Xi Jinping’s alarming blueprint for the future
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
