Career Mandarin

Rudd’s stint as PM is popularly remembered in Australia for his attempts to humanize himself through made-up slang. There was also the time when, at an international conference of world leaders in Copenhagen, he exclaimed, “Those Chinese fuckers are trying to rat-fuck us!”

But for better or worse, there’s more to the former PM than a collection of questionable one-liners.

Rudd joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in 1972, the year Gough Whitlam swept to power. In 1971, as Labor opposition leader, Whitlam had visited Beijing, pushing for diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Rudd benefited from Whitlam’s abolition of tuition fees in 1974, and became fluent in Mandarin during his studies at the elite Australian National University in Canberra. This is a significant status marker: to this day, fewer than 130 Australians of non-Chinese background can speak Mandarin to a high conversational level. In 1985, Rudd’s skills, combined with his ALP connections, enabled him to become first secretary of the Australian Embassy in Beijing.

After his diplomatic posting, Rudd took on a series of high-level political-bureaucratic roles, before entering politics himself in 1998. In 2006, Rudd became Labor’s opposition leader, and his successful 2007 federal election campaign ended the eleven-year reign of conservative prime minister John Howard in 2007. Central to Rudd’s push was his popular promise to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq.

The same month he became PM, Rudd met with the US ambassador and assured him he was “not starry-eyed towards China.” Despite this, the US embassy still cabled Washington, warning of an increasingly “independent” foreign policy line under the new leader. By mid-2009, US diplomats in Canberra were discussing Rudd’s replacement. On the eve of Barack Obama’s Pivot to Asia a year later, a group of Labor politicians and known US Embassy sources executed an internal party coup that saw Rudd replaced with a more compliant figure, Julia Gillard.

After resigning from parliament in 2013, Rudd took on a range of prominent academic and board roles in the United States. In 2022, he was appointed the ambassador of Australia to the United States. Despite the US establishment’s distrustful attitude toward him, he is clearly seen as a knowledgeable mediator of sorts.

A Brave New World Hiding in Plain Sight

In his book, Rudd attempts to define Xi’s ideology and map how it has influenced China’s domestic and foreign policy following his rise to power. Importantly, Rudd argues that CPC ideology is not an elite parlor game, a rhetorical weapon, a pragmatic means of control, or an analytical framework. Or rather, it isn’t just all those things. It is also, Rudd argues, genuinely believed.

One of the basic components of CPC Marxism, Rudd claims, is that it sorts the world into primary and secondary contradictions. Reconciling these contradictions then becomes the focus of the CPC’s hundred-million strong party apparatus.

After Deng Xiaoping’s ascendancy, the CPC identified the principal domestic contradiction as being “between the people’s growing material and cultural needs, and the backwards state of social production.” Deng famously said that “poverty is not socialism; development is the hard truth.” So, under Deng’s lead, the party opened the door to social development by unleashing market forces, albeit under state control.

This all changed in 2017, at the CPC’s 19th National Congress, when Xi identified a new official principal contradiction “between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.” In other words, Xi placed a new emphasis on decreasing wealth inequality. Xi’s “common prosperity” program echoed Deng, but added a second clause to Deng’s slogan: “Material poverty is not socialism, but neither is cultural impoverishment.”

Beyond this, Rudd argues that two other key imperatives loom large in Xi’s thinking. The first is an external imperative to defeat the United States and its allies. The second is international, namely to export China’s development model to the world as an alternative to the liberal-capitalist US-led international order.

Rudd asserts that there are three integrated components to what he labels Xi’s “Marxist nationalism.” The first moves Chinese politics to “the Leninist left.” By this, Rudd means that Xi’s reforms have increased the leader’s power over the CPC, and restored both internal party discipline and its control over the state apparatus.

The second component, according to Rudd, has pulled Chinese economics to “the Marxist left,” which he defines as reasserting the dominance of state planning over market forces, specifically by wielding the power of humongous state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The third component of Xi’s “Marxist nationalism” has shifted Chinese foreign policy to “the nationalist right.” In Rudd’s analysis, this has meant top-down campaigns that emphasize the centrality of Chinese civilization and the decline of the West.

But what does all this mean for China and the world? Rudd makes some cautious economic predictions. He claims that talk of “peak China” has no real grounds, and rather reflects attempts by China-haters to imagine their desires into reality. A decade of slower Chinese growth, however, is definitely in the cards. This is in part due to issues such as demographic decline and falling productivity, as well as debt in key sectors, reduced global trade due to geopolitics, and a shortfall in private capital investment.

But Rudd suggests that China’s decade of slower growth is also likely due to the impacts of policies related to Xi’s “Marxist nationalism.” These include increased state planning, the use of SOEs as future vehicles of technology and innovation as well as increased suspicion of the private sector, and a push toward mercantilism.

On the foreign policy front, Rudd predicts a new artificial intelligence and nuclear arms race as well as further decoupling with the United States. Beijing will also, he argues, promote European dependence on the Chinese market, and increase economic partnerships between China and the Global South to shore up political support. This entails economic engagement with certain nations (Indonesia, Malaysia) and the isolation of others (Vietnam, Philippines). Rudd also speculates that China will push toward reunification with Taiwan, possibly by force, before 2032, although he notes that this is not inevitable.

