What Americans Need to Understand About China

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.

So Rudd has a really rare set of perspectives — academic, diplomatic and political — on China, Xi Jinping and the U.S.-China relationship.

Ezra Klein: Kevin Rudd, welcome to the show.

Kevin Rudd: Thanks for having me on the show.

Before we get to Xi, I want to talk a bit about your career. Not many people go from being prime minister to getting a Ph.D. and being a grad student again. So tell me a little bit about your path.

Well, I seem to have this permanent appetite for career demotion. I was prime minister, then foreign minister, then did a Ph.D. and became ambassador. I’m now running a think tank. So it’s one steady slide for me.

Why did I do a Ph.D.? A lot of folks in the world and, particularly, my former counterparts as international political leaders, would ask me this question: Hey, Kevin, you’re a China guy. What does Xi Jinping think?

And I thought I knew pretty well the answers to that until I began to have doubts myself about the authenticity of my answers. So I decided to force myself to read everything that this guy had ever written, and I thought the best way to force myself to read everything this guy had ever written was to enroll in a Ph.D. at Oxford at the age of 59.

That’s exactly what I did. The principle at play was male vanity: It would be too humiliating and too embarrassing having enrolled in such a program to then withdraw because you’d lost enthusiasm.

It’s a commitment device.

Yes, that’s right.

But you also had a history with China. You began your career working in the foreign service. Do I have that right?

As a kid, I started first-year university with modern Chinese language, classical Chinese language and Chinese history. So I’d done four or five years of that. Then, because I was essentially unemployable in the 1980s, I found that the only place that had an interest in taking on my talents was the Australian foreign service.

Eventually, I ended up in Beijing as one of their better Chinese linguists at the time. They did send me to Sweden first — just to make sure I would lose my language. [Laughs.]

What year were you in Beijing at that time?

In Beijing from ’84 through until virtually the beginning of ’87.

What was it like then?

It was China at its most dynamic. It was China opening up to the world for the very first time, where all things were possible under heaven. This was almost the high days and holy days of China’s international engagement, and it was fully two years before Tiananmen, which was the first great Leninist wake-up call.

I think it’s after this period, but when do you first come across Xi Jinping?

Well, it’s interesting. When I was a junior woodchuck in the Australian Embassy at the time ——

Is that an official term? [Laughs.]

Increasingly, yes. Basically, the guy who does the photocopying.

When I was there, our prime minister was visiting at the time — a guy called Bob Hawke.

And Bob wanted to go to places other than Beijing. So we organized for him to go to one of the newly opening-up cities, what they called a special economic zone, at a place called Xiamen.

I went to Xiamen to do the advance work, and I met with the then vice mayor of Xiamen, who was a guy by the name of Xi, given name Jinping. That’s where we first met.

Was it a long and extensive boozy dinner? No. But it was the first time I met the guy.

I’ve met a lot of politicians in my time, for my sins. Sometimes you run across somebody, and you can feel the gravity of history warping around them.

The first time I met Barack Obama, you could feel the weight in the room. It shifted things. Trump has this quality. I’ve met people early in their careers, and they just have that quality. I’ve met other people who don’t, even though they rise quite far.

What was Xi like? Did he feel different to you than other mayors and vice mayors and party bureaucrats? Would you have told me after that meeting: I just met somebody, and that young man is going somewhere?

Because I was a student of contemporary Chinese politics, I knew of his father, Xi Zhongxun, who was already a member of the Politburo. But I’d be fibbing to you if I said to you today that the room shook for me when I first met him.

Much later on, when I was prime minister of Australia and Xi Jinping was visiting Australia as vice president of China, I remember sitting in front of the fireplace in the prime minister’s residence in Canberra — it was winter — and spending a couple of hours over a glass of Australian red, talking about the state of the world with him, in Chinese.

That’s when I sensed that this was a man of history — for the simple reason that all of his references were about his place in the context of unfolding Chinese history. So that’s the first time in which I had that sense we were dealing with something, somebody, some person, who was unique.

Say more on that. When you say that he referenced himself in the unfolding, what was he unfolding, and what was his self-understood role? Because this was before he was leader of the party.

That’s true — and when his position was still somewhat contested. It wasn’t absolutely clear that he would become paramount leader.

The conversation, which, as I said, ran for a couple of hours, was free-flowing. We didn’t have interpreters.

Essentially, his thesis was that China is intrinsically a great power. Historically, it was demonstrated as such throughout a couple of thousand years of recorded history.

Not the 5,000 that the Chinese often boast about, but just a couple of thousand. Given we’re up to the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country as a republic, a couple of thousand is pretty good — and certainly, measured against Australia, it’s very good.

But he saw that the trend of Chinese history was: China was a great power when it was: a) unified and b) able to keep foreign adversaries under control and divided. And China collapsed as a great power when neither of those propositions held true.

So for those reasons, spinning into the 20th century and then into the 21st century, when I was meeting with him, he saw the contemporary mandate of the Chinese Communist Party as to maintain China’s domestic unity and to keep it free from external pressure so that it could once again become a global great power.

He wouldn’t say directly: I, Xi Jinping, therefore have a unique mandate to do this on behalf of 1.4 billion Chinese people. But for me, the subtext was pretty clear.

So Xi is a man with a sense of history. And also a man with a very particular history. You mentioned his father a moment ago. Tell me his story.

His father, Xi Zhongxun, is a fascinating figure in modern Chinese politics in the period of the party’s crucible, which was when they had to retreat to a place called Yan’An, in northwestern China, where they effectively holed up for the better part of 10 or 15 years.

That’s when Xi Zhongxun comes to the fore as a trusted military lieutenant in Mao’s system. But Xi Zhongxun also runs through a period whereby he is repeatedly criticized and, in fact, purged by Mao — including during the Cultural Revolution, ’66 to ’76.

And as we know from our study of human psychology, particularly in authoritarian states, such experiences of purges from the party center can either have one of two consequences.

One, it makes you even more loyal to the party because you have recognized your errors through this process of criticism and self-criticism. Or second, you turn absolutely hostile to the party as an abuse of Leninist power.

Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping’s father, was very much in the first category. In fact, he reminds me of that last scene in Orwell’s “1984” with Winston, where he realizes as he disappears into oblivion that he loved Big Brother all along, and the party always comes first.

That’s where Xi Zhongxun fits — despite being purged, always coming back to the party because the party knows best — a true Leninist.

I think Americans who hear that story, given our particular culture, which has a bit less experience with purges ——

So far.

When you were saying that, I was thinking about a number of people who have been purged or nearly purged from Donald Trump’s Republican Party, having watched some of them go down alternative paths.

So I agree with you — so far.

But I think we have a somewhat naïve sense that the natural reaction is the second reaction: hostility to the party, recognition of the tyranny. And even if you have to buckle under for a little bit, you’re always plotting in your heart.

So you imagine being the son of a person who is purged somewhat repeatedly, whose family, in a way, is humiliated by the party.

And has physically suffered. Been sent down to the countryside and lived in quite impoverished circumstances for several years, as a young Xi Jinping was.

I think people imagine it would create a hatred. You’re saying for many people, it does the opposite.

What did it do for Xi Jinping, and why?

Well, my analysis is that Xi Jinping, like his father, Xi Zhongxun, concluded that, ultimately, the party knows best and that, ultimately, the party has the nation’s interests at heart. It’s not to say that the party is infallible — they will make mistakes. But in the full sweep of history, we owe our loyalty to the party.

You’re right, most Americans would say: This is just nuts. In fact, all Australians will think it was completely nutso.

It’s simply not within our realm of lived experience if you’d been treated that way. But there’s something about Leninist induction that creates veins of steel in these folks, and Xi Jinping is of that ilk.

He’s ultimately unemotional about these things, ultimately absolutely hardheaded — some would say coldhearted — but absolutely resolute that this beast called the party is the engine that takes China into the 21st century, not just as a country barely surviving against the external predations of the West or whoever else but on its trajectory to become a global great power.

