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.
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