Ideology Matters: My Review of Kevin Rudd's 'On Xi Jinping'

Welcome to Books and Ideas, a space dedicated to exploring thought-provoking concepts and writing. This section is designed as a platform for deeper dives into ideas that I encounter and engage with, whether they are China-specific or have broader significance.

This section is also a personal challenge and commitment. By curating and sharing my perspectives on books from various genres, I aim to push myself toward a more disciplined and diverse reading habit. Perhaps, it’s also a firewall against being numbed by the constant engagement with Chinese official discourse.

My immediate goal is to read and review two books a month. Over the years, I have found that writing detailed reviews allows me to retain the key insights. They also become useful when I’d want to refer to some specific aspects of the argument that someone has made in the past.

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Cheers,

Manoj Kewalramani

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Review of On Xi Jinping: How Xi's Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd

Over the past decade, policymakers, scholars, and analysts have been grappling with a particularly difficult puzzle amid China’s emergence as a global power. Could the trajectory of China’s rise have unfolded differently?

Were there alternate pathways that Xi Jinping could have taken to ensure that the country kept growing economically and accumulating international influence, while maintaining the Communist Party’s unrivalled control over political power and the military instrument? Furthermore, could such a path have minimised or even avoided the intensifying strategic competition with the United States—a competition that is likely to shape the future of the world order?

Addressing these questions require deep consideration of individual and systemic motivations, impulses and constraints. Are the sweeping changes in policies—from the centralisation of power, intensified Party-state intervention in the economy and society, and assertive foreign and security policies—the product of Xi’s ambition and ideological convictions? Or have they been a rational political response by a Leninist Party-state system to internal and external circumstances? This further leads to a deeper theoretical consideration: in a Leninist Party-state system, can one meaningfully distinguish between the leader and the structural logic of survival of the system? In other words, is Xi Jinping’s emergence as a dominant and transformative figure a product of his peculiarities or an inherent design flaw of the Marxist-Leninist Party-state system?

In his new book, On Xi Jinping How Xi's Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World, Kevin Rudd essentially contends that it is the man that matters today. Rudd’s argument is that China under Xi has witnessed the “unalloyed rebirth” of the “ideological man.” Xi, as per Rudd, is a “convicted Marxist-Leninist”, who is driving China’s politics and policy towards what he envisions is the goal of national rejuvenation. Understanding his ideological positions and prescriptions for China are, therefore, essential.

Or as Rudd, rather helpfully summarises: “Xi’s ideological worldview offers us a unifying ‘red thread’, providing a useful, albeit incomplete, illumination of the unfolding contours of Xi’s plans for China and the world.” Essentially, he argues that in China today, ideology is “a real barometer of much deeper change.” That it “represents a new and significant driving force, which we ignore at our peril.” “Understanding Xi’s ideational world a useful guide to understanding the ‘real world’ of politics and public policy” within Zhongnanhai.

Another reason why understanding ideological shift matters is because in the Chinese system, ideological messaging “sets the parameters within which a more granular, internal political and policy discourse can proceed.”

The ideological framework that Rudd ascribes to Xi is one of ‘Marxist-Leninist Nationalism’. He argues that in his approach, Xi has moved China to a Marxist and Leninist left along with a Nationalistic right. In particular, he describes Xi Jinping Thought as follows:

“It does not offer an alternative epistemology or methodology to that of classical Marxism-Leninism as interpreted through Mao Zedong’s principal works on historical and dialectical materialism, contradiction, and practice. Indeed, Xi explicitly affirms these previous approaches but is critical of the party for not having rigorously applied classical Marxist methodologies to the contradictions confronting it under his immediate predecessors. As noted previously, where XJPT does differ significantly from the past is in its periodization of recent Chinese history, its redefinition of the party’s principal contradiction, and its articulation of the party’s more detailed policy challenges arising in this new era. Beyond these three major changes, however, XJPT does not offer the party a new, free-standing ideological system. Rather, XJPT is highly elastic, building on the ideological inheritance of Mao and Deng, albeit with a decidedly stronger preference for the methodological approach and many of the conceptual conclusions of the former. And, as with Mao Zedong Thought, XJPT can be moulded to meet the party’s future political needs by legitimizing actions that Xi may need to take in response to as-yet-unknown policy pressures in the years that lie ahead.”

At this point, it is useful to unpack some of the key concepts that help one understand the argument. The author does in the early chapters:

Key Concepts:

• Ideology: Rudd defines it as “a systematic body of ideas that provides an organization with a defined unity of purpose, giving rise to a program of action, irrespective of whether those actions arise as a direct or indirect consequence of that body of ideas.”