That’s why I always say to American interlocutors: Never underestimate Xi Jinping. Never, ever underestimate him.

You talk about Leninism creating, I think you called it, “veins of steel.”

I don’t think most Americans are very familiar with Leninism, either in its initial form — how it modifies Marxism — to say nothing of its Chinese form, which is a modification on top of that.

So what is this Leninism of which you speak?

Marxism, as we know, is an economic ideology, and it’s all about ultimately creating an egalitarian or equal society through an equal distribution of goods, but to be achieved through a process of dialectical change.

A Leninist party is designed to accelerate the natural historical forces of change through the active intervention of a vanguard party, which accelerates the course of history through its own violent actions. Therefore, it’s a history accelerator. That’s how they see it.

Of course, when applied to China’s own circumstances, this Leninism essentially has all the hallmarks of Stalin’s party. It’s like Stalinism frozen in time. It is an unrelenting discipline anchored in absolute loyalty to the leader himself, and this is rehearsed time and time and time again in the party’s internal ideological discourse and reflected in what the party does in practice.

We talked a bit about how Xi’s father was purged. He also becomes, at certain times, unpurged.

Mao dies, Deng Xiaoping takes over. And I think this gets into something worth talking about. You described it as a bit like the Stalinist party “frozen in time.” But then, because of its fealty to the leader, it is also able to make quite radical changes.

So how does the Communist Party in China — and beyond that, China itself — change after Mao?

It’s gone through, I think, two big changes. The first reaction under Deng Xiaoping, who effectively replaced Mao in ’78, was called the great period of reform and opening. “Reform” meant, basically, introducing market disciplines into the economy rather than state planning, and “opening” meant in order to grow, we need to open to the outside world.

He didn’t fundamentally change its Leninism. He certainly changed its Marxism. He changed the economic ideology in a quite artful way by saying that at this period of economic history, the factors of production needed to be fully unleashed in order to pull China out of poverty, and therefore it was necessary to contemplate and embrace a long period of inequality while that occurred.

When asked how long, he said dozens of generations — which, you don’t have to be a mathematical genius to work out that’s hundreds of years, dozens of generations.

That orthodoxy effectively enabled market-based reforms in the economy domestically and engaged with the capitalist world externally.

Which is how, frankly, a generation or two of Americans — and Australians, for that matter — became familiar with Deng’s China, Jiang Zemin’s (Deng’s successor’s) China and Hu Jintao’s (Jiang Zemin’s successor’s) China — because the overriding ambition was to grow the economy, bring people out of poverty and make China a global economic great power — effectively for 35 years, right through until 2012 and starting way back in 1978.

The second big change after Mao, though, is with Xi Jinping. He becomes general secretary of the party at the end of 2012. And he has changed that ideological script again back to what I would call the Marxist left — a much more state-driven and party-driven economy, with much tighter levels of Leninist control.

I want to track how he gets into position to do that. I was just doing my simple math — I think when Mao dies, Xi was 23 or so.

Thereabouts, yeah.

What are the positions he holds? A young guy, he’d been in the countryside a bunch, his father was a complicated figure. What is his path upward, and what makes him a figure who keeps getting promoted upward by the Chinese Communist Party?

Through this period of reform and opening, which is quite interesting.

If we’ve looked at our Machiavelli carefully, in “The Prince,” he often speaks of the need to mask one’s own ambitions and to mask one’s own ideas while being a loyal servant of the prince of the time before you end up in power.

Of course, there are parallel axioms in Chinese traditional political wisdom about that, as well. So bear that in mind as we trip through his political career.

By the late ’70s and early ’80s, he lands a position as the private secretary to the then minister for defense, whose name is Geng Biao — and this was before I met the guy down in Xiamen. He spent a couple of years doing that — and he’s always prided himself on therefore having something of a military grounding or military background.

He then undertakes prefecture-level positions as party secretary, where he often refers to how much he learned from working closely with the peasants on the ground.

As party secretary in a prefecture, your job is to raise local living standards to organize agricultural production to ensure that agricultural surpluses are able to be sold on private markets on weekends. So you begin to see the emerging of a local semi-capitalist economy.

So a kind of technocratic governance job.

Technocratic governance, and it’s a standard pathway to ultimate advancement. He then is elevated to become vice mayor of Xiamen, which is one of China’s four special economic zones at the forefront, not only of domestic economic reform, like in the countryside, but of opening to the outside world, where I encountered him for the first time.

I’m sure he does not recall meeting me. I’m sure he met a whole bunch of foreign barbarians at the time.

Then he slowly is elevated to the point that he ends up as the provincial party secretary of the entire province of Fujian.

He then ends up, for a long period of time, as provincial party secretary of the province of Zhejiang.

Then he ultimately goes to Shanghai as party secretary before he’s then elevated by Jiang Zemin to the center, when he ultimately becomes, in 2008, vice president of the country and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.

What is his reputation in this period? The Chinese Communist Party had 110 million members, many, many, many people vying in various bureaucratic positions for advancement.

Why is Xi unique among them — moving up and up and up and up? What are other people saying about him? What is he considered to be good at?

In the Chinese Communist Party ecosystem, it is invariably advantageous to be what they call hong’erdai, which is second-generation red. So because his father is Xi Zhongxun, and his father has been rehabilitated in the reform and opening period, it is of no small advantage in your own career elevation.

Mind you, his major competitor for the job at the top, a guy called Bo Xilai, was also the son of another revolutionary leader called Bo Yibo, and he was on a similar career trajectory.

For those of us in the China analytical world, these two careers were moving toward a point of collision. Of course, those in and around Xi Jinping and those otherwise opposed to Bo Xilai dealt with Bo Xilai. So that’s one element of his advancement.

The other is at a technocratic level, in terms of the growth data coming out of Xiamen, coming out of Fujian, coming out of Zhejiang and coming out of Shanghai. He has an impressive set of numbers to demonstrate to the party center that he’s not just a political show pony.

As I reflect back on his career, he’s always been a safe-hands sort of guy, keeping his provinces stable while allowing the private sector to do its bit.

I think sometimes from the outside, we look at the Chinese Communist Party and don’t see politics. We just see a lock-step organization. We don’t understand its internal workings very well. But it does have politics. It does have factions. It has a lot of people in it.

Why him? What is his pitch to the party, and what do his supporters want from him? What do the other factions fear in him?

What is the understanding of how he becomes a leader and why he becomes a leader and what it means that he is the one chosen to be the leader?

This is the question that many of us in the analytical world are least equipped to answer because we weren’t in the room. But let me have a go anyway.

The kingmaker at this stage is Jiang Zemin, even though he’d been formally out of the position for a decade. Jiang Zemin, a wise old bird — I met him a couple of times in my political life.

He loved to sing, by the way. We once had him in Sydney when he was mayor of Shanghai himself. He insisted on performing onstage at the Sydney Opera House, so we made sure there was no one else in the Opera House at the time. But he liked it. He was performing onstage at the Opera House. He could say he’d sung there.

Was he a good singer?

The Chinese would say, “Mama huhu,” which is, “Yeah, OK.” [Laughs.] A bit like me in the shower, you know?

Sure. A confident singer.

A confident singer. A man who likes to sing.

I admire that.

That’s right. It requires a limited level of self-awareness in order to really enjoy it.

Or the knowledge he can purge whoever doesn’t like the way he sounded.

True. Mind you, as a junior Australian diplomatic official at the time, I appropriately applauded his performance at the opera house. That’s kind of what you do.

But anyway, you roll the clock along. Jiang Zemin has worked out that there are problems in terms of party corruption, there are problems in terms of indiscipline, and there are problems in terms of allowing any further slide in control, given where they ended up in ’89.

So against the alternatives that they were faced with at the time, I think they saw in Xi Jinping someone who was a party guy, first and foremost. And second, having presided over three heavily reformist provinces — Shanghai, Fujian and Zhejiang — which were very much at the cutting edge of economic progress, they thought the economic reform program would be safe, the opening to the outside world’s economies would be safe, as it would be safe in terms of party political control.