It’s Mercantilism on the Dance Floor

Throughout the book, Rudd draws an analogy between the Catholic Church and various aspects of the CPC. For example, Rudd describes one party ideologue as “the CCP’s equivalent of the Catholic Church’s Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith.” These regular comparisons are hilariously unhelpful for the reader not versed in Catholic history and theology. But they raise a crucial question: Is Rudd, like the grandstanding nonexperts he disparages early on in the book, simply repulsed by the institutional dogmatism of the CPC?

Not quite. Rudd’s concerns are themselves quite ideological, though he disguises his neoliberal orthodoxy as common sense. It’s helpful to think back to Rudd’s tenure as PM during the global financial crisis, when China’s unprecedented stimulus package shielded its trading partner, Australia, from the worst of the crisis. At the time, Rudd identified two challenges facing “social democrats,” including himself. The first was “to save capitalism from itself” by introducing modest regulation into open markets. The second was “not to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” by which he meant not succumbing to the temptations of protectionism.

To Rudd’s horror, since then many have indeed succumbed to the siren song of protectionism. And Rudd places the blame for this protectionist wave firmly on Xi’s China, which, due to its size and integration into the world market, threw a wrench into the established global economy. As Rudd opines,

such interventions are driven not by the normal competitive dynamics of supply and demand determining price in accordance with standard liberal economic theory. . . . Not only are the normal operations of global markets being upended by these unprecedented powers of monopoly and monopsony, their disruptive impact is compounded by the ever-present threat of trade bans driven by political, not market, considerations.

This criticism also applies, in Rudd’s view, to Trump’s presidency. Rudd’s issue with Trump is not simply that he thinks he’s stupid. After all, he once described Trump’s demagoguery as masterful. Rather, Rudd’s criticism is that Trump’s economic populism has disrupted multilateral institutions. This has foreclosed the one shot the United States had left to maintain strategic hegemony, which, according to Rudd, was “creating an increasingly seamless international market across the national boundaries of its major North American, European, and Asian strategic partners.”

In this context, Rudd asks his US readership, what rational country would turn on its largest trading partner — China — while swearing loyalty to America for no economic gain?

All Under Heaven, or Overaccumulation?

Rudd is confident that ideology lies near the heart of what’s happening under Xi. His commonsense premise is that the CPC would not invest such time, money and energy into its ideological apparatus if this ideology wasn’t believed at the highest levels.

One possibility is that Rudd is simply mistaken in his assessment that the CPC is populated by “true believers.” That’s certainly the argument of Cai Xia, a former CPC Party School professor and Jiang Zemin supporter who defected to the United States in 2019.

She describes a senior layer of CPC officials who are fairly ignorant on ideological questions. For example, she claims to have quoted Deng Xiaoping’s famous “poverty isn’t socialism” on a television program, only to be yelled at by the head of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, who didn’t recognize the quote or the idea.

But Rudd’s argument can survive this rejoinder because he doesn’t really make any big claims about ideological causation. He argues that while “facts on the ground” might primarily cause policy change in the PRC, analyzing CPC ideology remains useful because it allows outsiders to predict future Chinese behavior on the world stage.

The pickle is that if you emphasize ideology over “facts on the ground,” it tends to change the predictions that follow. For example, Rudd sees Xi’s attempt to boost consumer demand as “where ideological logic (i.e., poverty elimination) and mainstream economic logic (i.e., enhancing private demand) happen to coincide.” He forecasts that this could help to avoid a greater slowdown in the Chinese economy.

Compare this to Hung Ho-fung’s take, outlined in his book Clash of Empires (2022). Hung argues that if the CPC were able to sufficiently mitigate the overaccumulation-profitability crisis by boosting household incomes and consumption, it would lessen the need for China to export capital. In turn, this would reduce the need to fight the United States for spheres of influence. Hung contends that, though difficult, if a change like this were to take place on a large enough scale, it could help prevent an inter-capitalist rivalry from becoming open war.

These wildly divergent projections concerning the same policy stem from contrasting characterizations of the US-China rivalry and its underlying imperatives, as well as differing analyses of imperialism more generally. Clearly, quite a lot hinges on such ideological questions.

Does China’s expansion into global markets have its roots in “the eclectic ethical universe of Xi’s modernized and Sinified Marxism,” as Rudd claims, “whose values, concepts, and language will increasingly be drawn from a cocktail of Communist, Confucian, and even international sources”?

Or, is it the case that, as Hung argues, the CPC’s ideological reclamation of Qing imperialists and Weimar jurists “does not stem from the personal preference of Xi Jinping but is rather a result of the country’s long economic crisis”?

Whatever your take on the root causes of rising imperial tensions between China and the US-led world, CPC ideology has made its way into the global limelight. Questions may remain about the political utility for an outsider of a close familiarity with the ins and outs of Xi Jinping Thought.

But perhaps it’s better to have a rough grasp of it than none at all. As Rudd sighs in his introduction, “This is something we are all going to have to get used to.”