What Xi Jinping Wants

**Ezra Klein** (0:01)
It's your day to play. It's your morning to make the most of.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
It's your way to love.

**Ezra Klein** (0:06)
It's your climate to consider.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
It's your answer to what should I watch? It's your money to save.

**Ezra Klein** (0:12)
It's your song to analyze line by line. It's your 10 ways to find a little calm.

**Kevin Rudd** (0:19)
It's your world to understand.

**Ezra Klein** (0:22)
The New York Times.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:24)
Find out more at nytimes.com/yourworld.

**Ezra Klein** (0:55)
Since 2012, Xi Jinping has been the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He has consolidated power to a level very few people ever expected, and under his rule, China has strengthened technologically, diplomatically, militarily. It is now widely understood to be an industrial juggernaut on a scale the world has never seen, and in a way the world does not quite know how to respond to. But Xi Jinping's ambitions for China go far beyond that. In the long term, he wants China to be preeminent world power. In the near term, he wants it to control Taiwan. You cannot understand modern China, what it is now and where it is going, without understanding Xi Jinping and the power he wields and the ideology that drives him.
My guest today is Kevin Rudd, who has had a unique way of trying to understand that ideology, from many different angles. Rudd has this kind of amazing biography. He began as an Australian Foreign Service Officer serving in China. He's a fluent Mandarin speaker, who rose to be Prime Minister of Australia in the late 2000s. Along that rise, he got to know Xi personally, in a way very few other world leaders have. Then after serving as Prime Minister, Rudd went on to pursue a doctorate at Oxford, and he wrote his dissertation on Xi Jinping's ideology, reading everything that has come out under Xi's name, which is quite a lot. He's published that in a book, On Xi Jinping. He's also the author of The Avoidable War. He recently served as the Australian Ambassador to the US, and he is now the President of the Asia Society.
He has a really rare set of perspectives. He has an academic perspective, a diplomatic perspective, a political perspective on China and Xi Jinping, and the US-China relationship. He's really an amazing person to get to talk to about this. As always, my email, ezrapleinshow.nytimes.com.
Kevin Rudd, welcome to the show.

**Kevin Rudd** (2:54)
Thanks for having me on the show.

**Ezra Klein** (2:56)
Before we get to Xi, I want to talk a bit about your career. Not that many people go from being prime minister of a major country to getting a PhD and being a grad student again. Tell me a little bit about your path.

**Kevin Rudd** (3:08)
Yeah. Well, I seem to have this permanent appetite for career demotion. I was prime minister, then foreign minister, and then did a PhD, became ambassador, and now I'm running a think tank. So it's one steady slide for me. Why did I do a PhD? A lot of folks in the world, and particularly my former counterparts as international political leaders would ask me this question, hey, Kevin, you're a China guy. What does Xi Jinping think?
I thought I knew pretty well the answers to that until I began to have doubts myself about the authenticity of my answers. So I decided to force myself to read everything that this guy had ever written. I thought the best way to force myself to read everything this guy had ever written was to enroll in a DPhil at Oxford at the age of 59
That's exactly what I did. The principle at play was this, the male vanity principle, which is it would be too humiliating and too embarrassing having enrolled in such a program to then withdraw because she'd lost enthusiasm.

**Ezra Klein** (4:22)
It's a commitment device.

**Kevin Rudd** (4:23)
That's right.

**Ezra Klein** (4:24)
But you also had a history on China. You had begun your career working in the Foreign Service, do I have that right?

**Kevin Rudd** (4:30)
Yeah. No, as a kid, I started first year university with modern Chinese language, classical Chinese language, and Chinese history.
I'd done four or five years of that. Then because I was essentially unemployable in the 1980s, found that the only place that had an interest in taking on my talents was the Australian Foreign Service. Eventually, I ended up in Beijing. As one of their better Chinese linguists at the time, they did send me to Sweden first, just to make sure I would lose my language.

**Ezra Klein** (5:00)
What year were you in Beijing at that time?