On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World Kevin Rudd. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 624 pp. US$39.99; £26.30 (hbk). ISBN 9780197766033
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this substantial and ambitious work, former Australian prime minister and noted China expert Kevin Rudd presents a forceful and detailed discussion of the ideological foundations shaping Xi Jinping's governance and policymaking.The book, an updated version of Rudd's 2022 doctoral dissertation, argues that Xi has articulated a coherent ideological framework that Rudd terms "Marxist Nationalism."According to Rudd, Xi has taken "Chinese politics to the Leninist left, Chinese economics to the Marxist left, and Chinese foreign policy to the nationalist right," producing a system that blends ideological orthodoxy, statist economics and aggressive nationalism.After outlining key concepts and providing a historical survey of Chinese worldviews, Rudd moves to an analysis of Xi's rule across multiple domains: chapter two defines the Leninist left as the CCP's absolute political and ideological control over state, society and nation, while the Marxist left refers to increased state intervention in the economy, including industrial policy and support for state-owned enterprises (SOEs).The nationalist right captures Xi's assertive foreign and security posture.Chapters three and four discuss Xi's change to the Chinese worldview.Chapter five explores Xi's concentration of power and the CCP's deep penetration into media, education, religion, law and culture.Chapters six to eight detail Xi's economic agenda, including accelerating the timetable to end the "Primary Stage of Socialism," halting post-1978 liberalizing reforms, promoting state-led industrial policy, and curbing the private sector.Chapters nine to twelve focus on Xi's nationalism: his call for the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," efforts to reshape global power dynamics, and attempts to forge a "new type of relationship" with the United States.Rudd's analysis is valuable in emphasizing ideology as a driver of policy -a perspective often neglected in analyses that treat China as purely pragmatic or opportunistic.His attempt to engage with Party texts and speeches to discuss Chinese domestic and external affairs offering a window into Xi Jinping's ways of governance is well taken.So are his attempts to explore the continuity and evolution of Party-led governance.However, the book suffers from conceptual weaknesses and interpretative shortcomings that limit its explanatory power.Rudd's understanding of Marxism is filtered through Chinese and secondary sources (pp.35-36).As such, his core concept is inherently problematic.Classic Marxism views nationalism as a bourgeois construct that obscures class struggle and hinders international proletarian solidarity.Marx's dictum that "the proletariat has no motherland" and Lenin's focus on internationalism both stand in stark contrast to Xi's brand of patriotic mobilization.By labelling Xi's programme "authentically Marxist," Rudd sidesteps the tension and contradictions between Marxist
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".