Kevin Rudd — former Australian prime minister, Mandarin speaker, former ambassador to the US, and author of a doctoral study of Xi Jinping's writings — walks Ezra Klein through the ideology and biography that drive China's leader. Rudd traces Xi's formation (a father repeatedly purged by Mao who stayed loyal, producing a 'true Leninist' son), his technocratic rise through Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai, and the two big post-Mao shifts: Deng's reform-and-opening and Xi's turn back to the Marxist left plus a nationalist right. He argues Xi is a convinced Marxist dialectician who reads history as an inexorable movement toward 'the rise of the East and the decline of the West,' and that this underwrites a supply-side, self-reliance industrial strategy — Made in China 2025, control of global supply chains — deliberately paid for by suppressed domestic consumption and enforced by an unprecedented surveillance state. On the US relationship Rudd rejects both complacency ('hope becomes a substitute for analysis') and pure antagonism, arguing for 'managed strategic competition': hard deterrence on red lines, open economic competition, and cooperation on AI governance and pandemics. The most time-sensitive segment is Taiwan, where Rudd flags 2028 — Taiwan's presidential election, Xi's fresh mandate, a US election year, and post-Iran doubts about American resolve — as the window in which Xi could miscalculate.
Rudd explains why he enrolled at Oxford at 59 to read everything published under Xi Jinping's name, after losing confidence in his own answers about what Xi thinks.
Rudd first met Xi as vice mayor of Xiamen in the mid-1980s and felt nothing remarkable; years later, as Australian PM, a two-hour Mandarin conversation revealed a man who located himself inside the sweep of Chinese history.
Xi's father was a Mao lieutenant repeatedly purged yet remained loyal; Rudd argues Xi drew the same conclusion — the party knows best — which explains his unemotional resolve.
Rudd defines the vanguard party as a 'history accelerator' and describes Deng's reform-and-opening, then Xi's 2012 turn back toward state and party control.
Second-generation-red status, strong provincial growth numbers, and Jiang Zemin's kingmaking; Rudd argues Jiang would have been surprised by how far Xi later moved the centre of gravity.
The nationwide anti-corruption campaign launched at the end of 2012, the lesson Xi drew from the Soviet collapse, and roughly a hundred senior PLA generals purged — which Rudd reads as primarily about control.
Rudd was in Beijing in May 1989; he describes the square and argues the debate about a Singapore-style guided-democracy exit ramp closed after Deng's death in 1997 — a decade before Xi.
Rudd's core reading of Xi as a convinced Marxist dialectician who believes history has direction, and that China is now moving out of the primary stage of socialism — the analytical machinery behind 'changes not seen in a hundred years.'
Simultaneous with the shift to the Marxist left is a shift to the nationalist right, making the nation the vehicle for the ideological project.
Rudd's three-part account of how Xi manages a slowing economy — ideological propaganda, a surveillance state Mao and Stalin could only dream of, and an absolute priority on manufacturing and supply chains over private consumption.
Ma's Bund Conference attack, the anti-monopoly campaign, party secretaries and state equity inside private firms, and the 2024–25 attempt to bring entrepreneurs back in from the cold without abandoning the underlying model.
Klein describes the swing from 'the Chinese model is breaking' to 'they can do things we cannot'; Rudd warns against hope as analysis and explains the subsidy strategy's logic and its financing limit.
America as the only country with the scale to block China's ambition, plus an ideational threat; the doctrine of comprehensive national power and 'the rise of the East and the decline of the West.'
Rudd's 'third way': accept the red lines and deter on them, compete fully and openly on the economy, and cooperate where interests genuinely overlap (AI governance, pandemics, biotech).
Reunification before the 2049 centenary, exercises that increasingly resemble rehearsals, and Rudd's specific worry that Xi miscalculates in 2028 given Taiwan's January election, his own fresh mandate, and post-Iran doubts about American resolve.
Rudd's hard-headed case: the Taiwan Relations Act, the collapse of confidence in Pax Americana, Japanese and Korean nuclearisation, and no Chinese peace dividend — with sustained deterrence as the cheapest wise policy.
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