Last Friday, in a joint event with Asia Society Policy Institute, we hosted the launch of On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World (Oxford University Press, October 2024) by Dr. Kevin Rudd, Former Prime Minister of Australia and former President of Asia Society. In the book, which was reviewed in these pages here, Rudd explores Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview, how that was shaped by Xi’s understanding of Marxism and Leninism, and its implications for China’s political direction and global influence, based on deep research of Xi’s own writings.
Joining Rudd on stage to moderate the conversation were New York Times journalist Li Yuan, and Asia Society Vice President Orville Schell:
Speakers
Kevin Rudd has served as Prime Minister of Australia from 2007-10, and Australia’s Ambassador to the U.S. since 2023. He was inaugural President of the Asia Society Policy Institute from 2014, and President of Asia Society from 2020-2022. He is a scholar of Chinese politics, receiving his doctorate from Oxford University in 2022. His new book is On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Li Yuan writes The New New World column for The New York Times, which focuses on the intersection of technology, business, and politics in China and across Asia. Before joining The Times in 2018 she worked at The Wall Street Journal in New York, Beijing and Hong Kong. She is a co-founder and host of the Chinese-language Bu Mingbai Podcast.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and co-publisher of the China Books Review. He is a former Professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of over ten books about China. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs and other publications, and has traveled widely in China since the 1970s.
“Xi Jinping has been deeply traumatized by the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. … For him, ideology is in part the answer, together with the disciplines of a Leninist party, to hold the country together and to prevent what he saw as the implosion of the Soviet Union.”
Kevin Rudd
The video of this talk was also published at Asia Society. ∎