LRB (London Review of Books )
Vol. 48 No. 1 · 22 January 2026
Climbing the Ziggurat
Tom Stevenson
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6391 words
The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
by Joseph Torigian.
Stanford, 704 pp., £40, June 2025, 978 1 5036 3475 6
The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China
by Michael Sheridan.
Headline, 345 pp., £12.99, July 2025, 978 1 0354 1351 5
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World
by Kevin Rudd.
Oxford, 604 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 0 19 776603 3
Xi Jinping has been at the top of China’s political system for thirteen years. In that time he has consolidated control over the apparatus of the Chinese state and personalised power to a degree unseen since the death of Mao. Like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin before him, Xi is general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission and head of state. But unlike Hu and Jiang, who worked with powerful premiers (Wen Jiabao and Zhu Rongji respectively), Xi has no clear deputy, no predecessor looking over his shoulder and no obvious rivals. He is, in the historian Geremie Barmé’s phrase, ‘chairman of everything’. Though relieved of political challenge, Xi has subjected the state to the invigorating effects of regular purges, which are said to be necessary for ‘self-revolution’. China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American empire.
Xi has personalised power, but he is not a dominant personality. Deng Xiaoping (de facto leader from 1978 to 1989) could strike a pose, and often did – usually with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Jiang Zemin (1989-2002) liked to put on a tricorne and would sing and dance given half an opportunity. Hu Jintao (2002-12) cultivated the image of a staid professional, perhaps a bank executive – more avatar of the party than individual. Like Hu, Xi holds his cards close to his chest. There are no holiday photographs of him enjoying the beach at Beidaihe, as there are of Mao, Deng and Jiang. The American sinologist Orville Schell, who accompanied both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to meetings with Xi, said he had ‘encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little’.
If Xi lacks the vivid individuality of Deng or Jiang, it is not for reasons of self-concealment. Within China his personal biography is better known than that of most leaders of the People’s Republic. His name is attached to an enormous corpus of writings. But if he has private foibles they remain for the most part private. His chief eccentricity is being married to a popular singer. He is known to like football. In 2007, he told the US ambassador Clark Randt Jr that he had enjoyed Saving Private Ryan and The Departed, but was unimpressed with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Chinese martial arts genre more generally.
Xi is part of the hongerdai generation, the children of the old revolutionary leaders. Any attempt to understand him means reckoning with the life of his father, Xi Zhongxun, a veteran of the revolutionary north-west and one of Mao’s top lieutenants before he was purged in 1962. Xi has called his father his ‘supreme life example’. Recent years have seen a spate of biographies of China’s 20th-century leaders, including Robert L. Suettinger’s Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled revolutionaries or deviants from the true cause? Why were they always purging one another? Torigian’s intervention is evidence of a considerable research effort, with sources ranging from the archives of Yanhuang Chunqiu, once China’s most prominent reformist journal, to the letters of Italian communists who happened to cross Xi’s path. And his subject had a truly remarkable life.
Xi Zhongxun was born in 1913 to a landowning family in Shaanxi that was nearly destroyed by the early 20th-century Chinese famines. His father, mother and sisters all died. In his teens the region suffered a severe drought, through which Xi worked as a salt panner. At the age of twelve he joined the Communist Youth League. At fourteen he was forced to leave school after he tried, and failed, to poison an academic administrator at the local university (the poison went in the wrong porridge bowl); he joined the Communist Party during his four-month stay in the local jail. In the civil war, he was taken under the wing of the future head of the Yan’an soviet, Liu Zhidan, and spent time fighting bandits, Nationalists and ‘despotic gentry’ in rural Shaanxi. Detained in a purge led by another of the Communist armies in 1935, he was only saved from execution (at least according to official party histories) by Mao’s arrival in the north at the end of the Long March.