I think that’s why they made their bet with Xi Jinping. And I think Jiang Zemin, by the time he died only a couple of years ago, would have been deeply surprised by how much Xi Jinping then set out to change the center of gravity of the Chinese political economy in a big way.

Why would he have been surprised by that?

Because he assumed that the economic reform program would continue, that there would still be a lot of space for the Chinese entrepreneurial class, that China’s international economic engagement would continue, that China would progressively integrate itself with the global economy.

Instead, what he saw, certainly by the time we get to 2015, is Xi Jinping turning the levers very much toward the Marxist left: greater role for central planning, lesser role for interim inequality as Deng had conceived of it originally.

At the center of this is Xi Jinping’s rehabilitation of an old Maoist saying, which was along these lines: It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about north, south, east and west, whether we’re talking about the government, the military, the academy, commerce or society — the party leads in all.

Xi Jinping pronounced that and brought it back with a certain Maoist flourish. That’s what would have surprised Jiang Zemin.

The other thing that I had heard of him being known for was a series of anti-corruption campaigns. Tell me about that side of his story.

During the period in which he was party secretary, I haven’t seen a strong evidence trail that he had led crackdowns against corruption at the provincial level. At the same time, as soon as he takes over as party general secretary for the entire Communist Party at the end of 2012, almost the first thing he does is to launch a nationwide anti-corruption campaign.

So he has been, I think, observing, noting, seeing how corruption under his predecessors had moved from a retail level to a commercial level to an industrial scale, and he very quickly draws out the analogies with the collapse of the C.P.S.U. — the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — and says, in effect, that the fish rots from the head.

What happens when a fish rots from the head is that ideological corruption gives rise to physical corruption, gives rise to the dissipation of all forms of political discipline. He saw that as fundamental to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has become this long-playing training video for various folks in the Chinese Communist Party of everything that you should not do.

Tell me about — as you understand it, because he’s written quite a lot about it — the way that Xi Jinping would narrate the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.

Because I think the story here that is largely believed is that the Soviet Union collapsed under its own contradictions and Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup and moral leadership.

But that’s not how they see it in China. How does Xi Jinping see it?

One, remember that in the Gorbachev period, it was governed by these dual disciplines of glasnost and perestroika, which translated effectively to “glasnost” meaning “opening” and “perestroika” meaning “reform.”

Sound familiar to reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping?

So he’s got this rolling around in the back of his head that if you unleash too much of the capitalist impulses of the Chinese people, like the Russian people, then ultimately you’re going to shake the inherent disciplinary structures of the ruling party. That’s Point 1.

Point 2 is what he said particularly in a remarkable speech he gave in 2013 to a meeting of funsters, otherwise called the propaganda and ideology department of the C.C.P. That would be a fun conference if ever you want to go to one. I’ve never been invited, but I think that’s where they really get into their Marxism and Leninism and propaganda together.

That’s where he spoke most clearly about the corrosive influence of capitalist values and about the attrition of communist ideological values in the last days of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The third reason he gives in his extensive corpus of writings and teachings is his wistful reflection that there was not one single man prepared to stand up in the Soviet Red Army to defend the party when things fell to extremists in 1991.

It caused him to double down in terms of his determination that the party will always be in absolute control of the army.

You mentioned being in China not long before Tiananmen Square.

I’ve certainly read many histories of China where the sense is that the Chinese Communist Party’s response to Tiananmen Square — very different from how it’s understood in the U.S., as this moment of horrific crackdown and barbarity — is, in another sense, the moment the Chinese Communist Party decided not to be the Soviet Union.

It was not going to allow an economic opening to lead to the kind of social rights and discontent that could shake their power.

I’d finished my diplomatic posting by then, but I happened to be back in Beijing at the time, working in a different incarnation. We arrived in Beijing on the 20th of May, which was the day they declared martial law. They were already into that massive set of student protests within the square. The military crackdown, when all the students were killed, was on the 4th of June.

So because our entire program of whatever else we were supposed to be doing was canceled because of the chaos, I then went wandering in the square for a week to talk to all these kids.

It was remarkable to see the spontaneous outburst from kids — and not just kids, not just university students, but from other units of the Chinese Communist Party, calling out for freedom and democracy.

I remember walking to the square for the first time, coming down across the ceremonial bridges in front of Mao’s portrait beneath the Gate of Heavenly Peace, to look at the square for the first time.

I’d seen the square on multiple occasions when it was full of the normal Communist Party paraphernalia. This time it was like a massive comprehensive exercise in iconoclasm. To the left was the museum for the history of the Chinese Revolution, which had one giant flag planted on top in the Chinese characters saying “minzhu” — democracy.

The Great Hall of the People, full of big character posters, calling for the purge of a whole bunch of people within the Chinese leadership who are old-fashioned leftists. And then in front of you, there was this crowd of, I think on our particular day, half a million kids in the middle. It’s quite a large gathering.

The scale is unbelievable.

And then in front of them, as I looked, there were these parade marshals who were organizing individual protest marches of various units of the party. I looked to see which ones they were. One protest group from the Central Party School, another protest group from such and such foreign policy academy and so on.

As I wandered around the square and saw this sight for the first time, as a student of Chinese history — modern Chinese history in particular, but classical Chinese history, as well — I could feel the instinctive reaction of someone like Deng, an old-fashioned Leninist, who would just say: This is “gaoluan” — a Chinese expression meaning creating chaos. So I had this enormous sense of foreboding that the clock was already ticking.

So why did they do it? I think Deng concluded that unless he drew parameters around this, the party would rapidly lose power and, furthermore, that you would have this sort of chaos spread right across China. So they acted.

Through the rest of the ’90s until probably about 2000, there continues to be this internal debate within the Chinese Communist Party about whether we could execute a form of political transition to a Singaporean-style, long-term democracy or guided democracy, as they would see it, in order to create an exit ramp for the Chinese Communist Party over time.

After Deng died, in ’97, that debate rapidly reached its conclusion, and they said: No, we’re hanging on for the long term.

That’s where I see the fundamental changes having occurred. And remember, that’s a decade before Xi Jinping comes to power.

One thing we’ve seen under Xi is, first, a lot of consolidation of power, but also a pretty hard crackdown on Chinese civil society — rights lawyers, labor organizers, journalists, international NGO workers.

Tell me about freedom in China under Xi and why he has felt the need to do this.

From his first year in office in 2013, you could already see the directives going out to pull in the reins of control over the exercise of freedom in multiple domains. Religious freedom, for example, the independence of journalists — to the extent that they had it before, but they did have some. There was some investigative reporting underway.

The legal system, the independence of lawyers and also those who had been engaged in academic-level discussions about other forms of democratic governance experimentation in China at the village level.

Xi Jinping’s conclusion was that all these added up to an erosion of the Leninist control of the party. Therefore, crackdowns unfolded.

In the case of religion, because religious practice is so widespread in China, it’s not an abolition of all forms of religious expression. Not at all. But reining in anything that was not authorized.

So if you were to look at it in 2026, it’s vastly less free than it was a decade before.

More recently, we’ve seen some purging happening in the military. What have you made of that?

With the military, in particular, he has sought to reassert his control. It’s not just that we’ve seen multiple senior Chinese commanders, including those in the Central Military Commission, removed, but in the last several years, we’ve seen a hundred senior P.L.A. generals purged, as well.

What’s it about? Why has he done it? First, he genuinely thinks that corruption in the military impedes the professional capacity of the military to execute its mission in relation to Taiwan or other contingencies.

Second — and here it’s harder for us to reach these judgments, but I have some confidence in them — he’s not really prepared to brook a whole lot of internal dissent within the military or alternative views.

