What Xi Jinping Wants
About this episode
Klein interviews former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, who wrote a doctoral thesis on Xi Jinping's ideology, about what Americans misunderstand about China's leader. Rudd argues Xi is a genuine Marxist-Leninist dialectician who believes China's rise is the inevitable correction of a historical wrong, with nationalism turbocharging that mission. They trace Xi's formation during his father's purges in the Cultural Revolution, his conclusion that suffering purges bourgeois individualism and hardens party loyalty, and his Leninist faith in veins of steel. Xi read the Soviet collapse as proof that political liberalization is fatal, Rudd says, which explains the crackdowns on speech, religion, and entrepreneurs like Jack Ma. Taiwan is the one mission Xi has not fulfilled, making 2028 a danger point for miscalculation. Rudd prescribes managed strategic competition: firm red lines, competing where interests diverge, cooperating where they converge.