Marxist in the Middle?
The Lure, and Folly, of Putting Xi Jinping in a Box
Review of On Xi Jinping by Kevin Rudd
New York: Oxford University Press, 2024
604pp.
Reviewer: Connor Swank
1 - 16 - 25
To ingest large quantities of Chinese Communist Party propaganda is to be struck time and again by two qualities: its obsessive uniformity across officials, ministries, and levels of government and its almost religious conformity to precedent. No analyst of modern-day Chinese politics will be unfamiliar with the feeling of coming across an apparently new and analytically significant theme in one of Xi’s public communications, only to find on investigation that exactly the same formulation appeared years ago in the remarks of a long-departed predecessor. It is understandable, therefore, that when Xi follows his post-Reform and Opening predecessors in making paeans to Marxism, an ideology that the money-chasing and thoroughly corrupt Party-state today champions more in name than in fact, the first instinct of many is to roll their eyes. Capitalism has revolutionized and empowered China far more than the Marxist “revolution” under Mao Zedong, with its downright cataclysmic economic policies, ever did; why would Xi be sincere in espousing an ideology that entails a willingness to kill the golden goose?
Kevin Rudd, an Australian politician and China scholar, mounts a fierce assault on this brand of skepticism in On Xi Jinping, a dense new work that depicts Xi as a sincere Marxist ideologue. In furtherance of his argument, Rudd sets aside the fact that Beijing’s thick veil of secrecy– commonly referred to as “the black box”– renders obtaining a full picture of Xi’s sincere beliefs impossible and leaps with both feet into a face-value interpretation of Xi’s public and semi-public rhetoric. In the process, Rudd relishes that he is, as he puts it, “breaking some traditional academic crockery.” “We no longer have the luxury of perfectly conclusive scholarship,” he announces in his opening chapter. “We could, of course, wait until all the data points are in. But by then… it is likely to be too late in the real world of politics and geo-politics.” (At this juncture, the reader could be forgiven for asking why the rules of empirical inquiry can simply be waved away for reasons of purported necessity: can the troubled field of particle physics, bogged down in slow and inconclusive experimentation, skip the data-gathering process and declare a certain grand unified theory correct merely because its practitioners want their answers now?)
Rudd’s bold discarding of strict empirical standards lends his study both advantages and disadvantages. His wide-angle lens enables him to pose questions that, as he points out, are too-little examined in the China field (“while there is an abundance of analysis of where different parts of Xi’s enterprise might now be headed, there is a paucity of synthesis that tries to make sense of it all” [emphasis in the original]). At the same time, his choice to prosecute his argument rather than stress-test and deconstruct it in the best scholarly tradition renders it less persuasive than it might have been. On Xi Jinping largely ignores the question of how to disentangle performative speech from candid speech, a fundamental analytical issue that it sporadically raises only to wave away; exaggerates the novelty of much of Xi’s Marxist rhetoric; downplays historical data that raise crucial questions about its claims; and offers textual analysis that at times can only be described as baffling. For all Rudd’s strident argumentation and mining of the highly restricted range of available sources, therefore, it is questionable whether many readers will come away persuaded by his core contentions.
Empirically dubious though his claims may be, Rudd’s station as a former prime minister, with all the public clout that that implies, demands that they be taken seriously. Fortunately, engaging with Rudd’s framework also enables engaging with the key questions he fails to adequately address: How can we differentiate between a politician’s performative speech and his candid speech? What alternative variables might explain Xi’s frequent recourse to Marxist public messaging? Do a Marxist leader’s ideological convictions constitute a reliable predictor of his policy choices?
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No comprehensive analysis of the politics of Xi Jinping, or for that matter any Chinese leader, should omit discussion of the concept of performative speech. In all political systems, politicians’ public remarks are of course overwhelmingly crafted to bring about a desired political outcome rather than to disclose candid feelings; in China, the regime’s perceived existential need to prop up a vestigial ideological framework – an organization that still calls itself the Communist Party must convince its public that Communism is the only way forward, after all – inflates the volume of performative speech that the politician must spout to dizzying levels. A full understanding of the role of performative speech – how it is deployed and, in any given case, why – is consequently no less important to the observer of China than an understanding of candid speech.
