi’s (‘leftist’) reinstatement of the primacy (over both market and state) of the Communist Party, which he shows Xi to have actively combined with an assertive (‘right’) nationalism. In both of these respects, Xi has broken with his immediate predecessors, who were more reliant upon the market as the dynamo of economic growth, and were content to assume for China a less prominent role in world affairs while building national strength. This break, however, is not so much a novelty as a return in a long and, it now seems, enduring cycle.
China’s political system has been taken back to the past, not only through Xi’s insistence on his own absolute primacy (‘the chairman of everything’, in Geremie Barmé’s apt characterisation, quoted by Rudd) but through his retrieval from retirement of slogans and strategies associated with the cult of personality of Mao Zedong, from the latter’s emergence as the absolute authority during the communist movement’s days in Yanan prior to taking state power up to and including the Cultural Revolution.
Rudd takes the reader through the various accretions to Xi’s basic concepts, as a new periodization of recent Chinese history is imposed (airbrushing communist disasters and slighting his immediate predecessors), as the ‘new development concept’ (entailing more prominence for state owned enterprise, less income inequality, more restraints upon entrepreneurs) is asserted, and as policies in almost all areas become progressively ‘securitized.’ Each new phase is encapsulated in certain ‘banner words’ that must permeate the media and all public commentary. By 2021 Xi Jinping thought is ‘the Marxism of contemporary China,’ a notion already implicit in Xi’s claim to have ‘thought’ (sixiang): in the past the most that was conceded to Deng Xiaoping was ‘theory,’ the term ‘thought’ being reserved solely for the ex cathedra pronouncements of Mao Zedong himself.
If there is any component which can be described as a significant innovation in this assemblage, according to Rudd, it is Xi’s open embrace of nationalism. China is an exemplar for the world, performing policy miracles that have led, in a favourite Xi phrase, to ‘changes not seen in a hundred years’ and have even established the Chinese Communist Party as a model that other nations should emulate. In the words of the Party’s authoritative ideological pronouncement of 2021: ‘confidence in one’s culture, which is a broader, deeper, and more fundamental form of self-confidence, is the most essential, profound, and enduring source of strength for the development of a country and a nation.’ It is in this context that Xi often refers to China’s great ‘national rejuvenation.’ Although, interestingly, Rudd does not argue this point, there are echoes, in Xi’s national project, of Mao’s earlier claims for China’s experience as a model for world revolution.
In the most empirically based, and arguably the most insightful part of the book, Rudd departs from his ideological brief to recount the reactions of various senior individuals with connections to the United Nations who describe the shift towards a much more diplomatically active China. Chinese nominees now fill many positions, and Chinese funding is steering the institution towards China-compatible goals. In the field of international peacekeeping, for example, China has loomed ever larger as a major player, but this has had the paradoxical result that this activity has become highly constrained and even counterproductive. As one former ambassador is reported to have stated, ‘They’re trying to bring non-interference to an interference enterprise.’ [p. 275]
Accordingly, there is even now ‘Xi Jinping thought on diplomacy.’ A pronouncement from current Foreign Minister Wang Yi states that Xi has provided ‘profound strategic thinking about changes of the world, of our times and of historical significance’ and therefore furnishes ‘overall guidance’ for the nation’s foreign affairs policy. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks on President Trump’s diplomatic acumen provide a striking current transnational parallel.
What is especially noteworthy, as Rudd argues, is how much of this ever more elaborate system is anticipated in ‘Document no. 9,’ an internal communique circulated in mid-2012 to Communist Party cadres but which only came to light through an adventitious leak the following year. In it Xi is already preeminent, receiving 25 mentions (more than Mao or any other leader) and being described as the Party’s ‘core’, ‘chief representative’ and source of the only and authoritative interpretation of the regime’s guiding theory. It postulates an unbridgeable gulf—Rudd characterises it as ‘Manichean’—between such western practices as constitutionalism, civil society, open media and free scientific inquiry, and the necessary primacy in China of the Communist Party in all spheres. This primacy is extended also to the market—generally characterised as ‘socialist market’—though it is only in this respect that Xi’s views in 2012 were more cautious and qualified than those of today.
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‘Kevin Rudd is uniquely well placed to answer the question of what Xi Jinping actually believes’, claims Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor to former US President George W. Bush, in his blurb for On Xi Jinping, adding that ‘he does so brilliantly.’ Rudd himself, for all his immense knowledge of Xi’s record, is more circumspect:
While it may be impossible for academic researchers to conclusively answer the ultimate question of “what does Xi himself actually believe”, it defies logic to dismiss the entire ideological edifice erected by him as little more than an exercise in calculated political cynicism. [p. 134]
Thus, in Rudd’s text, Xi’s ideological outpourings are, variously, exercises in ‘signalling,’ sometimes best seen as reflecting (and thus post facto) policy changes, but then again sometimes more general ‘guidance.’ Rudd does not quite present Xi Jinping thought as a unique driver of policy, but nevertheless maintains ‘we ignore [its role] at our peril.’ [p. 11]
Yet because Rudd never confronts the central issue of what is really behind all this verbiage, his book sidesteps the essential question, ‘what does its author think of it all?’ To answer that question, of course, it is necessary to refer to factors beyond Xi’s own works and utterances, which Rudd is generally reluctant to do.