The most recent purge, for example, of Zhang Youxia, who was effectively the deputy commander of the Central Military Commission — a lifelong friend of Xi Jinping’s going way back, through their fathers — reflected an ultimately unemotional view that unless you are 1,000 percent on board the Xi Jinping bus, then it’s not the place for you.

In what ways were these figures, these officers, not fully on the Xi Jinping bus?

Here we have to speculate. It’s not as if they were engaged in preparations for a military coup. That’s not the nature of the beast. It’s more internal disagreement, I suspect, about the nature of levels of military preparedness for deploying the P.L.A. against and into Taiwan contingencies.

So an officer who says in a meeting: I think this would be a disaster — is not long for the world?

Or a senior officer who may say: Comrade Xi, I think we have two or three capability sets that need to be further improved.

That would be the more cautious way of putting it.

Whereas my suspicion is that Xi Jinping’s response to that will be to say: You guys are supposed to be providing absolute confidence in the system that we are ready. How can I therefore be trustful of your leadership of the system when you yourself are the sources of doubt?

That, I have to say, is a hypothesis. I do not have strong evidence for that. But it’s not just a corruption equation.

I’ve also seen American analysts say, for example, that the purges in the military make it much less likely that Xi Jinping would deploy the P.L.A. against Taiwan in the coming years.

My experience of these things is that for everyone who is purged, there’s a queue of 100 people waiting to take the job. The P.L.A. is a very big beast.

How much of the corruption campaigns are about corruption, and how much are they about control?

I think control is the dominant factor in the equation. Therefore, the ability of the system to be able to deploy a corruption file against anybody on anything is large in a formidable security apparatus.

Remember, in the organization department of the Chinese Communist Party, which is basically the uber personnel department, everyone has a file and on that file goes a whole bunch of stuff, and some of it may well be fabricated.

So it is ultimately about whether I choose to pull your file out.

For this Ph.D. thesis, this book, you read everything Xi Jinping has written, which is quite a lot. I find this to be an interesting thing about him — he is much more well published than most world leaders.

That’s true. Of course, at the end of the day, we don’t know how much is the hand of Xi Jinping, how much is his writing group of people who may get two or three lines of instruction and off they go, and how much of it is actually a formal party document that simply has his imprimatur later on.

I’m not sure that matters. I have a belief, which is not always shared in my profession, that the things politicians say in public are much more important than the things they say in private.

You’re absolutely right. Having been a political practitioner myself, you are very mindful as a political practitioner of the parameters you set for yourself for the future, for your party for the future and for the country — as opposed to private ruminations over a beer.

Yeah. Politicians will tell you in private all kinds of things they shade to the audience. They muse. When they say things in public, it is a steadier signal of where they’re actually going to go, and we treat it the opposite.

In my profession, we love the off-the-record comment. We love what is said over a beer. We think that is like a guide to the truth. And it’s often, I think, a way in which we badly get the future wrong.

If I understood the Republican Party from what Republican members of Congress told me privately over the course of the Trump era, I would have predicted it completely wrongly.

Whereas, if you take seriously what they do in public and their speeches, you get a fairly good sense of where it’s going.

Which is all to ask: What is the ideology of Xi Jinping that emerges out of these documents? You’ve described it as Marxist-Leninist nationalism, a turn to the Marxist left.

For an American audience who’s not that familiar with these terms you’ve been bandying around, what’s your synthesis of it?

Let me answer it on two levels. The first is I’ve read enough of Xi Jinping to conclude that he is a convinced Marxist dialectician. What do I mean by that? Because it’s not a term that we bandy around at Starbucks much here in New York.

It’s important we understand how the other person thinks, but more important, their methodology, their epistemology, the way in which they reach conclusions about that which is real and that which is not, that which is true and that which is false.

A “dialectician” — it sounds like a horrible word. It comes from Hegel, the German philosopher adopted by Marx and Engels. It is, essentially, a view of history that there are two fundamental sets of forces changing historical developments over time. One is called dialectical materialism, and the second is called historical materialism.

So what the hell is that? Dialectical materialism is a worldview by Marxists that says that change in society, the economy and politics occurs between this constant push between progressive forces and reactionary forces — which they describe as the forces of the working class versus the capitalist class.

Ultimately, one pushes hard against the other, overturns the other and creates a new synthesis: a Communist state.

So that’s dialectical materialism ——

Basically the inevitable historical engine that pushes through the capitalist state to Communism.

That’s true, and through the agency of what they call class struggle, or just struggle.

By the way, one of the things that Xi Jinping has rehabilitated as a term in China’s political discourse today is “struggle” — struggle, struggle, struggle — a term that largely disappeared during the Deng, Jiang and Hu period.

So bear with me for a moment. This is turgid stuff, and I apologize to your listeners.

This is a safe space for turgidity. They know what to expect. [Laughs.]

This is seriously turgid. I’ve had to read this stuff, and I wouldn’t recommend it to any of you unless you’re suffering from deep insomnia. I can give you the relevant chapters of my book, which will send you off to sleep.

But historical materialism is the parallel discipline that asks Marxist historians this question: Where are we in this current historical moment and the evolution of this inexorable struggle between progressive and reactionary forces, between the working class and the capitalist class, between working-class nation-states and capitalist nation-states in producing this final resolution through struggle of an evolution toward a Socialist and Communist society?

They say through historical materialism that China is now moving out of what they call the primitive stage or the primary stage of Socialism into something higher than that, and that the role of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi’s leadership is to further accelerate that change.

Applied to the nation-state, not just China’s society and economic experiment domestically, when they talk about changes not seen in 100 years — a favorite phrase of Xi Jinping — when they talk about the rise of the East and the decline of the West, these are all euphemisms for a historically materialist view that China’s time has come to emerge on top in this inexorable process of dialectical change.

It may sound like gobbledygook to you and me, and I don’t really subscribe to any of it. But we would be wrong to conclude that this is not the analytical mechanism used in the central organs of the C.C.P. to understand where China is today and where the rest of the world is today.

Well, let me try to build that empathetic bridge.

I think to most of us in the U.S., even the socialists — who sometimes pretend to be Marxists — I’ve met relatively few who truly believe in dialectical materialism or historical materialism.

I think if you’re here and you’re trained in the way we see our society, the way we do our thinking, the idea that history is linear or teleological in that way — that there are forces playing out that fairly inevitably are moving toward a certain end state — I actually find this the hardest thing to believe that other people believe.

I can imagine why you believe a Communist state is better or a social state is better, but the belief that it is driving in that way — that history has a direction — is, I think, often the hardest part of the pill to swallow.

But as I understand what you’re saying, it is that Xi Jinping and the Communist Party do believe that history has a shape. And that shape is very important to the way they understand their role and structure their governance and direct their society.

Is that fair?

That is a fair summary. Remember, this teleological trajectory of which you spoke just before has not historically been unique to Marxism-Leninism. There have been Judeo-Christian variants of this at various times in history, moving toward an ultimate telos, which is the realization of the kingdom of heaven on Earth, etc.

I’m a bit like you. I’m somewhat skeptical about both of these propositions. But when you describe and say that this is the way they think — that history has its own force, that it is moving, and you can make it move more rapidly through the agency of a Leninist party — that is precisely what they think.

We would be analytically derelict if we did not explain that to others because it underpins their ultimate analysis of where the rest of us fit in the world and where they think they are taking China today. They call it scientific Socialism.

But there’s another dimension. It is also, for Xi Jinping, specifically Chinese. Attached to this Communist or Marxist theory of history is also a theory of China’s history and its role in history.

So how does Xi’s nationalism, his story of China and its role in the world, play into this?

I argue in the book that, simultaneously, to these shifts to the Marxist and Leninist left, there’s been a shift to the nationalist right. By which I mean a permanent and growing appeal to China’s own inherent nationalism, anchored in its civilizational achievements in the past, anchored in the idea that we have been badly done by the rest of the world during the 100 years of foreign humiliation from the Opium Wars through the end of the war with Japan, in 1945.

And now we’re on this trajectory to make China once again a global great power — the global superpower — and to be proud about that. Be superproud about that.