During the Sino-Japanese war, Xi was engaged in counter-intelligence work concerning the fraught alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists. Spies, both Nationalist and Japanese, were thought to be everywhere. This was the milieu in which Maoism in the strict sense emerged, and Xi took to it. In 1943, at Mao’s direction, he led a purge in Suide County (he was not beyond torture or execution). In the later years of the civil war, he persuaded two influential Nationalist leaders in Yulin to defect to the Communists along with their forces. On the strength of his war record and considerable political talents, he was made head of the north-west bureau in Xi’an. After the founding of the People’s Republic, he was one of five rising stars (along with Gao Gang and Deng Xiaoping) called from the provinces to Beijing, where he was made minister of propaganda and assistant to Zhou Enlai at the State Council. In 1956, he joined the Central Committee. In 1959, he was made vice premier, again under Zhou.
For at least two decades, Mao appears to have maintained a very high opinion of his man from the north-west. Though not an eloquent sophisticate, like Zhou or Liu Shaoqi, Xi was an adept schmoozer. He dealt on Zhou’s behalf with the former emperor Puyi, repatriated by the Soviets in 1950. He struck up friendships with ethnic and religious leaders in the sparsely populated west. In Xinjiang, he was tasked with curtailing Nationalist aspirations for an Urumqi republic while maintaining the feudal order in nomadic areas. When Zhou asked him to consider becoming minister for foreign affairs, he replied that his talents were in local diplomacy in Tibet and Xinjiang and with the leaders of the non-Communist parties, and that it would be better if he remained minister for ‘internal foreign affairs’. Frugal and disciplinarian with his children, on the job he was a big drinker and developed a reputation, when in the capital, for fondling waitresses. By all accounts he cheated at mahjong.
Politically, Xi saw himself as neither a dogmatic leftist nor a cowardly rightist. But as Torigian’s account makes plain, he tacked with the prevailing winds when it came to Mao. This put him in a tight spot during the first major purge of the People’s Republic era, which targeted Xi’s old mentor from the north-west, Gao Gang. In 1953, Gao was purged, in part as a result of Deng and Zhou’s machinations. After his subsequent suicide, Mao became convinced that Gao had been a Soviet agent – an early foreshadowing of the Sino-Soviet split. Xi had to go along with this paranoid theory, and did. Above all he was, as Mao put it in 1943, a man for whom ‘the party’s interests come first.’ In 1959, another of Xi’s allies, Peng Dehuai, was purged for criticising the Great Leap Forward. Xi had observed the early stages of the famine in Henan and Gansu, but elected to avoid open criticism. When Peng was purged, he kept his counsel.
Xi’s own fall was the result of a more convoluted set of events. The context was the party’s eventual recognition that the Great Leap Forward had been a disaster. Having survived the moves against Gao and Peng, and the Tibetan uprising of 1959, Xi was felled in 1962 for assenting to the publication of a historical novel set in the north-west. Some in the party leadership appear to have thought, or feigned to think, that Xi was the true author of the book, which touched on sensitive matters of early party history. Of course there was more going on. Deng and others probably moved against him to distract attention from themselves. One of Torigian’s most important analytical contributions is his argument that alliances at the top of the party were too uncertain and temporary to allow for the formation of real factions. That didn’t stop Mao from imagining Xi’s past association with Gao and Peng as evidence of one.
In September 1962, along with twenty thousand supposed members of the ‘Xi Zhongxun anti-party clique’, Xi was put under house arrest and sent out of the capital to Luoyang. He remained in prison until 1975 and was only restored to officialdom after Mao’s death. Despite his persecution, he admired Mao for the rest of his life (though he thought that Mao had gone off the rails in the late 1950s). In Luoyang, before his full rehabilitation, he was visited by his son Xi Jinping. They spent the time smoking and reciting Mao’s old speeches.
