Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Xi Jinping: He Is a Shrewd Observer of Power

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd provided an in-depth analysis of Xi Jinping's dual perspective on the United States: on the one hand, based on his Cultural Revolution experience and family background, he is a power-sensitive realist observer who deeply understands and acknowledges America's powerful pillars in military, economic, technological, and dollar dominance; on the other hand, as a Marxist-Leninist, he holds a historical materialist view that the world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, that Western power is entering structural decline, and that the historical trend of the East rising and the West declining is tilting toward China.

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Underpinning his view of the United States is two things, each of which, pardon the expression, are in dialectical tension with the other. I'm an old-fashioned Australian dialectician. There's only one or two of us. The first tension is this. When he looks at the United States, he still sees the three great anchoring pillars of U.S. power. The power of the US military, the power of the US economy slash its technology, and the power of the US dollar. So when you strip away all the sentiment, Hollywood and soft power, you know, all that sort of stuff, because he's a Leninist he looks at power to survive in the Chinese political system, you look at power, is that guy going to shoot me or not.

So his training through his father, Xi Zhongxun, who remember was a military commander during the Revolutionary War and had been purged on a number of occasions by Mao Zedong, his experience of the Cultural Revolution and being on the wrong side of power, he is an acute student of power. And so the fundamental view, whether it's with President Trump or with anybody else, is his opinion. These are the internal debates of those countries, day by day, and you have very few, he is in Washington D.C. and also underground, in those countries, this is what you call a democracy here, it is the cloud they look past, and then they look at where do these three matrices of power now stand.

That was the first one, the second is this. Because he is a Marxist-Leninist and not just a Leninist, he has a Marxist view of history, which is about the ultimate linear march of progressive forces versus reactionary forces, progressive countries, reactionary countries. The winds of history are now blowing in China's sails as the overall what the Soviets would have called correlation of forces moves inexorably in China's direction. That is its power is rising in relative terms militarily. We can all recite the stats. It is economically from where they were decades ago where they are now as the second largest or broaching largest economy in the world depending on which measure we look at and the technology stakes i'm sure we'll get on to later in the conversation so.

But when Xi Jinping, as you know as an accomplished China analyst Ryan uses the phrase, the world is experiencing events now that we have not seen in a hundred years. That's code language for a Marxist view of history which says that this unipolar world is becoming a multipolar world, in fact the deep code language it's become bipolar world and then a china-led world, that this is happening. And when he looks through the lens of U.S. domestic politics the fragmentation here, when he looks at American preoccupation with wars and military engagements beyond the Indo-Pacific, e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and when he looks at even the regulatory debate here about how do you constrain the AI titans in the valley, the lens through which he sees that is that these represent elements of structural decline.

So what's the dialectic here? A deep realist view of the continuing drivers of US power, and parallel to that, a Marxist view of history which sees the US, the West, the rest in decline. Remember, though they don't use it as much anymore because they thought it was getting hubristic, Dungshengxijang, the rise of the East, the decline of the West, being in fact another leitmotif of this Marxist view of history.