So you have this turbocharge of history in the nation, with the nation now being the vessel or the vehicle through which this great ideological enterprise of Marxism-Leninism is realized into the future and will become the vehicle through which that is then taken into the world.

It has been much longer than I would like it to have been since I’ve been in China. My hope is to go back sometime in the next year or two.

But when I was there in 2010 or 2011, the most common thing that members of the party and members of the private sector said to me was that China was not going to be stable beneath something like 8 percent growth.

The way they described China to me was almost as a transaction between the party and the public, where public support for the party was dependent on this roaring growth rate.

And then I watched over time as that growth rate began to fall, and then under Xi, as the growth rate began to be deprioritized, as he began to do things that were clearly about control and ideology that were sacrificing that level of prosperity. I’ve wondered how much of this has been a turn from growth above all to nationalism as the new way you hold the country together.

Everybody seemed obsessed with the question of: How do you hold together a country as big as China? How do you keep it unified?

Is that accurate? I’ve always found this puzzling because it seemed to happen very fast. We went from this thing everybody was talking about to: Oh, we’re just going to experiment with actually letting the economy be much weaker than that — and doing so fairly successfully.

I think Xi’s response to the dilemma of national control is at two or three levels.

One, his first impulse is always ideological. Remember the analogy with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — we just need to get these kids to read more Xi Jinping Thought, and that will brighten up their day.

In my view, not an enormous recipe for success, but that’s his first impulse: double down on ideology and double down on ideological propaganda.

There’s the whole view that they can produce a whole new generation of what they call little pinks — that is, little reds, xiao fenhong — who will capture this vision, transcend into the future.

The second response to the challenges of national and political control during a period of sliding growth is simply the surveillance state. The so-called white-card movement was a protest movement where people didn’t hold up protest signs, they just held up blank white cards. Well, those people were tracked down through surveillance systems — their phone locations, etc. — and whisked away.

So understand that the surveillance state — through iris recognition, gait recognition, facial recognition and the monitoring of all your payments, which are all done electronically — means that, frankly, the tools available to the surveillance state today are stuff that Mao and Stalin would have dreamed of way back when. So that’s No. 2.

No. 3 goes to the core of the economic dilemma that the party faces at present. Effectively, through a series of central economic policy decisions, what Xi Jinping has said and what they are now doing is placing an absolute priority on the supply side of the economy rather than the private demand side of the economy as the growth vehicle.

The supply side of the economy is manufacturing, it’s industry, it’s high technology. It’s ensuring that we have complete control over our own supply chains, and that we progressively control the supply chains of the world. That’s what we’re doing, because against a future national security crisis over Taiwan, we will not allow our country to be vulnerable to external pressure. And that’s what they’re doing.

That is, therefore, sacrificing the normal evolution of private domestic consumption as the driver of growth. If you look at China’s domestic savings rate, which remains high, and the private domestic consumption rate, which remains low, relative to where they would normally be as a low-middle-income country, there is a direct trade-off here.

So we are likely to see continued lower growth in pursuit of these national economic, industrial policy and national security objectives in the economy with this trade-off. But the problem is: lower levels of employment, higher levels of youth unemployment and people, frankly, becoming increasingly disenchanted.

I want to zoom in on the youth protest movements like the white card movement. You also have people just lying down. There’s a sort of quiet quitting, so to speak.

“Lying flat” is the term.

Lying flat. It’s hard to know from the outside how meaningful things like this are, but typically when you begin to think about a society with sustained levels of youth unemployment, you imagine a certain ferment to that, a certain space of dissatisfaction.

Now there’s a lot of surveillance — a very, very powerful central party. But it’s also a party that does have to respond, at some level, to a public if it is disenchanted.

What is the theory of this? Does the Chinese Communist Party see this as a problem — or just see it as a discontent to be managed?

They see it as a problem, but in Xi Jinping’s calculus, they see it as the lesser problem against the greater problem, which is national economic self-reliance and national economic dominance in the driving technologies of the future — what they call, in the party’s discourse, the new productive forces, which is essentially A.I., quantum and everything else.

If you want evidence of this, just look at China’s Made in China 2025 strategy, which is the largest-scale exercise in any nation’s industrial policy seen in economic history.

So what’s their theory of the case? This massive investment in industry and in leading-edge technologies will ultimately produce a new wave of productivity in the economy, which will create a new wave of wealth, including in the related services sectors.

But this will take a while to wash through. In the meantime, maintain surveillance and do a certain amount to keep the economy and growth as stable as possible.

For example, the property sector has been the one in which most Chinese citizens have had their savings over the last 20 years. Over the last five years, the property market has collapsed through the floor through a series of policy and political interventions by Xi Jinping.

Xi Jinping, rather than allowing the property sector to collapse completely, decided, as of about 2024, to put a floor under it, to rescue some of the property development firms and also to ensure that people were not going to lose anything and everything.

So there’s an awareness that you can’t just allow private consumption to be destroyed completely. You can’t allow that.

But has that dissipated his fundamental ideological resolve to build this all-powerful Chinese industrial state that controls supply chains at home and abroad? No, it hasn’t compromised that one bit.

The bottom line is Xi Jinping’s response to a very disgruntled body politic was: What you need to do is to learn how to chiku, which is to eat bitterness. That’s what we’ve done throughout the most difficult periods of party history.

Of course, if you’ve got a formidable, all-seeing, all-dancing surveillance system across the country run by the security intelligence authorities, you can say “chiku,” eat bitterness, with some effect — because the system will be out there to round you up if you don’t do so accordingly, and with a smile on your face.

Well, let’s talk about the way he’s building that industrial juggernaut. There was a way of looking at Xi Jinping’s economic policy a few years ago that made it seem like he was, in many ways, decapitating the productive factors of the Chinese economy.

This is maybe a good place to talk about Jack Ma and Alibaba, which was the Chinese national champion, globally competitive, until Ma was seen as getting too big for his britches. And then something happened.

What happened to Jack Ma?

Well, Jack was always larger than life. I’ve known Jack quite a lot over the years in one form or another. If you ever listen to Jack’s English, you’ll notice an Australian twang. It’s not from me, but as a young person, he went off to Australia to learn some English. So we’re responsible for Jack’s version of the English language.

But the bottom line is this: Jack became adulated across China as the symbol of this new entrepreneurial class. This poor boy from nowhere could build up this extraordinary firm to become world leading. But in the party’s view, and in Xi Jinping’s view, he became bigger than the party.

Where all this came to a head was a number of years ago at what’s called the Bund Summit in Shanghai, which is an annual conference.

Jack decided to publicly attack the party’s financial management policies and how constricting it was on new forms of innovation in the Chinese financial services sector, where Ant Financial, one of Jack’s subsidiaries, would be a major participant.

Xi Jinping just cracked right down, and not just on him, but on what was then called the collectivity of the platform companies, including Tencent and a number of other firms.

Then there began a series of antimonopoly or antitrust moves against the size these companies had reached, and then that spilled over into a broader campaign against the excessive display of private wealth, private influence, ostentation and the private sector writ large.

That led to a further campaign to implant party secretaries in each of these private firms, and to say to these private firms: By the way, we think it’s a good idea under a mixed economy model that the state begins to take equity in your companies.

Needless to say, this didn’t lead to a set of happy campers among the Chinese private sector.

As a result, you began to see not only this trend that I referred to before — which is static or declining figures for private domestic consumption, consumers driving the future of growth — but private fixed capital investment also began to slide, as well.

Both these things created a dilemma for the party’s overall growth discipline. As you correctly said before, the unofficial social contract used to be 8 percent growth, then it became 6 percent growth. Hey, 4 percent would be OK, but it was beginning to slide south of that.

So they’ve tried to stabilize both of these things since about 2024. You may remember a high-level meeting in early 2025, when Jack was finally brought in from the cold together with others.

He had sort of disappeared for a while. You didn’t see him anymore.