Rudd does not disregard the concept of performative speech per se, but nor does he grapple with it directly. On Xi Jinping acknowledges “a range of empirical and methodological problems” with determining what Xi thinks and what impact his beliefs have, “including how we equate Xi’s ideology…with what he actually thinks,” but to the extent that it acknowledges the possibility of non-candid speech at all, it does not offer a detailed methodology for sorting performative from candid rhetoric. Instead, Rudd justifies his belief that Xi means what he says in broad terms. “While it may be impossible for academic researchers to conclusively answer the ultimate question of ‘what does Xi himself actually believe,’ it defies logic to dismiss the entire ideological edifice erected by him as little more than an exercise in calculated political cynicism,” he says. The data he points to as evidence of Xi’s sweeping ideological sincerity, however, is in many regards no less consistent with performative speech than candid speech: “Even in the absence of definitive proof of the genuineness, or otherwise, of Xi’s stated belief system, what can be measured is the clear correlation between his published ideological worldview, on the one hand, and, on the other, the clear direction of political change and real-world policy behaviours that have followed in its wake.” No serious observer of Xi’s rhetoric would dispute that it is intended to be taken seriously and to bring about political change; the key question is whether those aims are sufficient to establish that Xi sincerely believes in the Marxist lingo that he pumps out in vast quantities in order to get his subordinates and subjects to fall into line. If one accepts the importance of performative rhetoric in China’s political system, one rapidly finds that the matter is not so easily resolved.
Yet what of Rudd’s claim that “real-world policy behaviours” – presumably referring to, or encompassing, those of Xi himself – support his thesis? Rudd vehemently argues that Xi has overseen “a significant move to the Marxist left in the party’s overall economic framework following the 19th Party Congress,” but readers familiar with the broader contours of Xi’s policymaking, as opposed to the limited glimpses On Xi Jinping affords, may be left unpersuaded. Unlike countless other nominally Marxist leaders, Xi has of course never undertaken anything resembling the fundamental collectivization of the heavily marketized economy he inherited; his limited efforts to bolster the state sector and to trumpet the notion of “common prosperity,” on which Rudd places heavy emphasis, constitute flimsy evidence of Marxist convictions when weighed against this obvious fact. (Xi’s apparently genuine disdain for the excesses of the rich, hardly a monopoly of Marxist doctrinaires or even the global political left, likewise offers little support for Rudd’s claims of a Marxist worldview.)
In addition to eliding key facts, Rudd mischaracterizes alternative explanations for Xi’s self-aggrandizing reforms. On Xi Jinping states that attributing recent changes in Chinese politics to “Xi’s basic interest in power consolidation… assumes that personal power consolidation, and an ideological mission to re-entrench the power of the party, are conceptually and practically irreconcilable.” Yet viewing Xi’s governance as predominantly motivated by self-interest does not require assuming that selfish motivations are irreconcilable with ideological verve; indeed, it would be a strange argument that posited that they were. Instead, it merely requires viewing self-interest as an adequate explanation for Xi’s behavior and a hypothesis of bona fide Marxist ideological verve as both unsubstantiated and entailing a higher burden of proof in light of Xi’s failure to govern in accordance with important tenets of Marxist ideology.
Rudd does not, at least formally, entirely disregard the impact of factors other than ideology on Xi’s behavior (“I will not argue that ideology is the only driving force that animates Xi’s political and policy program”). Yet On Xi Jinping contains little by way of analysis of alternative factors. More worryingly, Rudd appears to set aside his face-value analytical framework when addressing data that are not fully supportive of his claims. In his first chapter, he characterizes Xi’s “new ideological canon” as “vastly different” from the “pragmatism” of his predecessors since Deng Xiaoping, Xi’s innovations as an “ideological revolution,” and Xi has having made a “turn to the Marxist left on the economy.” When obligated to acknowledge that major ideological concepts and policy initiatives from Xi’s tenure were actually introduced under Xi’s predecessors, however (a “community of common destiny” in international relations, “a new type of great power relationship” with the United States, a 2049 deadline for China’s renewal or rejuvenation), he downplays such precedents and provides scant discussion of the broader forces guiding Chinese policy across leadership periods. Just as strikingly, when forced to acknowledge a large-scale rightward shift in economic policy in 2022 and 2023, Rudd waves away such un-Marxist moves as “tactical and short-term” – and maintains, stunningly, that Xi’s “overarching ideological narrative on the economy…remained thoroughly and consistently Marxist” throughout the period described.
