This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Since 2012, Xi Jinping has been the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He has consolidated power to a level very few people ever expected, and under his rule, China has strengthened technologically, diplomatically and militarily. It is now widely understood to be an industrial juggernaut on a scale the world has never seen, in a way the world does not quite know how to respond to.
But Xi’s ambitions for China go far beyond that. In the long term, he wants China to be the pre-eminent world power. In the near term, he wants it to control Taiwan.
You cannot understand modern China — what it is now and where it is going — without understanding Xi and the power he wields and the ideology that drives him.
My guest today is Kevin Rudd, who has had a unique way of trying to understand that ideology from many different angles. Rudd has an amazing biography. He began as an Australian foreign service officer serving in China. He’s a fluent Mandarin speaker who rose to be prime minister of Australia in the late 2000s. Along that rise, he got to know Xi personally, in a way very few other world leaders have.
Then, after serving as prime minister, Rudd went on to pursue a doctorate at Oxford, and he wrote his dissertation on Xi Jinping’s ideology, reading everything that has come out under Xi’s name — which is quite a lot. He has published that in a book, “On Xi Jinping.” He is also the author of “The Avoidable War.” He recently served as the Australian ambassador to the U.S., and he’s now the president of the Asia Society.