Yeah. He’d been actively studying texts, and I’m sure that included Xi Jinping Thought, though I’m not quite sure. He wasn’t arrested, but he was not exactly completely free to move, either.

So there’s been an effort to bring these folks back into the circle, because even under Xi Jinping’s industrial policy, with cutting-edge new technologies led by artificial intelligence at the fore, Xi Jinping realizes: Guess what? State-owned enterprises can’t do all of this. In fact, most of the juice lies within the Chinese private sector. We’d better re-embrace them.

So there’s been an attempt to correct, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the fundamental move to the Marxist left, move to industrial policy über alles, move to China controlling global supply chains and the national party-state view of the world is still predominant. It is.

These other two corrections for consumers and for private entrepreneurs have been more at the margins.

Well, let me speak from what I think to be the American perception of China and how it has changed in this five-year period post-Covid.

There was a period when Jack Ma was suddenly gone, and you could see Xi cracking down on a bunch of these companies. Many people in the U.S., I think, had the view — especially since “zero Covid” was considered to have gone on way too long and been something of a disaster — that we were finally seeing the thing that had been long predicted.

Countries with that strong of a centralized government — call it authoritarian, call it Communist, however you want to frame it — eventually begin to break because the leader can make bad decisions, and eventually will. Paranoid decisions, power-consolidating decisions.

You saw China’s growth rate going down and thought that maybe this period of Chinese rise was coming to an end. This was very much how the Biden people felt things were as they left office.

And then I would say over the last two years, that shifted — again, this is my perception of the zeitgeist — to a sense now that China’s industrial juggernaut has jumped a series of levels such that it is no longer just copying America, but it can now do things America, to say nothing of the Europeans or others, cannot do.

It is nearly level with us in A.I. but much more able to build some of the underlying infrastructure of A.I., like energy. Its ability to produce electric vehicles, its ability to produce functionally anything, because of its manufacturing ecosystems, is now beyond where we are.

So it was wrong, this sense a few years ago, that the Chinese model was beginning to break down. In fact, whatever its problems, it has developed perhaps not economic prosperity but economic power that is very, very real.

In some ways, all of these stories seem true to me, and I’m curious how you think about that kind of whiplash that has been happening in the American story of the Chinese economy and its power.

Well, I think, Ezra, you’re right to describe that evolution of American perceptions, and American perceptions are not entirely detached from the underpinning Chinese economic reality.

Sometimes I worry, though, in this country where I’ve lived among you now for the better part of 10 years, that sometimes hope becomes a substitute for analysis and strategy.

Americans, or at least those in administrations of one hue or another, look at Chinese demography, they look at the slowing of growth, and they say: Yeah, we told you so. Problem fixed. And we move on.

It ain’t fixed. China is formidable. Particularly under a leader like Xi Jinping, it’s doubly formidable. And given his surveillance apparatus, it’s trebly formidable.

I think in terms of the periods you’re talking about, yes, post-Covid growth slowed. But underpinning it all was always this continued red thread of Xi Jinping’s core organizing principle, which is: I’m building the world’s most powerful industrial state, and I’m not going to let any bunch of private entrepreneurs or consumers get in the way of that. I’m just going to do it.

That was Made in China 2025, the technology objectives he set for himself in 2015. If you look at the double down in the current 15th five-year plan announced ——

These are technologies like semiconductors, electric vehicles ——

Yeah, E.V.s, aeronautics, batteries.

If you look at the list of where they were in 2015, which was nowhere much, and where they were by 2025, at the end of last year — frankly, as an exercise in industrial policy alone, whatever the economic inefficiency may have been in getting there, Xi Jinping regards that as a bit of loose change compared with obtaining the commanding heights of these new driving technologies.

America is keeping Chinese electric vehicles out not because they’re bad cars but because they’re such good cars. And if they came in here at their cost, they would annihilate the American electric vehicle sector.

I think this is a change. For so long, our theory was they’re copying us, they’re stealing our intellectual property. Now we are quite afraid, in some cases, of their intellectual property.

I think this has been a big evolution in reality. Does China engage in industrial espionage? Yes. Do they copy stuff that is obviously available through open patent? Of course. And they have the great advantage of scale, and they scale up rapidly given the automatic leverage of their domestic market.

But given their domestic market is still flat because of problems with disposable income, deploying this surplus capacity, this surplus production on global markets, is their next best step. And since America has erected the tariff wall, all roads lead to Europe, which is why you see such a huge reaction now from European political leaders.

That’s what’s unfolding, and it’s all of those things everywhere at once, and at a pace of knots. Like, this thing is happening at speed now.

Is it sustainable for China itself? Ultimately, there is a problem of finance, and we need to think this through. How does China finance this level of industrial subsidy?

For them and their calculus, this is a temporary exercise. That is: We will, through our level of industrial subsidy, ultimately destroy the world’s competition and opposition. Those will fold, then we can restore prices at a level that makes sense for us in terms of the cost of production domestically. But by then, the alternative sources of production have gone.

This is a very elaborately thought-through strategy on the part of the Chinese. And so far, to give them credit, it has worked remarkably well. But they cannot sustain it indefinitely.

They’re currently borrowing from Chinese consumers and their personal savings in banks to keep this whole thing afloat. Industrial subsidy, which is of an order of magnitude not seen in economic history before, cannot be sustained forever.

I want to slow this part down because I think it’s really important. Earlier, you were describing the problem that the Americans just sort of hope the problem is solved. Now what is the problem? How does one define the problem?

We’re not always very clear about that, but I think it’s something quite close to this: The challenge China poses to the rest of the world is that it is able to suppress domestic prosperity, take money from its own people and keep their wages down in order to put it into these industries to attain scale.

This would functionally make it impossible for other countries to compete in these industries. They will just be too far behind, and the Chinese goods will be much cheaper.

I mean, that is the theory, in part, of the tariffs you saw come out in the Biden administration, and obviously even more in the Trump administration. If China is going to make its products artificially cheap, we are going to make them artificially expensive. From that perspective, is that a wise strategy?

It is a perfectly logical response to the challenge that China’s industrial policy — which exists on the basis of massive industrial subsidies — poses.

The alternative is you simply allow the Chinese industrial juggernaut to dominate every single industrial and sub-industrial sector. We’ve already seen that in terms of critical minerals and rare earths, both raw and processed. If you want a case study of what that looks like in practice, look at that sector.

Not only did they dominate that, they were so dominant in it that they were able to break Trump’s tariff policy and break his trade war by simply threatening to remove our access to their rare earths and magnets and so on. They had leverage over us that we did not have over them.

The Chinese are highly intelligent, highly disciplined masters of economic statecraft, and they know where leverage lies. And because their political culture is dominated by a culture of engineers, they understand precisely, instinctively — before you get an elaborate, dumbed-down briefing to your average Western cabinet — where they stand against the periodic table of critical minerals and rare earths, how many they’ve got both on the extraction side and the processing side, and where they, therefore, will end up by year X in their ability to exercise leverage elsewhere.

I think I want to flip the question of what Xi Jinping believes for a minute. We’ve been talking about what he believes about China. What does he believe about the United States of America and about Donald Trump?

He hasn’t told me, so again, we’re into the realm of speculation here. But let me start with his view of America, and then we’ll move on to the president.

His view of America is that it’s the only country in the world potentially standing in the way of his national, political, economic and geopolitical ambition. Why? Simply because of your scale.

And second, for 100 years, you guys have represented, since the early days of Dewey liberalism, an alternative script for how you construct the politics of a country.

So when Xi Jinping looks at America, he looks at it through these two lenses.

You represent this massive alternative ideational force, and the attraction to that idea still causes many successful Chinese to go and live in the United States and the rest of the collective West, because “freedom” is not a hackneyed phrase, particularly if you’ve lived in a country where there is none.

But at the level of raw national power — the power of the U.S. military, the power of Indo-Pacific Command, the power of what you have in cyber and space and your nuclear forces, and the power of American innovation reflected through Silicon Valley — he looks at that and says: That’s the only thing that can get in my road.

