What Xi Jinping Wants

What It Covers

Ezra Klein interviews Kevin Rudd — former Australian Prime Minister, Oxford-trained Xi Jinping scholar, and ex-U.S. ambassador — on Xi's Marxist-Leninist ideology, China's industrial strategy, the origins of Xi's authoritarian consolidation since 2012, and why Taiwan represents the most dangerous potential flashpoint in global geopolitics before 2029.

Key Questions Answered

• •Xi's Ideological Framework: Xi Jinping operates through a dual lens of dialectical and historical materialism — Marxist analytical tools that treat history as an inevitable progression toward communist supremacy. This is not rhetorical decoration; it is the actual decision-making framework inside CCP central organs. Understanding this means reading Xi's public speeches as strategic commitments, not performance. His repeated phrase "changes not seen in a hundred years" signals a belief that China's rise is historically inevitable and structurally equivalent to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
• •Soviet Collapse as Operating Manual: Xi's governance is shaped by a specific reading of the USSR's fall: Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika loosened ideological discipline, corruption rotted the party from the head, and crucially, not one soldier defended the party in 1991. Xi's response has been threefold — intensify ideological propaganda, maintain absolute party control over the military, and run nationwide anti-corruption campaigns that began within months of taking power in late 2012, purging over 100 senior PLA generals in recent years.
• •Industrial Supremacy Over Consumer Prosperity: Xi has deliberately sacrificed domestic consumption growth to build the world's most powerful industrial state. China's Made in China 2025 strategy targets ten technology sectors — EVs, batteries, semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, aeronautics — through subsidies of a scale unprecedented in economic history. The strategy: sustain subsidies long enough to eliminate global competition, then restore pricing power once alternatives have collapsed. China's dominance in rare earths and critical minerals is the proof-of-concept model already executed successfully.
• •The Jack Ma Lesson on Party Supremacy: When Alibaba founder Jack Ma publicly criticized CCP financial policy at Shanghai's Bund Conference, Xi moved immediately — not just against Ma personally, but against the entire platform economy including Tencent. The crackdown involved antitrust actions, forced state equity stakes in private firms, and implanting party secretaries inside companies. Ma effectively disappeared from public life. By early 2025, Ma was rehabilitated, signaling Xi's tactical recalibration: state enterprises cannot drive AI innovation alone, so private entrepreneurs must be re-engaged within party-controlled parameters.
• •Surveillance State as Social Control Mechanism: China's surveillance infrastructure — combining facial recognition, iris recognition, gait recognition, and fully electronic payment monitoring — gives the CCP tools Mao and Stalin could not have imagined. The 2022 blank white card protests, where citizens held up empty sheets to avoid explicit sloganeering, were neutralized through phone location tracking. Xi's explicit response to economic discontent is the Maoist concept of "eating bitterness" — enforced acceptance of hardship — backed by a security apparatus capable of identifying and detaining dissenters with minimal friction.
• •Taiwan Timeline and Miscalculation Risk: Xi has stated publicly that Taiwan reunification must occur before the PRC's centenary in 2049 — now 23 years away. Rudd identifies 2028 as the highest near-term risk window: Taiwan holds presidential elections in January 2028, the U.S. holds its own election that year reducing appetite for foreign intervention, and Chinese military exercises have shifted from abstract preparedness drills to rehearsals resembling actual invasion or blockade scenarios. The danger is not deliberate war but Xi miscalculating American resolve, particularly post-Iran, when U.S. arsenal depth and political will may appear diminished.
• •Managed Strategic Competition as Policy Framework: Rudd argues against both naive engagement and reflexive antagonism toward China, proposing three-track managed strategic competition. Track one: maintain hard deterrence on Taiwan, South China Sea, and East China Sea red lines. Track two: run full open competition across trade, technology, capital, and ideas markets. Track three: cooperate specifically on AI governance regulation and pandemic preparedness. Walking all three tracks simultaneously, rather than collapsing the relationship into pure confrontation, reduces the probability of unmanaged escalation leading to kinetic conflict.