Kevin Rudd says Xi Jinping's ideology is driving China's behavior

Kevin Rudd has spent years trying to map Xi Jinping’s decision-making, and his conclusion is that China’s leader is driven by an ideology that reaches from the party center to the country’s foreign policy. The former Australian prime minister’s 2024 book, On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World, grows out of a 2022 DPhil at Oxford University and argues that Xi’s governing logic is not ad hoc power politics but a coherent worldview.

Rudd describes that worldview as “Marxist Nationalism.” In his account, Xi pushed Chinese politics to the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left and foreign policy to the nationalist right. He has also said Xi is ideologically closer to Mao Zedong than to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao or Deng Xiaoping, a judgment that places the current Chinese president in a far more ideological tradition than the reform-era leaders who preceded him.

That reading matters because it turns Xi’s domestic crackdowns and external posture into expressions of the same system. Oxford University Press describes the book as an authoritative account of how Xi’s worldview drives Chinese behavior at home and on the world stage, while the thesis submitted at Oxford says China’s ideological worldview changed significantly under Xi and summarizes it as “Marxist-Leninist Nationalism.” The common thread is a party-first model in which the Chinese Communist Party holds near-total control and ideology is again central to decision-making.

For the West, that has direct policy implications. If Xi sees politics through a Leninist and nationalist lens, trade disputes are not just about tariffs or market access but about state control and strategic leverage. Taiwan is not just a regional flashpoint but a test of nationalist legitimacy. Security competition with the United States becomes harder to separate from Beijing’s ideological project, because Xi’s worldview is tied to China’s challenge to the U.S.-led international order.

Rudd’s own career gives his argument added weight in policy circles. He served as Australia’s prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013, became Australia’s ambassador to the United States in 2023 and founded the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in 2022. Professionally proficient in Mandarin and long familiar with China, including study in Taiwan, he has presented this work at the Council on Foreign Relations, Asia Society, Harvard and other institutions as a guide to how Beijing’s ideology shapes state behavior, diplomacy and strategy.