I don’t know what books Rachel Reeves keeps at her bedside, but, since the Treasury still seems to be setting the UK’s China policy, I heartily recommend that she read the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s magnificent On Xi Jinping. Ideology and -isms may or may not be Reeves’s thing, but while the book is primarily a dissection of Xi’s Marxist, Leninist and nationalist ideas – ‘a form of intellectual biography’, in Rudd’s words – it is of practical value to policy-makers. In laying out how Xi is applying his ideology to China, Rudd provides not only a guide to understanding the Chinese Communist party’s path over the past decade but also a convincing look into the future.
Most importantly, the book is a clarion call for free and open countries to wake up. I have known Rudd since we were in our respective embassies in Beijing in the mid-1990s. He has never been a ‘China hawk’. His long journey as a China scholar and linguist, diplomat, prime minister, think-tank academic and now ambassador in Washington has left him still a Sinophile, but increasingly a CCP-phobe. This book explains why.
Xi’s ideology underpins what he sees as an existential struggle between the CCP’s system and the liberal order. Beneath the propaganda – that teeth-grating ‘win-win’ vocabulary – the CCP’s aim is to rework the global order. On Xi Jinping sets out to answer the questions: what does Xi actually believe? And what are his plans for China’s and the world’s future? Rudd spent five years studying the speeches, documents and other texts put out by Xi and the party leaders. Few analysts and commentators have undertaken such essential work, but Rudd has done for us what his mentor the great sinologist Simon Leys called ‘chewing rhinoceros sausage’.
The ideology, Rudd contends, really matters. It has world effects; it informs policy. He instances Xi’s reining in of the private sector. Early on, Xi saw that a dominant private sector was a major ‘imbalance’ in the Chinese development model, a danger to Leninist control, since accumulated money usually leads to demands for power (‘no taxation without representation’, anyone?). It also plays a leading role in corruption. Despite the private sector’s more efficient production than the state-owned sector, Xi put political survival over economic pain, suggesting that scorn of his economic illiteracy may be misplaced: economic dislocation might be a price worth paying if it lessens threats to the party staying in power.
Rudd thinks that Xi really does believe in Marxist-Leninist nationalism:
It is not just cynically seen as a convenient intellectual fiction to hold the party together and to define its enemies both within and without. Indeed, it is this level of apparent belief that makes Xi such a potent challenge to the United States and the rest of the West.
And Xi certainly puts much time and effort into his ideological project – as must all party cadres. Why bother if it is not important?
Without the anchor of Marxist-Leninist nationalism, how is a country of 1.4 billion to be controlled?
Perhaps Xi sees ideology as a necessary tool to avoid the moral vacuum suffered by the USSR – to contain corruption and to combat inequality which could lead to social unrest. Without the anchor of Marxist-Leninist nationalism, how is a complex country of 1.4 billion to be controlled and ruled? Rudd concedes that we cannot see inside Xi’s head. And whether or not Xi’s convictions are practical or quasi-religious may not matter. The party and people must believe that Xi believes.
Any book on ideology might appear daunting to the average reader, with terms such as ‘dialectic materialism’, ‘historical materialism’ and ‘new development concept’. There is also a succinct thesaurus of all the ‘banner terms’ (encapsulation of theories and policy direction). Rudd even suggests that anyone daunted by the panoply of ideological explanation might want to read only the first four and last three chapters of the 16. But the middle chapters, covering domestic politics, economic policy, foreign affairs and more are a valuable and clear dissection of Xi’s China.
The book ends by peering into the future. This is vastly important because, health permitting (and Xi comes from a long-lived family and enjoys the sort of healthcare that 1.4 billion Chinese can only dream of), the general secretary will be in charge for at least another decade, if not more. The future Rudd sees is not comforting. Like Margaret Thatcher, Xi is not for turning.
Rudd has plenty more useful lessons for our chancellor. Mark Tucker, HSBC’s chairman, who recently accompanied Reeves to China, has written of the ‘tremendous opportunities for increased collaboration… in financial and professional services’. Rudd has little time for views long past their sell-by date. Time and again he stresses that the era of Xi as party leader is massively different from that of his three predecessors. For those whose views are still stuck in the Deng/Jiang/Hu period of ‘hide and bide’, Rudd provides a wake-up call.
Xi’s aim, he writes, is for Chinese markets to be important to foreign financial institutions, which would be accorded only a small proportion of the Chinese market itself. With the ultimate eye on influencing foreign governments, Xi aims to
increase China’s political and policy leverage over foreign financial institutions, mirroring the more general experience of foreign corporations’ dependency on China’s goods and services markets on an already massive scale.
Rudd also cautions:
Anyone looking for China to relax its increasingly draconian national security environment and once again tolerate normal forms of international economic collaboration would be disappointed.
He concludes:
Xi’s ideological blueprint for the future is out there on the Chinese public record for all to see – assuming, of course, we have the eyes to see it, read it, and understand it within its own terms…hiding in plain sight for us all.
I am not sure it was ever in hiding, but it is certainly in plain sight now. All the chancellor and her staff need to do is read this book. Rudd has done the hard work for them.
Comments