Rudd Foresees a ‘Centrist’ China, but Chinese Dissident Says This Is Unrealistic

A paramilitary policeman stands ion Tiananmen Square in on March 15, 2019. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images

In his new book, “On Xi Jinping,” former Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd posits that the world needs merely to wait out Xi’s leadership, at which time China will resume a more centrist course.

The current ambassador to the United States claims this swing could happen as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader’s strict adherence to Marxist ideology takes its toll on the economy.

Xi’s objective is to “change the international order itself, underpinned by an increasingly powerful China as the emerging geopolitical and geo-economic fulcrum of that order,” Rudd argues.

He says the 71-year-old communist leader has shifted Beijing’s politics to the “Leninist left” by reasserting the leader’s power while shifting economic policy to the “Marxist left” by prioritising state planning over market forces.

At the same time, he’s moved foreign policy to the “nationalist right” by promoting grievance of the West’s past occupation and containment of China, and talking up the centrality of Chinese civilisation.

While Xi “understood what his predecessors were seeking to do by leaving the democratic door open for the next generation,” he had instead decided to “slam it tightly shut.”

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd during the public hearing at the Environment and Communications References Committee at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on February 19, 2021 Sam Mooy/Getty Images

His leadership “likely represents the period of peak danger on the possibility of war over Taiwan,” Rudd says, but tensions will settle when he’s replaced.

“Unless Xi can hold on for another 20 years or more, China, on balance, is less likely to become more ideologically extreme once he goes.”

Once that happens, China “would broadly welcome a return to the centre.”

The only way Xi’s attitude and approach would prevail is if he were able to “maintain power well into his nineties to appoint enough ideologically reliable younger cadres to enable his long-term political strategy to take root,” Rudd says.

Rudd’s Prediction Unrealistic: Chinese Dissident

However, the ambassador’s prediction of Beijing’s renaissance after Xi has been dismissed by a Chinese dissident in Australia, who said it was unrealistic and ignorant of China’s history.

Federation for a Democratic China Australian President Chin Jin told The Epoch Times that Rudd “only sees one side of the coin, while the other side either escapes his notice or he chooses to ignore it.”

While agreeing Xi has shown himself to be the most aggressive leader since Mao, the root cause of China’s problems lies with the regime’s “autocratic dictatorship,” Chin says.

“This is a significant political blind spot of Western figures who focus on the trees but fail to see the forest.

“The CCP’s fundamental goal has always been global domination, a vision it has held since its founding in 1949.”

The only reason Beijing was less expansionist under past leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and even Mao himself was that it lacked the strength to pursue its international ambitions, he said.

Deng Xiaoping introduced the strategy of “hiding strength and biding time” to lull the West into complacency. It is a combination of the country’s strength and Xi’s determination that the world is now witnessing and that will not change just because of a change of leader, Chin says.

“Kevin Rudd sees Xi Jinping as a threat to the world, but this isn’t just about Xi—it’s about the entire authoritarian CCP regime. Has the West realised this? Has Kevin Rudd realised this?” he asks.

From 1979 to 1989, China seemingly experienced its most politically liberal decade—after the failures of the Great Leap Forward—during which it had an opportunity for political change similar to Taiwan’s, Chin says, but the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 marked the end of this period.

After that, China focused solely on economic development, with no further political reforms.

A decade later, internal oppression markedly worsened as Jiang Zemin launched the persecution on Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation practice, including harvesting organs from its practitioners—a policy which has since been extended to the Muslim Uyghur minority and other targets.

Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner who survived the Chinese Communist Party's forced organ harvesting regime in China, shows his scar during a press conference in Washington on July 3, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Those actions predate Xi’s ascension by a decade, and show that it is the party, not just who leads it, on which the West should focus, Chin argues.

But that’s not to deny Xi’s influence.

“Xi Jinping has transformed China’s political power structure through his own ideology and personal dictatorship, absorbing the Chinese Communist Party and shifting control from party rule to Xi family rule,” he said.

“This effectively turned him into an uncrowned emperor. Amid the constant clamour of the ‘East rising and the West declining’ around him, the overconfident Xi aims to reshape the international order, with China’s growing strength serving as a new geopolitical and geo-economic pivot [to bring about this change].”

Former Foreign Minister and Ambassador Support Rudd’s View

Meanwhile, former Liberal government Foreign Minister Alexander Downer described Rudd’s book as a “good piece of work.”

“Having read just summaries in newspapers of what the book says, it seems to me pretty much on the money,” Downer told Sky News.

“Focusing on Xi Jinping being a very different leader from his predecessors, much more Marxist-Leninist, more Maoist if you like than his immediate predecessors, having swung the country hard to the left economically and becoming a very aggressive nationalist—I think all of that analysis is completely right.”

And former Liberal politician Arthur Sinodinos, who served as ambassador in Washington until he was replaced by Rudd, said the former prime minister’s depiction of Xi as an ambitious and aggressive nationalist, determined to have Beijing play a major role in shaping a new world order, accords with Washington’s view.

“I think the Chinese would no doubt see Kevin as fairly ensconced now in the Washington view of the world,” Sinondinis said.

Former Air Force General Says Move to ‘Centre’ Unlikely

At least one Republican disagrees with Rudd’s optimism of a less threatening China post-Xi, however. Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon—a former Air Force Brigadier General—said there was no evidence of this shift.

“I don’t see any indications yet that China is trying to come back to the centre. No indications they are trying to moderate. They want to take Taiwan in 2027. [But] I don’t think we should pick a fight either. We’ve got to have a strong alliance, and we’ve got to have a military budget that can deter them,” he said.