That’s why America occupies this unique position, whether you’re run by Republicans or whether you’re run by Democrats.

We’ve talked about how Xi Jinping has a dialectical, historical view of China’s rise and Communism’s rise. Does that extend to a similarly inevitable view of American decline? Does the mainstream thought of the Chinese Communist Party believe America to be in a structural decline?

They do have this belief, and it’s expressed in two different ways.

There is a Chinese concept of what they call comprehensive national power. It’s a standard analytical framework for aggregate American power versus aggregate Chinese power against all indices of power. They look at the size of the U.S. military, the size of allied militaries and the size of their own military, and they make their own calculus.

They also make a calculus about the solidity of U.S. alliances abroad, and when those are under pressure or when they’re beginning to fracture. They also look at the solidity of the U.S. domestic body politic and the degree of unity and disunity against the predetermined unity of the Chinese unitary state.

Interestingly, they stopped publishing this stuff for the rest of the world to see what their conclusions were about 12 years ago. I think because the results were beginning to look increasingly indicative that China was really rising rather rapidly.

The second, in a propagandistic Chinese phrase, is “dong feng xi jian,” which is the rise of the East and the decline of the West. In Chinese political parlance, that’s a euphemism for China and the United States.

And if there’s a third phrase, it’s probably Xi Jinping’s oft-used phrase, including during his summit with President Trump most recently: The world is now experiencing changes not seen in 100 years.

He first began using that phrase in 2017 on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The internal interpretation of the phrase is that we, the Chinese — now with our own revolution, now going out into the world at large — represent as seminal and shaking an event to the certainties and certitudes of global politics today as the Bolshevik Revolution portended back in 1917.

Two things here. One is that in the time Xi Jinping has been leader, American policy toward China and American political elite thinking toward China has changed dramatically. It has become far more antagonistic. The sense that China would become more liberal and democratic as it became richer has dissolved.

The sense that we allowed China to take advantage of us has become a bipartisan theory, and that we are locked in a great competition with them — possibly a Thucydides trap leading to war has become fairly widely believed and certainly widely prepared for.

And, of course, American politics itself has changed, falling into this period of Trumpism and much more internal division. You wrote a book called “The Avoidable War” that was at least partly about this.

What is their narrative of us in this era?

They saw a sea change just under 10 years ago and during the first Trump administration, when the official American strategy toward China changed from strategic engagement to strategic competition.

H.R. McMaster, then Trump’s national security adviser, wrote that in the national security strategy, I think, December 2017. That wasn’t just a piece of language. You could almost hear the creaking of the entire machinery of the U.S. state across all agencies of power.

Before that, Obama talked about his pivot to Asia.

That’s true. But he did not have an organizing principle, which is that we are in a competitive relationship with China about which country becomes the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific and in the world. So that’s the big change.

That dominated the second half of Trump’s first term, and it really dominated the Biden administration.

Then, through until the most recently convened summit in Beijing, where we now have a different organizing principle announced for the first time — this time by the Chinese — called constructive strategic stability. And the White House briefing paper that came back at the conclusion of the visit said: Yeah, that’s the framework we accept, so long as it’s fair and reciprocal.

So what does that mean if you decode it? I think what the Chinese are seeking to do is to cause the United States to be more stable, less unpredictable and less antagonistic going forward.

What is it going to mean in practice? I don’t know. One of the advantages may be that the two sides begin to have an active and substantive negotiation on the regulation of the most dangerous and destabilizing forms of artificial intelligence, which is what came out of Scott Bessent’s conversations with his counterpart He Lifeng.

For the rest of the relationship beyond A.I. governance, I’m not sure yet.

I find U.S. policy toward China to be one of maybe the most major areas of policy where my own thoughts are most unsettled.

There’s one story that I think has become a more popular story, and I think you could extract out it of at least part of our conversation, which is to say: Xi Jinping and the C.C.P. under him are highly ideological organizations and individuals bent on eventually attaining Chinese supremacy, particularly economically and industrially, and you need to understand the relationship as having a competition and an antagonism at its heart.

You can manage that better or worse. You can manage it more erratically or more systematically. The Biden administration, I think, was trying to do it very systematically: build up American industries, impose very targeted tariffs and boundary certain kinds of technologies.

The Trump administration, I think, has managed it more erratically. But, fundamentally, openness toward China in this telling is very dangerous. You don’t want their technologies here, you don’t want their industries with too much penetration here, and you are trying to compete with them, not learn from them.

There’s another argument — and for me, I get nervous whenever anything becomes too bipartisan in Washington — that says: This is a mistake. You actually need to learn right now from things like Chinese E.V. manufacturers. You want technology exchanges. You want to understand their manufacturing systems.

You don’t want to make antagonism self-fulfilling. You don’t want to create a lot of room for misinterpretation. There are advantages, economically and otherwise, that openness creates. And the shift toward seeing it as fundamentally opposed is actually missing a lot of positive-sum opportunities in trade and innovation. If China has a lot of really interesting bio research coming out, if they invent new medications, that’s wonderful for us.

Where do you fall on this spectrum?

The third way. Let me explain what I mean by that.

One, as I’ve said before, don’t mistake the fundamentals here, which is that Xi Jinping and the party he leads are Leninist, and they have a very clear-eyed view of where they wish to be at home and abroad.

At home, it’s for China to become a fully developed economy. Abroad, it’s for China to be the most powerful state in the Indo-Pacific region and in the world — and to surpass the United States. So let’s just be clear about that. It’s an unemotional, clearheaded, realist, but ideologically driven view of the world.

What I’ve argued for a long period of time — and I think there are levels of agreement and disagreement with this approach — is what I call managed strategic competition: Accept the reality of the competition and manage it. It’s far better than unmanaged strategic competition, which can end in crisis, conflict and war.

What do I mean by that? Three points, really.

One, accept the fact that there are fundamental strategic red lines that they can’t cross and we can’t cross. Managing those red lines — particularly over the question of Taiwan, the South China Sea and the East China Sea — is the meat and potatoes of sustained deterrence. That actually creates the strategic stability for the rest of the management of the relationship to ensue.

The second element of managed strategic competition is for the economy writ large — whether it’s trade, investment, capital markets, currency markets, technology markets, talent markets, ideas markets, the ideation of the future, the liberal international rules-based order or one headquartered in Beijing — to make this a full and open competition, and may the best system win.

The third component of managed strategic competition is those areas that we define as in our mutual interest to cooperate on: the future of A.I. governance; preventing the next global pandemic, given how much we all screwed up on the last one, particularly the Chinese; the future of other forms of global public health, like cancer research and biotech.

These are quite rich areas for collaboration. My view is we can walk and chew gum at the same time in these three different domains — while recognizing that we’re not ultimately engaged with those organizing a Sunday school picnic.

Well, that brings up Taiwan, which is something we should talk at least a little bit about before we end. What I hear in your managed strategic competition framework is an orientation toward clarity. Where do we compete? Where do we cooperate?

Taiwan — the fundamental nature of that is ambiguity. America has a studied, ambiguous description of what Taiwan is and what is going on with it, and even what our policy toward it may be.

We know what Xi Jinping wants, which is ultimately unification and control of Taiwan, but we don’t know what he will do to get it or when. That’s the one where I hear the most constant concern because neither side, I think, really understands the other.

So how do you think about where the Chinese are on Taiwan, and then how do you think about the overall framework for managing that strategic competition appropriately?

Now, Ezra, this is a really important element of our overall conversation because it’s the most time-relevant in terms of problems that could arise before you and I look much grayer.

I look much grayer than you, by the way. My hair turned white because of the global financial crisis — I was in office at the time.

[Laughs.]

It might fall out if we have a Taiwan crisis.

So where is Chinese thinking on Taiwan? Xi Jinping has made it clear that he wants a reunification with Taiwan before the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic, and that’s in 2049. That sounds like an eternity away. It’s now 23 years away, so that’s not exactly an eternity.