Xi Zhongxun has long had a reputation in the West as the soft face of China’s old revolutionaries – a tradition his son is said to have besmirched. Torigian overturns that simple assessment. Xi Zhongxun returned to government in 1978 as party secretary in Guangdong, where he found himself at the heart of the new Reform and Opening Up agenda. He played a significant part in the establishment of the special economic zones that laid the groundwork for the enormous boom in the south, of which Shenzhen is the contemporary symbol. He made the first official visit by a provincial party leader to Hong Kong since 1949. He took well to the re-establishment of relations with the US and led a party delegation to Washington in 1980. But his later political career points more to a commitment to party discipline than to any reformist conviction. After his stint in Guangdong, he was elected to the Politburo and was again put in charge of dealing with Tibet and Xinjiang. Avoiding missteps was almost as important during the Deng years as it had been under Mao. But with his official position and old revolutionary credentials restored, Xi was at least in a position to give his son’s career a strong start.
Xi left the Politburo in 1987 after his immediate boss, Hu Yaobang, fell out with Deng over the subject of Deng’s retirement. He managed a few more years at the top of the party, fighting many of the same battles he had waged in the 1950s. As a party elder at the time of Tiananmen, he played no role in the crackdown and massacre, but did subsequently support it. In Torigian’s telling, Xi is a chiaroscuro of the pragmatic moderator and the orthodox party man. The contradiction can’t be explained away, only embraced. Torigian argues that after the Cultural Revolution, the party feared another binary, between dictatorship and collapse. That anxiety would prove lasting. As Xi himself is said to have remarked to Peng Zhen, ‘if, in the future, there is another strongman like Mao Zedong, what is to be done?’
The myth of Xi Jinping’s rise is that it owes more to his father’s purge than to the offices he once held. As a child, Xi Jinping was raised on stories of the revolution and educated at the 1 August school on the steps of Zhongnanhai, home to China’s top leadership. His father’s fall and the Cultural Revolution put an end to that. In 1969, when he was thirteen, Xi was detained and publicly humiliated by the Red Guards; his mother was forced to join the denunciations. Xi was plucked from a life of enormous privilege in the capital and sent to live in a cave village in Liangjiahe, close to the old Communist base area at Yan’an. He was certainly a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Yet in a sense he was fortunate. He was too young to have become a Red Guard, which might have damaged his later political career, and he was neither killed nor morally destroyed before he was rusticated. There were worse fates: his siblings were incarcerated and one of his sisters killed herself.
The fable of the prince in the cave, while broadly accurate, is merely the authorised story. The biographies published by the party all share the theme of Xi triumphing over adversity and working long hours for the party while managing to stay close to the soul of the people. In his book, more a synthesis of published material than the product of new research, Michael Sheridan suggests that accounts of these years remain open to some doubt. The adolescent Xi is said to have spent his evenings reading Marx and making repeated attempts to join the party. Sheridan doesn’t see how The Communist Manifesto can have appealed to an adolescent in rural China. But then he also seems to think it unimaginable that Xi, or anyone else, might have read Rabindranath Tagore or Mikhail Sholokhov (Hemingway is allowed as a possibility). What is clear is that on his tenth application, Xi was accepted as a party member. In 1975, he left the countryside to take a degree in chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
After leaving university, Xi managed to get himself lodged under the wing of Geng Biao, secretary general of the Central Military Commission. He was a junior functionary but at one of the major institutions of the state (Geng would remain Xi’s mentor until his death in 2000). There’s little doubt that his father helped secure that position. Yet Xi’s early political career would end up being defined by a decision he took himself and without obvious paternal support. In 1982, he left both Geng and Beijing to become a local party secretary in Hebei. It’s a period that Sheridan glosses over, but in abandoning the comfortable life of an adviser in Beijing for an unglamorous posting as a local party boss, Xi set his future in motion.