• Worldview: When exploring the concept of worldview, Rudd engages in a discussion on the distinction between pure and practical ideology. This is because “a world view may give the individual a certain outlook, but it does not indicate to him how he should act. Therefore, he distinguishes pure ideology from practical ideology. “Pure ideology is a set of ideas designed to give the individual a unified and conscious world view; practical ideology is a set of ideas designed to give the individual rational instruments for action…of practical ideology have no legitimation. But without practical ideology, an organization cannot transform its Weltanschauung into consistent action.”

In his analysis, Rudd eventually brings these two concepts together:

“China’s ideological worldview should therefore be defined as the CCP’s analytical methodology for understanding the world both at home and abroad and its conclusions about the changing nature of the world they face, including the range of strategic threats and opportunities they identify as a result of this analysis. It also includes their view on how the Chinese party and state should respond to these changing circumstances through political and policy action.”

Let’s now turn to some of the other concepts from the book.

• The Leninist Party: Rudd defines a Leninist party “as a political organization that applies the disciplines of historical and dialectical materialism, the theory of contradiction, and the targeting of political struggle, on the one hand, to the praxis of current, real-world circumstances, on the other. It therefore analyses where contradictions exist, whether they are major or minor, whether they are violent or non-violent, and what form of struggle is required in order to achieve resolution and progress. The Leninist party is also responsible for maintaining both ideological and organizational discipline within the party so that revolution at home and abroad can be achieved without internal political dissolution, or through deviation from the agreed ideological line. These form the core tenets of Chinese Leninism.”

• Left & Right in CCP Context: This is an important explanation. “In CCP history, ‘left’ and ‘right’ as political labels have been shaped around several recurring, core issues within the party’s debates over more than a century. Principal among these are: the scope of the dictatorship of the proletariat; the dangers of bourgeois liberalism and democracy; the primacy and permanency of class struggle; the centrality of the relations of production over the factors of production; the importance of equality and inequality; deep questions of the periodization of party history, including the primary stage of socialism; the socialist law of value; the socialist market economy; the relative roles of the party, the government, and the state; and the legitimacy of supporting world-wide revolution beyond China’s borders. In other words, the ideological epithets of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are therefore not simply hollow phrases designed for prosecutorial purposes and devoid of substantive meaning. Indeed, throughout party history, they have been both tools of intra-party politics as well as means of expressing real-world ideational, political, and policy divergence.”

• The Leninist Left in his view, encompasses “reasserting the leader’s power over the party’s collective leadership, redeploying a Mao-like party rectification movement to restore party discipline, and reinforcing the dominant role of the party over the professional technocratic machinery of the Chinese state.”

• The Marxist Left: Rudd also identifies 7 essential feature of Chinese Marxism. Key among these is that Chinese Marxism is fundamentally “materialist rather than idealist,” and that its “machinery of change” “is dialectical materialism, based on the concept of the unity of opposites, the inter-permeation of phenomena, and the theory of contradiction.” He defines the shift to Marxist Left essentially in the context of the economy. Rudd argues that Xi has done so by “asserting the primacy of state planning over market forces, the state-owned enterprise sector over private firms, and greater income equality over rampant inequality.”

• Nationalistic Right: This refers to the changes in Chinese foreign and security policy. This, he argues, is reflected in increasing, top-down, nationalist campaigns about Chinese civilisational centrality, an enhanced grievance culture about the West’s past occupation and continued containment of China, the prospect now for the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’, articulated by a new ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy legitimizing a more assertive and aggressive posture towards the world, all harnessed by a new, ideological assertion that China’s time has now come with ‘the rise of the East, and the decline of the West’.”

  Importantly, Rudd contends that “Xi’s nationalism is sui generis—it differs significantly from the forms of defensive nationalism often found in the Deng-Jiang-Hu era, but neither is it a simple reprise of Mao-type revolutionary nationalism. Although the nationalist component of Xi’s overall ideological worldview is clearly driven by a number of revisionist ambitions from ‘the right’, there is also evidence of a number of residual Marxist-Leninist concepts. These are further reinforced by certain classical Chinese ideations of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, all combined in an eclectic vision of a form of future Chinese-led international order. In other words, Chinese nationalism under Xi is emerging as a composite of three inter-connected traditions. It evidences: a nationalist-revisionist core; a Marxist, historically determinist rationale concerning the inevitable collapse of the international capitalist order led by the United States; while also wrapping itself in the classical garmentry of universal Confucian values, Tianxia, and other forms of more ancient Sino-centrism.”