We know that Xi knows that his own ‘Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ is now the guiding standard for all policy in China, since it is described thus on eight occasions in the authoritative ideological statement of 2021. In one of the more fulsome accounts of Xi’s theoretical breakthroughs, former Foreign Minister and senior cadre Yang Jiechi has claimed that ‘Xi has mastered the laws of human development arising from human history.’ Again, according to the pronouncement of 2021:
Marxism has brought to light the laws governing the development of human society. It is a scientific truth for understanding and shaping the world. … Over the past century, the Party has rallied under the banner of Marxism, continued to adapt Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of our times, embraced all the outstanding achievements of human society with a broad-minded perspective, and used the sound theories derived from adapting Marxism to the Chinese context to guide its great endeavors. In China, Marxism has been fully tested as a scientific truth.
State Marxism has long presented itself as a unique scientific guide to the future, a future that would arrive by virtue of the fact that the laws of capital accumulation worked, in Marx’s own words, ‘with iron necessity towards inevitable results.’
Xi is therefore openly claiming the mantle of Marx (as well as those of Lenin and Stalin). He is also, of course, aligning his ‘thought’ with that of Mao, whose 1939 work ‘The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party’ asserted that only the Communists could see the nature of the historical revolution of their time and it was only their party, consequently, that could lead the country on the required march to socialism.
In Xi’s representation, ‘History’ is therefore appropriately capitalised, at once the source of the claim for the unique status of the Party and the validation of that claim, given that the existence and program of the Party are the outcome of immutable historical laws. It is no accident that Document no. 9 places a specific prohibition on what is characterised as ‘promoting historical nihilism,’ which is denying or disputing the Communist Party’s own account of its past experience and role. It is therefore remarkable, and a fact very well known to Xi and his supporters, that actual history (as opposed to the capitalised variant) is actively and continuously repressed, distorted and erased. In short, Xi’s capitalised ‘History’ with its ‘laws’ only possesses a tenuous connection with the record of actual events.
On the latter, one of the sins of the ‘historical nihilism’ of Document no. 9 is ‘to cleave apart the period that preceded Reform and Opening from the period that followed,’ in other words to accept what was decreed as the orthodoxy of the time. According to the then authoritative ‘Resolution on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China’ adopted at the 6th plenary meeting of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP in 1981, in the years after assuming power in 1949 Mao made major ‘mistakes’ from 1957 and after 1966 basically wasted the time and energies of his people entirely. History, even communist history, is a shifting entity.
Mao has since been at least partially exonerated. According to the view taken in 2021 the famine of 1959-61, the largest human-induced fatality of its kind in history, which claimed the lives of between 30 and 40 million people, is accounted for thus: ‘the [Party’s] correct line adopted at the Party’s Eighth National Congress [1956/58] was not fully upheld. Mistakes were made such as the Great Leap Forward and the people’s commune movement.’ Xi knows of this episode all too well as it prompted a great upheaval in the Communist Party including a serious attempt in 1959 to check Mao’s status, until then preeminent. Of even greater significance, it also led to the initiation of Mao’s strategy to recapture absolute dominance which finally issued in the Cultural Revolution, this episode now attributed to Mao’s ‘completely erroneous’ class analysis of the time.
On the Cultural Revolution itself, Xi again knows, this time from bitter personal experience, that it unleashed a reign of terror, anarchy and blood-letting which left deep wounds on the body politic. He was perhaps fortunate to escape with his life, but he saw his own parents (both senior cadres personally known to Mao) reviled and humiliated. He was denounced by his own mother, and his half-sister was either tortured to death by Red Guards or forced to commit suicide. Rudd adverts to how these episodes have been described, claimed or rejected, but has little to say of these events themselves.
If the claims advanced for Xi’s historical insights were credible to their author, then testing them against what is known or can be discovered about any given historical issue or problem would—if they were shown to be correct—further validate (or even enhance) their foundational status. Yet Xi knows perfectly well—because he is the instigator of the policy—that any work on any historical episode which disputes the official communist narrative is repressed or erased, and the author or authors thereof are threatened, hounded, or imprisoned and their materials confiscated or destroyed. A legion of internet warriors working for the state, aided by an immense cyber capability (the opportunity cost of which for China in talent and technology must be huge, which Xi must also know), spends an immense amount of time on performing these tasks.
This story of repression is well documented—the important recent work by Ian Johnson, Sparks (2023), considers some contemporary examples. Yang Jisheng, whose painstaking researches over many years documented the famine of 1959-61, was never able to publish his foundational work, Tombstone, in China – although as it is widely influential on informed opinion inside the country it has evidently been accessed surreptitiously.
In short, Xi knows that what he has to say about history is indisputable because none dare dispute it, and it is only repeated and glorified by his supporters since to do otherwise (as, again, Xi knows, since he is the ultimate superintendent of the policy) is dangerous for health, liberty, fortune and family. Yet reading Rudd’s account none of these questions are considered, though Rudd is undoubtedly much better informed on all of them than the current reviewer.