Xi was a skilled if cautious bureaucrat but his real talent was as a climber of the gargantuan ziggurat that is the Chinese state system. By 1985, he had obtained a more attractive party position in Fujian. Sheridan says Xi ‘never went down well with the Fujianese’, which may be true, but the posting served his political rise. Over seventeen years, he worked his way up to become first secretary in the provincial capital, Fuzhou, just in time for an economic upturn in the city, before being made governor of the province. His record there secured him the more prestigious job of party secretary in Zhejiang, one of the most developed provinces in the country. As well as political nous, Xi appears to have had the advantage of personal probity. In both Zhejiang and Fujian, which was notorious at the time as a smugglers’ paradise, there were opportunities for a skilled official to acquire a portly bank account and a collection of mistresses. Xi seems to have forgone both. Nor did he help his family to reap the rewards on the side, at least at first. He came out of his time in Fujian almost spotless.
‘Xi inherited success,’ Sheridan writes. ‘He just had to manage it.’ But it’s hard to chalk it all up to having a famous father. In 2007, when the head of the party in Shanghai was ousted for corruption, it was to Xi that the leadership turned to set matters straight. By then he was already a potential vice premier (a few years earlier he had given Jiang Zemin a rare bottle of baijiu, which probably did his reputation no harm). Within six months he was put on the Politburo and tasked with overall responsibility for the Beijing Olympics. He became vice premier in 2008. In 2010 Hu Jintao made Xi vice chair of the Central Military Commission, all but granting him the keys to the kingdom. Sheridan is unwilling to credit Xi’s personal qualities for his rise. For him, Xi’s ascent is simply evidence of family favour and the emergence of a dynastic tendency in the party. But Xi is an exception among the princelings: most of the children of the revolutionary generation either abandoned politics for business or were sidelined in the 1990s to make way for professional technocrats.
When Xi became general secretary in 2012, the popular press in the West indulged in its favourite predilection by describing him as a ‘reformer’ (the BBC correspondent John Simpson predicted that he would mark a break with the ‘stern’ Hu, and speculated about the possibility of an elected parliament). Instead, all prospect of a more open political environment has receded. Dissidence is rare and often treated as treason. Liu Xiaobo, perhaps the most prominent critic of the government, who had been imprisoned since 2008, died on Xi’s watch. Xi’s definitive break with his father’s legacy came in the non-Han interior. From 2014, his ‘strike hard’ campaign amounted to an organised strategy of coerced assimilation and repression informed by technocratic population management. By 2017, this included the mass detentions of Uyghurs in an archipelago of prison camps. Perhaps half a million people are still detained there. In August 2022, the UN reported that the campaign amounted to crimes against humanity.
If Sheridan’s book is accurate on most of the basic facts (three volumes of Das Kapital were not published ‘in Marx’s lifetime’), it’s probably because much of the research was done by a former head of BBC News Chinese, Howard Zhang. Sheridan is too fond of juvenile observations (that Xi was born in the year of the water snake, for example, or that he wasn’t cuddled much as a baby). For him, Xi Zhongxun is just one of Mao’s henchmen who ‘dipped their hands in blood’. Zhou Enlai is a ‘pliant functionary’ and Liu Shaoqi a ‘grim Stalinist’. Zhou Yongkang, China’s security chief until 2012, is a ‘priapic pest’ and Wang Huning, the éminence grise of the CCP, a ‘courtier, thinker and overall bad influence’. The early party was merely a conquering army and ‘slave to the doctrines of a foreign ideology’. Land reform and state ownership of land were no more than the replacement of one kind of feudalism with another. In 1953, the year of Xi’s birth, many Chinese apparently ‘lived in a daze’ and ‘discontent ebbed and flowed.’
It’s not unknown for foreign correspondents to have a taste for gossip, but Sheridan sustains the pleasure beyond its usefulness. He repeats the speculations of ‘dissident YouTubers’ and diaspora chatter about secret heirs and concealed drinking. He seems to revel in the prosaic difficulties of Xi’s first marriage, to Ke Xiaoming, daughter of the Chinese ambassador in London (one of the few original additions in the book is unfounded speculation that Ke may have been romantically involved with Denis Twitchett, a British historian of China). He devotes much space to the incident involving Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong publisher who was kidnapped in Thailand and rendered to China for planning to publish a book titled Xi Jinping and His Lovers. But that book largely comprised fabricated stories of Xi’s seduction by beautiful Taiwanese businesswomen and CIA assets.