Nor are these the only instances of analysis in On Xi Jinping that are likely to strike the reader as incongruous. Rudd often pushes his Marxifying analytical framework of Xi’s words and behavior to the limit, with at least one such instance warranting being quoted at length:
Yet in the passage Rudd cites, instead of implying something profound about the Marxist concept of stages of socialism, Xi conspicuously omits Deng’s reference to stages of socialism. He interprets Deng’s words as referring to “turn[ing] China into a modern country” or, more generally, “modernization” – hardly distinctively Marxist concepts. Where Xi does discuss socialism, he does not anticipate China transitioning to a new phase because of an accelerated “economic modernization timeline,” as Rudd claims; he simply calls for socialism to be maintained, “even after modernization is achieved.” Far from being atypical, these errors are emblematic of Rudd’s Marxifying approach to Xi’s pronouncements – an approach likely to strike readers as serving to weaken, not strengthen, On Xi Jinping's core contentions.
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These issues aside, what of Rudd’s major claim about “the predictive role that ideology can play in the world of Xi Jinping?” Leaving aside some forecasting of highly questionable utility that appears late in the book (“Xi will continue to leverage China’s regional and global economic footprint to China’s foreign policy and strategic advantage”), this assertion poses an important question: to what extent do Marxist leaders’ ideological views serve as a reliable predictor of their policy behavior? If Rudd is correct and Xi Jinping is a bona fide Marxist ideologue, does this realization enable us to anticipate his policy choices moving forward?
Basic Communist history suggests not. Communist politicians’ ideological devotion to Marxism and its attendant philosophies, however fervent, has often held dubious value as a predictor of their policy decisions, even on issues of fundamental ideological importance. A few years after the October Revolution, Lenin famously salvaged a national economy in crisis by forcing the passage of a set of de-Marxifying state capitalist measures – the New Economic Policy, or NEP – that many of his followers viewed as a betrayal; Leon Trotsky, no less devout a Marxist than his leader, publicly denounced market forces like those unleashed by Lenin’s NEP as a “diabolical phenomenon.” Lenin was scarcely less unpredictable on the fundamental ideological question of how to organize the Marxist world: he favored the incorporation and Sovietization of multiple European nations into Russia during the ill-fated Polish War, then reversed himself on a proposal for the absorption of smaller Soviet republics by Russia and successfully pushed for the establishment of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics comprising Russia and other republics as quasi-equals. Stalin, for his part also a committed Marxist and an even more committed student of Lenin, defended the NEP against its critics during Lenin’s lifetime, then turned to the radical left and implemented catastrophic Marxist collectivization a few years later. The committed reformer Mikhail Gorbachev – puzzlingly, also a keen admirer of Lenin (perhaps even more than was Stalin) – pioneered an agenda of political liberalization that could scarcely have been more anathema to his intellectual idol.
What was true of the Soviet Union was doubly true of China. Mao Zedong’s vacillations on economic and foreign policy are well-known, including his veering into and out of ultra-Marxist collectivization with his foray into the Great Leap Forward and his ultimate grudging abandonment thereof. Perhaps most shocking of all, if Marxist convictions are to be taken as predictive of policy, was Mao’s paradigm shift from client and close partner of the Marxist Soviet Union to its mortal enemy and cheerful partner of the United States, the nemesis of global Marxism. The Chinese Communist Party’s permanent dismantling of Marxist economics under Mao’s eventual successor Deng Xiaoping, a onetime Marxist revolutionary, is scarcely less stark a personal betrayal of ideological values that were, at least at one time, sincerely held.
The problems that these cases suggest with ascribing predictive power to Marxist ideological convictions are compounded when a researcher takes Communist leaders’ public and semipublic rhetoric, as Rudd does, at face value. Lenin lied to his public with alacrity about his core ideological convictions and governing priorities: he stated that he wanted to give peasants Russia’s land, when in fact he wanted to nationalize it; he called for Russia’s workers to run their factories, when he actually wanted to control them through his Party; like Mao Zedong, he publicly invoked the principle of democracy even has he worked towards the establishment of a dictatorship. Mao also not only gave the lie to some of his major public pronouncements, with disastrous consequences, when he punished citizens who credulously accepted his invitation to openly criticize the regime in the “Hundred Flowers” campaign (to name but one stark case of duplicity); he also made his true opinions so opaque, and changed his expressed stance behind closed doors so frequently, that he trapped Chinese politics– particularly during the latter years of his rule– in a tense back-and-forth between left-leaning and right-leaning camps, with neither side able to be confident of its long-term support or even its survival. Stalin’s contempt for the truth in all aspects of his political life, which ran even deeper than Mao’s, requires no elaboration.