Next, I’d like to highlight two key arguments from the book, which I found deeply thought-provoking.

The Primary Stage of Socialism

One of the most intriguing arguments in the book deals with changes in China’s economic policy under Xi. Rudd argues that Xi believes that “the analytical paradigm of dialectical (and historical) materialism was important for China’s ‘strategic thinking’ across the board.” In other words, it is an essential tool to analyse and respond to the changes in China’s internal and external environments.

In discussing China’s shifting policies, Rudd explains that it is not his view that Marxist-Leninist ideology or the instrument of dialectical materialism did not matter during the Deng-Jiang-Hu era. He says that it mattered “in terms of the party’s ongoing claims to national political legitimacy in the eyes of its membership and the people” and “it mattered as a central medium for both internal party discourse and as a guide to substantive policy action by the Chinese state.” The key difference, however, was that Deng, Jiang, and Hu “remained ideologically disciplined in their respective levels of policy activism” for a variety of reasons. This is not the case with Xi, who is the first leader since Mao “to deliver speeches explicitly dedicated to Marxist analytical methodology.”

Xi’s policy activism is primary due to his assessment of the changes in China’s domestic and external contradictions. In addition, something about the 2015-16 stock market crash also seemed to leave a deep impact on Xi.

From the perspective of the economy, Rudd explains that the change in the understanding of China’s principal contradiction at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 was incredibly important. He argues that Xi seems to have assessed that although China continues to remain in the primary stage of socialism, the progress made since the era of Reform and Opening up has brought it to towards latter phase of this stage.

Discussing the concept of periodising development into different stages of socialism, Rudd explains:

“The underlying ideological logic of this official periodization of China’s development trajectory is that it determined the level of class inequality to be tolerated at each stage in order to raise the people’s overall living standards. But, in Xi’s logic, the ideological purpose of generating greater wealth was not to permit higher levels of inequality forever; it was to accelerate the overall economic development process towards higher levels of socialism. In the primary stage of socialism, higher levels of class inequality have been permitted in order to generate more rapid economic growth. However, as the party moved towards more advanced levels of socialism, that inequality must be moderated before being eliminated altogether under communism.”

This requires purposeful action to correct the imbalances that decades of pro-market policies had generated. Xi’s answer to this challenge is the New Development Concept, which Rudd says “represents his overarching ideological alternative to Deng’s concept of ‘reform and opening’.” He adds: “It is designed for the ‘new era’ that had been heralded by the ‘higher phase’ of the primary stage of socialism that Xi believed China had now reached, as the country proceeded along its pre-ordained path—one that had been determined long ago by the ineluctable forces of historical materialism.” Interestingly, examining Xi’s speeches, Rudd concludes that Xi seems to be suggesting that the “mid-century goal (2049 goal of modernisation) as the official benchmark for formally ending the primary stage of socialism”.

It is within this context that Rudd also characterises Xi’s drive for common prosperity, which the Chinese leader has classified as an essential aspect of Chinese-style modernisation. A direct consequence of this assessment is intensified intervention in the markets and the need to constrain and direct the growth of the private sector and wealth creation.

Foreign Policy & World Order

Rudd is rather clear-eyed in his assessment of Xi’s global ambitions. Examining Xi’s speeches, he concludes that the Chinese leader views foreign policy and the shape of the international order within the context of his broader goal of national rejuvenation. In this context, he views competition with the US as an inevitable contest between national systems. He also appears to believe that in this regard, China’s Party-state system enjoys superiority. This not only has implications for domestic policy and bilateral relationships with other countries but also for the future of the world order.

Rudd argues:

“Xi Jinping is signalling loudly and clearly through his expanding nationalist narrative that the time has come to take active measures to change the international status quo in a direction that is more compatible with Chinese national interests, values, and power. This includes consciously and actively reshaping the international rules-based order. It also means resolving outstanding challenges to China’s perception of its territorial integrity.” He further writes that in Xi’s view, going forward, “China’s growing national power would be the fulcrum of the emerging international system; it would not be an international structure still underpinned by historical American power—or by some loose, power-sharing arrangement with others.”

Rudd argues that Xi’s vision for the world order is that “China should lead the building of this order, and that it should draw on its own reservoir of national wisdom in doing so.” This vision for order is encapsulated in the concept of the community of common destiny for mankind.