Sheridan’s central argument is that Xi’s China is best seen as a kingdom and Xi himself best regarded as an emperor. Xi may look ‘like the chief executive of a corporation’, Sheridan writes, but beneath that appearance he is something else – perhaps a ‘mafia godfather’. The title Red Emperor is taken from Roderick MacFarquhar, who produced a shelf of books on China’s 20th-century history. Sheridan insists that Xi has more in common with the pre-revolutionary dynasties than with his immediate predecessors. He suggests that the statue of Xi Zhongxun erected in Shaanxi after his death is evidence of Xi’s dynastic ambitions. That notion isn’t novel – it has been explored in a more rigorous way by the political scientist Yuhua Wang – but he hangs far too much on it.
Xi’s monarchic qualities are plain enough. In the time of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao one could speculate about the balance of power among the members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Xi’s committee is more court than high council. Most members are old allies from his periods in Fujian and Zhejiang. Li Qiang, the ranking member immediately below Xi, has been with him since the early 2000s. Cai Qi, who appears to control access to Xi, worked under him in both provinces. Ding Xuexigang was Xi’s deputy in Shanghai. Zhao Leji, Xi’s chief enforcer, has family from Shaanxi. Li Xi gained access to the inner circle through family friends of Xi’s. The exception is Wang Huning, former consigliere to both Jiang and Hu, who is best known in the West for his book America against America (1991), about his time as a visiting scholar in the US (‘Americans hate theories and abstract thinking’). Wang can’t be characterised as a Xi lackey, but his ideas about the use and unity of state power are complementary to the Xi project.
Xi has transformed the party’s internal culture. No longer would it pose, as in the early 2000s, as a group of executives who just happen to be running the country. As a qiangguo (‘powerful state’), China needs a correspondingly powerful leader. In 2018, Xi had the National People’s Congress dispense with the two-term limit in order to allow him to continue as head of state. In October 2020 he was declared linghang zhangduo (‘pilot at the helm’). Since the retirement in 2022 of Li Keqiang, a holdover from the Hu days, there has been no one in the party leadership who could plausibly represent an alternative power centre. At the 20th Party Congress that year, Hu himself was unceremoniously escorted from the hall before the show of hands approving the new Politburo.
Xi has protected his rule through repeated purges. He succeeded Hu in 2012 after the fall of Bo Xilai, then the party boss in Chongqing and a putative rival. Bo was arrested by the party disciplinary apparatus and transferred to Qincheng prison after his wife, Gu Kailai, was embroiled in the murder of the British businessman Neil Heywood. Sheridan doesn’t believe that Gu, a ‘reclusive woman in poor health’, was the killer and suspects a plot by the ministry of state security. Much about the affair remains murky. Whatever happened with Bo pales in comparison with the purges Xi has since conducted. Sheridan argues that Xi’s move against Zhou Yongkang, the once feared former head of public security, was a model for later manoeuvres. When Xi became general secretary, Yongkang was ushered into retirement and Xi set the anti-corruption investigators on him. In 2015, he was convicted of bribery and leaking state secrets and sentenced to life imprisonment in Qincheng. His deputy, Sun Lijun, was purged and denounced as the leader of an anti-party clique.
In his first two years in power, Xi purged seven hundred top officials, including dozens with ministerial rank as well as Hu’s former chief of staff, Ling Jihua. In his first five years he had two million party members put under investigation for corruption. Party membership is now more demanding and party dues are actually to be paid rather than ignored. Officials dread being called to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in Beijing for shuanggui, ‘dual designation’ interrogation. This element of the Xi system has its supporters. Members of the higher business caste don’t appreciate the fact that they may be placed in extrajudicial detention if they step out of line. But the new petite bourgeoisie tends to approve of the sense of order. When Xi took over in 2012, corruption within the party was a serious problem. An anti-corruption drive of some sort was surely necessary.