These historical cases hint at the breadth and depth of the analytical consequences of the core element of Rudd’s research design: the abandonment of strict empirical standards in the name of drawing policy-actionable conclusions. More generally, Rudd acknowledges the analytical obstacles on the road to understanding Xi Jinping’s mind, but his solution is not to accept the uncertainty inherent in the difficult work of analyzing the limited pool of reliable data from all possible angles; it is to ascribe undue significance to a far larger body of readily available poor data – public and semi-public rhetoric that may, or may not, reflect what Xi actually thinks. This approach makes for a more appealing premise and more satisfying takeaways for the policy-minded reader; it also makes for fundamentally unreliable analysis.
This sobering fact, alongside other flaws, renders On Xi Jinping a trying read for the China-literate reader. It also renders it impossible to acclaim Rudd’s work – however admirable its scope and ambition – as a genuine glimpse into the mind of Xi Jinping. It is regrettable, but unsurprising, that we shall have to wait for such a glimpse a little while longer.
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[Xi said,] In 1992, Deng Xiaoping stated: “We have been building socialism for only a few decades and are still in the primary stage. It will take a very long historical period to consolidate and develop the socialist system, and it will require persistent struggle by several generations, a dozen or even several dozens. We can never rest on our oars.” In my opinion, Deng made this remark from a political perspective. He was pointing out that it would take a fairly long period of hard work to turn China into a modern country based on the weak economic foundations of the time. But he was also saying that we must persevere with China’s socialist system from one generation to the next, even after modernization is achieved.
[Rudd:] In other words, Xi is implying that the sheer, unanticipated success of China’s recent economic development meant that Deng’s virtually unlimited timeframe for continuing the primary stage of socialism had largely been superseded…. Or put more starkly, because of China’s rapidly accumulating national wealth and power, Deng’s economic modernization timeline had been proven wrong and, by inference, reaching a higher level of socialism was now within reach of the present generation.”
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1) An important, and more balanced, recent study points out that “Xi’s common prosperity program is not socialist in the classic sense, but at most a bastardized version of socialism”; that “making China’s economy strong and secure is more important [to Xi] than making it more equal”; and that “the truly Marxist contents are thin in Xi Thought,” among other findings that undermine Rudd’s core claims on the Chinese economy: Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 118, 143, and 196, Kindle. Notably, in an interview with this organization, one of the co-authors also discussed the analytical significance of disentangling Xi’s sincere speech from his insincere speech: “Dr. Olivia Cheung Explains ‘The Political Thought of Xi Jinping,’” Foundation for the Interdisciplinary Study of China, February 16, 2024, 20:20-25:28, https://www.fisc-china.org/cheung-on-xi-jinping.
2) See, for example, Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 483-485, Kindle; Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 107, Kindle.
3) Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 495, Kindle.
4) Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, pp. 475-478.
5) Leading experts tend to agree that Stalin was sincerely dedicated to Communist ideology, even if this fact competed with other traits. See, for example, Norman Naimark, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), pp. 6-13, Kindle; Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, XI; Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, pp. 28-31. Regarding Stalin’s apparent preference for Lenin over Marx, see Khlevniuk’s account of Stalin’s archived collection of books, which contained considerably more works by Lenin than by Marx and Engels (seventy-two compared to thirteen): Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, pp. 148-149.
6) Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, p. 497.
7) See, for example, Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin Books, 2017), pp. 27, 70, 127-128, Kindle.
8) See William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), pp. 215-216, Kindle.
9) Among the many dangers that Deng braved as a young revolutionary which attest to his devotion to the cause was the acute risk of being killed by the Guomindang during his underground work in Shanghai from 1927 to 1929. See Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 25-26.
10) On Lenin: Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, The Dictator, and the Master of Terror, pp. 301-302. For some of Mao’s many lies about his democratic intentions, see Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (Simon & Schuster, 2012), pp. 320-321.
11) See Pantsov with Levine, Mao: The Real Story, pp. 440-442.
12) Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976 (M.E. Sharpe, 2007; Routledge, 2015), e.g. pp. 611-612.