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In order to set Rudd’s account in its wider context, it is necessary to traverse other territory of which he is undoubtedly aware but has chosen not to visit. A favourite term in the Chinese Marxist lexicon is, as Rudd points out, ‘contradiction,’ a term given currency by Mao Zedong. Xi himself frequently refers to the chief ‘contradiction’ of the present age, which, he contends, is ‘the conflict between growing aspirations for a better life and the imbalances and inadequacies in development.’ There is however, a glaring contradiction in Xi’s Marxism about which he has nothing to say but which is clear to all who would pay even a moderate amount of attention to it (a task which Chinese without exception are obliged, in any case, to undertake, including now by logging time on their Xi Jinping phone app).
As far back as Document no. 9, constitutionalism, human rights, and an autonomous civil society, have all been rejected, because while their advocates claim they are based upon ‘universal values’ in reality they are ‘Western.’ As Document no. 9 maintains, ‘The goal of espousing “universal values” is to claim that the West’s value system defies time and space, transcends nation and class, and applies to all humanity.’
However, to point out that a given practice or belief has its origins in thinking about values from within a particular culture is not to provide grounds for rejecting it. In Xi’s own vision for China and the world, the doctrine of ‘a community of common destiny’ is a product of his own thinking and thus rooted in Chinese history and practice, yet is held to be applicable to all nations and cultures. Furthermore, the entire edifice of Xi Jinping thought is based on the ‘universal laws’ of dialectical materialism, a system of thought invented—mostly by Friederich Engels and Georgi Plekhanov—in the West.
Dialectical materialism may be the ostensible underlying philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party but if the answer to every question that it poses is ’Xi Jinping,’ then we could be excused for concluding that this outcome has been engineered in advance. The propositions of dialectical materialism are, in short, a series—to use the terminology of Karl Popper—of ‘ad hoc’ hypotheses. These are marshalled to ensure that the central ideological claim—in this case the primacy of Xi Jinping in all things—is unquestioned. It would be unsurprising, to say the least, if many Chinese had not come to the same conclusion, and that the same thought had not also occurred to the man himself.
And however much Xi and his colleagues have sought to distance themselves from ‘flawed’ Soviet experience, the party dynamic pioneered in Moscow has proved hard to escape. It is remarkable that Rudd offers no remarks about Stalin or his particular contribution to Marxist practice, despite Xi so clearly operating according to the Stalinist model. In the natural sciences, if one knew that an experiment was being undertaken which, the last time around (albeit under less than identical conditions) resulted in an explosion destroying the apparatus and taking lives, one would have a duty to point out this fact. Xi’s continuing purge in 2022-2024 of individuals hand-picked by himself (including a slew of very senior military officers) shows that his regime is behaving according to its Russian and Stalinist original. The members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Stalin’s ‘Congress of Victors’ of 1934—Stalinists almost all—only lasted until 1937 when they were decimated by the Great Purge. Xi’s Great Purge is currently in operation. The reasons for this strategy are well known. Purging loyalists keeps other loyalists on their toes. Meanwhile, as a true master of the historical laws cannot implement a wrong policy, ‘mistakes,’ ‘errors,’ or instances of ‘corruption’ must be the fault of subordinates, whose culpability must be exposed. Xi’s purge is Xi’s own knowing handiwork. Xi is as much indebted to Soviet (and thus ‘Western’) practice as to Soviet theory.
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Rudd’s book is dedicated to the memory of Pierre Ryckmans/Simon Leys, his teacher and a giant in the field. Ryckmans’ best known work—The Chairman’s New Clothes (1971/1977)—is aimed at Western scholars who took the Cultural Revolutionaries at their word. It was clear, argued Ryckmans, that Mao and his acolytes knew exactly what they were doing, however much it was dressed in progressive ideological language. They were destroying even the chance of any opposition ever appearing to Mao. Xi is using his ‘thought’ (and a lot else) to attain the same objective. Rudd surely knows this and why he chose not to take a leaf from Ryckmans’ book and plainly say as much is a puzzle. Indeed, Rudd strains all credibility with his comment on Xi’s attempt to achieve some form of sympathetic resonance between Marxism and China’s historical culture:
He seems blissfully unaware that communism, despite its relatively short footprint in the long history of the Middle Kingdom, has proved to be a more violently iconoclastic force in destroying traditional Chinese culture than almost any other foreign ideology or external political assault down through the ages. [p. 392]
Rudd’s book concludes that we will see even more variants upon the pattern of Xi Jinping thought now so indelibly established. However, a different conclusion suggests itself regarding one who has proclaimed himself successor to Stalin and Mao. Stalin, as the supreme arbiter and authority in every question in world communism, only remained as such for three years after his death. Mao, as the exclusive source of ideological correctness in China, survived in that role for five years beyond his demise, at which time he was then relegated to the status of a deeply flawed prophet. Xi is thus likely to have three to five years of posthumous pre-eminence, at the expiry of which time an indeterminate quantity of this verbiage will be swept away. And as a keen student of both he is likely, for all his mastery of the historical laws, also to know this. Australian policy makers should take note.