Xi’s intramural purges are outdone by his approach to the military and security apparatus. As soon as he became head of the Central Military Commission, Xi began purging senior military officers. Army business interests were shut down and 300,000 military personnel demobilised. The Second Artillery Force, responsible for missile defence, was dissolved and reformed as the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, a body Xi then purged of his own appointees in July 2023. In August 2023, he purged the defence minister, Li Shangfu. Until recently it was common practice for Chinese military officers to purchase promotions and then recoup the cost by selling jobs to underlings, giving the CIA a natural source of agents. Xi has kept some military figures close: his second in command on the CMC, Zhang Youxia, has retained his post despite exceeding the customary age limit (their fathers once fought alongside each other). But half of the top CMC positions are currently vacant. In October last year, nine senior army officers were removed from their positions and expelled from the party, including He Weidong, the first uniformed vice chairman of the CMC to be purged since the days of Mao.
As Sheridan sees it, Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns are mostly a cover to distract from the fact that he is himself part of a self-enriching revolutionary aristocracy. While Xi’s early political rise was notably clean, once he joined the Politburo in 2007 his family does appear to have benefited. Relying on a report published by Bloomberg, Sheridan writes that between 2007 and Xi’s election as general secretary in 2012 (when the family wealth became ‘better hidden’), his sister Qi Qiaoqiao and her husband appear to have made large fortunes. There’s no reason to doubt those facts. But by focusing on them Sheridan misses the historical importance of the Xi years. He doesn’t attempt to explain China’s economic rise under Xi, which he sees as merely a continuation of an older trend. It’s true that China’s economy quadrupled in size during the Hu decade (and grew fiftyfold between 1978 and 2012). But Xi’s own efforts in the largest and fastest industrialisation in human history can’t be discounted. The vast expansion of high-speed rail mostly occurred under Xi. In 2010, less than half of China’s population lived in cities; by 2020, it was more than two-thirds. The gargantuan industrial strategy known as Made in China 2025 has shifted the Chinese economy from manufacturer of indifferent consumer goods to powerhouse of next-generation technology, with state-backed investments in electric vehicles and solar power generation.
Xi’s permanent purge doesn’t point to a machine in perfect working order. But it’s hard to agree with Sheridan’s claim that he is ‘not a political strategist’. He has consolidated power over a behemoth. He has shown ruthless finesse in moving potential rivals out of the picture and keeping China’s new tech billionaires in their subordinate place. Sheridan’s unwillingness to acknowledge Xi’s more formidable qualities in favour of the caricature of an overpromoted hongerdai is indicative of a general prejudice. In his account, Xi’s China is a petty tyranny. The government’s successes are evidence of ‘traditional Chinese subtlety’ and its crimes a consequence of the nature of the party. One is left to wonder how a state of such size and complexity could possibly continue in Xi’s hands.
One of the particularities of the Xi era is its penchant for codified official political theory, collected and published since 2017 under the rubric ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. Chinese leaders tend to be more than usually interested in the phraseological power of the state; Mao was obsessed with finding the ‘single formulation’ that would bring about the flourishing of the nation. But the deadening sprawl of Xi Jinping Thought is something to behold. There is Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, Xi Jinping Thought on Culture and Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilisation. From 2019, study of these various branches of official ideology became mandatory in the party. Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia and now Australian ambassador to the US, is one of relatively few China analysts in the West to have met Xi in person. In The Avoidable War (2022) he argued that the US and China could limit their competition to something short of military conflict. In his most recent work, he has set himself the task of analysing the corpus of Xi Jinping Thought.