“These propositions”, Rudd writes, “represent a major departure from Deng’s underlying argument that Beijing should work within the framework and structures of the existing international order as a continued precondition for maximizing China’s national economic development.” From Rudd’s perspective, this is a product of a sense of new nationalism but also the outcome of Xi’s assessment of the state of the world through the methodology of dialectical and historical materialism. He adds:

“the central ideological construct of ‘struggle’ unifies both Xi’s domestic and international missions. Xi also refers to Marxist understandings of the ‘underlying trends’ that warrant this new exercise in international institutional reform or ‘struggle’, as an old, American-led order passes away and a new Chinese-led order comes into being.”

My Takeaways:

On Xi Jinping is a truly compelling read. Rudd has waded through vast amounts of Xi Jinping’s writings, official discourse and scholarly work distilling important insights for analysts and policymakers around the world.

Indeed, we are in an era where tracking ideological discourse is critical to understand the long-term, strategic policy trends. However, ideological clarity from Xi Jinping does not necessarily imply rigidity in policymaking. In fact, at different points in the book, Rudd argues that Xi himself does not view Marxism as a rigid, dogmatic ideology. Furthermore, towards the latter part of the book, Rudd delves into Xi’s discourse on strategy and tactics.

Xi has argued that “strategy and tactics are powerful weapons for our party to lead the people to transform the world, change practice, and promote historical development. The correct application of strategy and tactics is the secret of our party’s success in creating a glorious history…To promote Chinese-style modernization, we must pass on, apply, and develop this successful secret well.”

The secret essentially implies persisting with strategic objectives while maintaining tactical flexibility because the “environmental conditions for implementing the strategy change at any time”. Of course, this proposition does not take into account the elephant in the room, i.e., there can always be a moment when tactical changes acquire critical mass thereby having a strategic effect.

Anyway, while I am not going to detail it, Rudd’s eventual prognosis for China and the world is not terribly optimistic. He believes that Xi is set to hold the reigns of power for the foreseeable future. This, in turn, will continue to yield tumult and turbulence at home and abroad.

Beyond this, as an analyst studying Chinese politics and policy-making and as someone who reads an unhealthy amount of official discourse, there are five practical lessons that I would like to draw from the book.

1. First, while official language and discourse is often dull, repetitive and exhausting, it is important to go slow and take your time with it. Often the difference lies small changes in language or the use of certain adjectives and adverbs. These can be significant. Analysts tend to be most acutely aware of these changes when examining language related to monetary or fiscal policy, but even on ideological issues, it is important to not glaze over such changes.

2. Second, ideological framing of policy shifts might take place after the fact but that does not render ideological discourse meaningless. It is still critical to continue deciphering the ideological casting of real-world policy changes because it sets the parameters for and can circumscribe the scope of action. More importantly, it sets the terms of debate for the future. This is because demonstrating ideological continuity even when breaking from the past is critical to the party’s legitimacy. Therefore, understanding the codes of communication within the Marxist-Leninist system is critical for any analyst of China.

3. Third, when engaging with the system’s codes of communication, it is important to unpack how certain terms are understood within the Marxist ideological worldview. For instance, what does Xi mean when uses terms like modernisation, democratisation or common prosperity? What are the constituents of national rejuvenation, and what is its linkage with an emerging trend of global interventionism by China? This underscores the importance of work like The Decoding China Dictionary that the good folks at MERICS have put together.

4. Fourth, analysing the use of banner terms is important. I have often been guilty of underplaying some of this in my assessments. For instance, I have seldom put as much stock in counting the number of references to terms like security or development in key speeches. But, after reading Rudd’s book, I think it is worthwhile to take this into account far more than I have, particularly through the use of historical comparisons. In other words, changes in the number of times a concept is mentioned by Xi in comparison to his predecessors is useful. Likewise, increased references to a certain concept in speeches at recurring forums or changing prioritisation of tasks compared to the past can be useful markers of shifting objectives. It doesn’t tell the whole story, but it is an important data point.

5. Finally, everything has a purpose, and timing matters. This is perhaps one of the most significant analytical tools that I draw from Rudd’s work. Editorial decisions taken by the Chinese media and theory ecosystem are not ad hoc, driven by market demands or conventional metrics of newsworthiness of a development. These are purposeful choices to communicate primarily to a domestic and, more narrowly, a party audience. It is, therefore, important to understand the timing and context within which a certain speech delivered or made public through Qiushi months or even years after it was delivered. Understanding the thought-process behind such communication and how it intervenes in or shapes ongoing debate on an issue is essential. One must also view this from the perspective of different stakeholders, i.e., officials, bureaucracies, cadres and private sector actors.