Second, his policy toward Taiwan is increasingly hard and sharp.

Give me an example of what you mean by that. What is he actually saying?

He is saying, on the question of Taiwan, in his most recent engagements with President Trump in Beijing, that unless this is handled prudently, this is a very dangerous issue that could result in a collision and conflict.

He hasn’t used those formulations before. So these are not just: I’m shooting the breeze with my best pal Don, and this is what I felt like this morning after I’d had my waffle.

And he’s not like Trump. He speaks very carefully.

Yes, he’s a Leninist, and words are bullets for these guys, and they often result in bullets.

And then third, what do we see? The patterns of Chinese military exercises in relation to the Taiwan Strait move from just being abstract exercises of China’s military preparedness against, for example, a Taiwanese unilateral declaration of independence — which is, I think, a 0.0 percent possibility — to exercises that increasingly resemble rehearsals for either taking a Taiwanese offshore island, imposing a blockade or a full-scale invasion of the island.

Don’t we have satellite imagery of very precise replicas of various Taiwanese buildings for military exercises?

Well, because I’m still subject to various national security requirements, given my most recent job, you can speculate on that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

I’m just saying we’ve come across reporting on that.

That’s good. I’m glad that you’ve so reflected.

Anyway, we’ve moved from abstraction to reality. We’ve moved from ahistoric time to historic time.

In Xi’s calculus, he’s now 73 years old. He’s up for reappointment at the end of next year. He probably has a couple of terms in him yet. But he’s also, as a good Marxist-Leninist, looking to where the dialectical forces take him in terms of unique periods of opportunity.

Does he perceive 2028 as a unique period of opportunity? I don’t know, but I do notice a sharpening in his levels of preparedness.

Something you said at the beginning of this conversation is that he wants China unified and its enemies divided.

Say what you will about Trump, whatever you believe about him, this is — and he is — a divisive time and force in American life. The next presidential election year is 2028. There is not going to be a lot of appetite among the American people for foreign adventurism, particularly after the Iran war has proved something of a disaster. In America, there’s not a high level of commitment to Taiwan. It’s not a place we think about.

I’m not saying that Xi Jinping is going to choose to invade Taiwan at that moment, but he and the Chinese Communist Party see America as in a political and even terminal decline via historical materialism.

So I wonder how he sees this, and if this is a sort of moment of opportunity.

Yes, I’m worried very much that Xi Jinping could miscalculate in 2028. Why I say 2028, by the way, and not 2027 or 2026, is that the Taiwanese have their own presidential elections in January 2028. And if the existing Democratic Progressive Party, which is anathema to Xi Jinping, gets re-elected, it will be for its fourth term, and it has run consistently on an independence-leaning platform. Will they get re-elected in January 2028? I don’t know, but I think it’s a 50-50 possibility.

Does this, therefore, become a trigger for Xi Jinping to say enough is enough? Open question — given he will have just been reappointed as general secretary of the party the previous October or November. And he’s aware that 2028 is a presidential election year here in the United States.

What do I fear? A miscalculation by Xi Jinping about the level of American resolve. Do the Chinese conclude post-Iran, for example, that the likelihood of any American leadership to deploy forces in the event of a Taiwan crisis would be reduced as a result of the Iran experience?

And then there’s the more mechanical question of the extent to which the American arsenal depth, magazine depth and capability set have been impaired as a result of Iran.

So my concern as an analyst is: Could he arrive at a conclusion through a bout of excessive self-confidence that a unique opportunity has arisen? The danger is that he actually miscalculates.

To act against Taiwan would be to cause President Trump to look weak. And the one thing I’ve observed about President Trump in the last several years I’ve been in Washington: The last thing President Trump likes is to look weak.

So I think we are in potentially dangerous territory.

One question I hear from Americans is: Well, why should we care about Taiwan? Why is this our problem?

When you say: What if they miscalculate American political will? — they might calculate it correctly. There is an American elite commitment to Taiwan. Do swing voters in Ohio care about Taiwan? Does the American public, in general, care about Taiwan?

What is your actual answer to that? Why is the answer to Taiwan’s being a flashpoint actually to say: Maybe it shouldn’t be? Maybe it’s not America’s problem?

I think the reason you’ve had such buy-in to deterrence over Taiwan is not because of some feel-good American emotional commitment to those nice folks over there. It’s actually much more hardheaded than you would give credit to.

No. 1, it was the Congress that framed the Taiwan Relations Act back in 1979, at the time of diplomatic recognition of the mainland, which is a de facto form of security guarantee for the Taiwanese — and that’s an act of your Congress. Therefore, if you go to the congressional leadership, Democrat and Republican, they have seen themselves as the long-term custodians of that set of arrangements.

But the second is this. Let’s hypothetically assume, Ezra, that Xi Jinping walks into Taiwan tomorrow, decapitates the leadership, it’s gone, and it has now become China’s province. A fully fledged red flag goes up over the presidential building in downtown Taipei, and the first party secretary arrives to take over the administration of the province and the suppression of the locals, there having been much bloodshed in the process.

I think at that point, what Americans need to consider is what happens to the rest of the world’s perception and conclusion about U.S. strategic reliability worldwide at that point. It becomes very much the point at which the notion of Pax Americana disappears in the collective consciousness of allies around the world.

The Japanese, for example, may then conclude it’s time for them to go nuclear. If they go nuclear, the Koreans will conclude: Well, if the Japanese are going nuclear, we’ll be going nuclear.

In other words, the whole dynamic of this region changes.

And the third thing for Americans to consider: Is it the conclusion here in the United States that China, already having assembled the world’s largest surface fleet, for example, having taken Taiwan, that it’s time then to deliver to the Chinese people a grand peace dividend that we will then reduce the size of the Chinese military by two-thirds because we’ve achieved our historical mission, and we’ll all, therefore, have better social security payments as a result?

Unlikely, because Xi Jinping’s made plain that China’s power projection should be pan-regional beyond the Taiwan Strait, and because of existing behaviors, increasingly global.

And then I think there’s this final point, which is if you guys still see yourselves as the light on the hill, are you indifferent to places which have, of their own volition, evolved into democracies and to open societies and open economies around the world, like the 23 million people in Taiwan? And if you’re indifferent to that, what does it say about your indifference to freedom worldwide?

I think those are active considerations for the American body politic. But as a barbarian living in your midst, far be it for me to tell you what’s right or wrong.

So then what is a wise policy behind those considerations?

The wise policy is, in fact, the least expensive and most effective: sustained deterrence. If you sustain deterrence, and we therefore sustain the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, as Deng Xiaoping once said, we kick the ball down the road for future generations who will be much wiser than us to resolve this intractable problem.

I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Because we’ve been talking a little bit about China today, you’ll be pleased to know, Ezra, I’m not recommending a text on dialectical materialism. But one I thought might be of interest, given your line of questioning, and perhaps to those who are listening, is: Where did Xi Jinping come from? There’s a great book by Joseph Torigian called “The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.” It’s a great book and a great read.

The second is Ian Johnson’s “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.” It’s about what has occurred on the ground, at the grass roots, with the rise of various forms of Taoism, Buddhism, Protestant Christianity and other forms of religious belief as a reaction to the uber-materialism of China’s ideological orthodoxy. That is a great read.

The third one is by Pope Leo XIV — or as we would call him in Australia, Pope Bob I — a guy from Chicago. It’s the encyclical on artificial intelligence. I’ve been working my way through, and it’s a great read about the essential dignity of the human person and how A.I. uplifts that dignity or how it might impair that dignity.

Kevin Rudd, thank you very much.

Good to be with you, Ezra.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Steph Khoury, Dani Dillon and Kristen Williamson. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker and Diane Wong. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy and Marlaine Glicksman. Special thanks to Joseph Torigian and Eyck Freymann.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.

The post What Americans Need to Understand About China appeared first on New York Times.