In search of what Xi thinks, Rudd surveys official communiqués, proclamations and the party’s theoretical journal, Qiushi. The Xi who emerges is a committed ideologue, combining Sinocentric nationalism with Marxist struggle. The Xi ideology is a fusion of Leninist politics, Marxist economics and nationalist foreign policy. Xi Jinping Thought sits in the tradition not of Mao’s quotations but of Deng Xiaoping Theory. When he came to power, Xi stressed that the legacies of Mao and Deng – ‘the two that cannot be denied’ – were not up for repudiation. Yet Rudd finds subtle signs that Deng’s legacy is being demoted. If in Mao’s time it was more important to be ‘red’ than ‘expert’, in the Deng era it was more important to be ‘expert’ than ‘red’. Xi, he says, has returned the ‘red’. Early discourses on the importance of both market and state have, over time, shed the market part. In 2015, Xi announced the New Development Concept (‘dual circulation economy’, ‘common prosperity’, ‘security in development’), which Rudd sees as a rejection of Reform and Opening Up.
What is the evidence that these developments constitute a ‘turn to the Marxist left’? Rudd finds plenty of good Marxist rhetoric in Xi’s speeches. Under ‘common prosperity’, redistribution is supposed to be a priority. In an article published in Qiushi in 2021, Xi wrote that ‘we cannot allow the gap between rich and poor to continue growing.’ But as Rudd notes, the proposed remedy involved getting the rich to support charitable causes and ‘give back’ to the community. Rudd does entertain the possibility that Xi’s use of Marxist vocabulary is a kind of customary formalism, but dismisses it on the basis of how much space Xi devotes to it. In Rudd’s account, anodyne sections of speeches on the importance of Marxism in China become a ‘full-throated embrace of Marxism as the single, totalising worldview for the party’. The existence of state-owned enterprises and industrial policy are evidence of a ‘profoundly Marxist ideological imperative behind Xi’s common prosperity’ (the written style of Chinese official documents is mildly contagious).
In fact, the Xi corpus represents only a superficial engagement with Marx and contains no serious political philosophy of any stripe. And is Xi – who personally cleared the way for Citibank to set up in Hangzhou, who sent his daughter to Harvard and who told Shinzo Abe that had he been born in America he would have joined the Democrats or Republicans – really best viewed as a dogmatic ideologue? Xi cares not about political philosophy but about loyalty and party discipline. One could go further. Is Xi Jinping Thought not better seen as an attempt by the state bureaucracy to sterilise the Marxist tradition in China? Rudd is only cursorily interested in the gulf between Marxist theory and the reality in Xi’s China, where GDP and employment are overwhelmingly in the private sector, independent trade unions are illegal and labour unrest is suppressed in an unending fiesta of capital. A higher percentage of the population in China receives income from ownership of capital than in the UK, Japan or even the US. K.M. Panikkar once described Chiang Kai-shek as ‘a democratic president who believed in military dictatorship’. Rudd appears to think Xi is a capitalist dictator who believes in Marxism.
In 2015, Xi’s childhood friend Yi Xiaoxiong wrote that the dominant ideology in contemporary China is vulgar nationalism. But, as in the West, one cadre’s guojia zhuyi (nationalism) is another’s aiguozhuyi (patriotism). While he has little interest in pre-revolutionary political history, except insofar as it bequeathed Chinese culture, Xi is wedded to the idea of China as an antique and continuous civilisation. He likes to decry Western values and to talk up ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’. He oversaw the insertion of ‘wolf warrior’ party ideologues into the diplomatic corps in the late 2010s. Rudd concludes that this is part of ‘a full-blooded ideational and nationalist struggle against the Western world’. He sees Xi’s use of the phrase ‘great changes unseen in a century’ as evidence of plans to supplant the American empire. But for the most part Xi keeps any talk of the decline of American power in abstract terms. He is much more outspoken about US influence in East Asia, as in a 2021 declaration in which China is described as being ‘confronted with various types of external encirclement, suppression, disruption and subversion’. The 2025 national security white paper listed as a first-order concern ‘the US-led Western bloc’s provocations in China’s periphery’.
