Kevin Rudd is a former Australian Prime Minister and the current Australian Ambassador to the United States. He is a Christian. He has recently published a 600 page book simply called “On Xi Jinping”. The subtitle of the book is "How Xi's Marxist nationalism is shaping China and the world." The book is a revised version of Rudd’s PhD thesis at Oxford University. It is an encyclopedia on Xi Jinping’s thought on every subject.
Writing about the book in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Tom Tugendhat, a former chairman of the British government’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, commented “The mistake many have made is not to read what China's most powerful leader in decades has said.” So Rudd is not so much commenting as simply reporting what Xi has said and written. "Rudd's analysis of Xi's ideology reveals a complex blend of Marxist-Leninism and Chinese nationalism dictating both China's internal policies and its foreign policy objectives. The aim is to transform China into a major global power rivaling the West with a new mandate from heaven. This ranges beyond the scope of political manifesto aspiring almost to theology.” “Xi views the world through this ideological lens, seeing the world as the site of competing ideologies. His goal is to restore China to its former glory.”
Rudd emphasizes two key elements:
The first is that Xi has led China back to the kind of thinking that lay behind early Maoism. “Xi Jinping is a committed Marxist and Communist, much more than any of his post-Mao predecessors. Most of the mistakes made by Westerners in dealing with China derive from the refusal to acknowledge that Xi is really an orthodox and almost fanatical Marxist rather than simply a pragmatic Communist. Ninety million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should download an app allowing them to study Xi’s thought and Marxism daily, and they should prove they use it religiously.” This emphasis on a manifesto “aspiring almost to theology” joined together with the “written word” of Xi Jinping thought which is to be read daily is a significant statement.
A second key point in the book is that Xi believes that religion had a leading role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. To many, it was evidence that Marxist theory had proved false when it predicted that Communism could not fail. It could fail, and it did in Eastern Europe. Xi reasoned that the failure occurred because the Soviet leaders had become less strictly Marxist and less ideological, a mistake the CCP should avoid at all costs. He also stated that Communist parties can only avoid this kind of failure and survive by putting their trust in a strong leader - himself. Xi’s analysis of what went wrong with Eastern European Communism is that it left free rein to civil society, including in some countries to Christian churches, which would eventually destroy it. No such mistake should be repeated in China.
Tom Tugendhat concluded that “Rudd's warning has never been more timely. We ignore Xi's clarity of ideological purpose at our peril.”
Sources: UK Sunday Telegraph and Bitter Winter
Pray for Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership as they govern China.
Pray for Western and other governments to discern how best to exist together with Xi Jinping's ideology in our shared world.
Pray for the people of China to have opportunity to hear about “true religion" - the way, the truth and the life which is only in Jesus Christ.