In his speeches, Xi talks of an ‘independent foreign policy of peace’ and a commitment to the UN Charter. China’s Global Governance Initiative is supposed to promote ‘democracy in international relations’, multilateralism and the rule of law. For Rudd, these commitments amount to no more than seeking ‘the international moral high ground’. Behind them lies an ambitious ‘mega-project to rewrite the entire international system’. He speculates, without real evidence, that China might seek to replace the UN Charter with a ‘new emerging Sinocentric structure’. This view is somewhat supported by China’s territorial claims to islands in the South China Sea, its incursions into Taiwanese airspace and its border scuffles with India. When, in September, Xi posed with Putin and Kim Jong-un on the balustrade of Tiananmen Gate to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, China hawks reacted strongly. But China is more committed to the status quo international institutions than America is. One would search in vain for reports of China bombing Somalia for days on end or conducting airstrikes on unidentified boats in the Caribbean or abducting the president of another country and spiriting him back to Beijing.
Rudd describes a speech given in 2021 by the director of the party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission, Yang Jiechi, at a meeting with the Biden administration in Alaska. The speech contained a lengthy and quite accurate critique of US foreign policy that surprised the US delegation. But Jiechi also said that China’s core policy was ‘no confrontation, no conflict, mutual respect and win-win co-operation with the United States’. There is a strong tendency in Anglophone analysis to fit all evidence into a master narrative of Chinese nefariousness. As the writer Zichen Wang has pointed out, peaceful rhetoric by Chinese leaders is invariably classified as deceit while more aggressive comments are taken as revealing true intentions: ‘Why should the hawkish half be coded as truth and the doveish half as a lie? What principle justifies ignoring one half of the record?’ Far better to conclude that China, like other states, mixes diplomacy with deception and self-justification.
Rudd claims that China’s low view of the US is a product of Xi’s political philosophy. The argument is stronger that something like the opposite is the case. To the extent that China’s view has shifted under Xi, this can’t be separated out from the rise of the China hawks in Washington in 2011, the ‘confront China’ rhetoric of the 2016 election, the 2018 US National Defence Strategy, Jake Sullivan’s institutionalisation of China containment during the Biden years and the establishment in 2021 of a dedicated China mission centre – at the time the only one formed for a single country – at the CIA.
The Sino-American relationship remains fraught. The US and China have irreconcilable positions on Taiwan. On the US side there is still a desire to maintain a sphere of influence that only stops at China’s borders. China would like to roll it back, and assert one of its own. Earlier this year, the US Air Force dug out and restored the runways on the Pacific island of Tinian from which the Enola Gay and Bockscar took off in 1945. But there are also signs of relations easing. The latest round of the US’s poorly conceived and ill-executed trade war has begun to peter out. When Xi and Trump met in Busan on 30 October, Trump referred to it as a meeting of the G2. The two sides agreed to lower tariffs and suspend export controls on rare earth elements and semiconductors. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, published in December, focused on keeping the US ‘pre-eminent in the Western hemisphere’ and gave less space than usual to bellicose rhetoric about China. At the Busan meeting, Xi said he and Trump were responsible for ‘the steady sailing forward of the giant ship of China-US relations’. It is possible that the US and China will be able to find a modus vivendi based on China’s emergence as a third pole of the world economy, even if this is likely to be just a lull in a long saga.
If China were run by someone other than Xi, would the general picture look very different? I suspect not. Xi did not capture the state. The party, or its interests, produced him. Diaspora critics fantasise about concealed power struggles. Every year when Xi goes on holiday, the Economist publishes an article claiming he has become ‘elusive’. But political evolution in China is not as contingent as those approaches would suggest. Speculation about succession is one of the favourite sports of intelligence desks but with China it is, for want of a better phrase, a dead end. Xi must have thought about the succession problem but the nature of that thought will remain obscure. The consensus is that he will hold on to power at the 21st party congress in 2027. It’s plausible he will rule until 2032 and beyond. He is only 72, after all. He may be delaying succession planning with the intention of staying in power indefinitely. Or he may already have a successor in mind whose identity is wisely concealed. There’s no way to know. His father lived to 88; his mother is still alive at 99; and he has access to excellent healthcare.
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