What Xi Jinping Wants

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2026

⏱️ 104 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You can’t understand China today without understanding its president, Xi Jinping. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has doubled down on communist ideology and significantly consolidated his own power while transforming China into an industrial juggernaut unrivaled in the world. And Xi’s ambitions for China go far beyond that. So what does Xi want for China in the coming years? And how should the United States respond? Kevin Rudd has a unique perspective on these questions. He first met Xi in the 1980s, when Rudd was a China analyst in Australia’s foreign service and Xi was a local party official. Decades later, when Rudd was the prime minister of Australia and Xi was China’s vice president, the two men got to know each other better. And after leaving office, Rudd decided to really try to understand Xi; his latest book, “On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World,” is built off the doctorate he pursued at Oxford after his time as prime minister. Rudd recently finished a stint as Australia’s ambassador to the United States and is now the global president and chief executive of the Asia Society. In this conversation, Rudd explains Xi’s ideology and the forces that shaped it, his ambitions for China and strategy for achieving them, and what Xi thinks of the United States and Trump. Mentioned: On Xi Jinping by Kevin Rudd The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd Book Recommendations The Party’s Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian The Souls of China by Ian Johnson Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Steph Khoury, Dani Dillon and Kristen Williamson. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker and Diane Wong. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Joseph Torigian and Eyck Freymann. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy and Marlaine Glicksman.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Since 2012, Xi Jinping has been the leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
0:30.8	He has consolidated power to a level very few people ever expected.
0:35.4	And under his role, China has strengthened technologically,
0:38.7	diplomatically, militarily. It is now widely understood to be an industrial juggernaut on a scale
0:44.5	the world has never seen. And in a way, the world does not quite know how to respond to. But Xi Jinping's
0:50.7	ambitions for China go far beyond that. In the long term, he wants China to be
0:54.4	the preeminent world power. In the near term, he wants it to control Taiwan. You cannot
1:01.3	understand modern China what it is now and where it is going without understanding
1:06.3	Xi Jinping and the power he wields and the ideology that drives him.
1:16.3	My guest today is Kevin Rudd, who has had a unique way of trying to understand that ideology from many different angles.
1:18.9	Rudd has this kind of amazing biography began as an Australian Foreign Service officer,
1:23.0	serving in China.
1:24.3	He's a fluent Mandarin speaker who rose to be prime minister of Australia in the late
1:29.0	2000s. Along that rise, he got to know Xi personally in a way very few other world leaders have.
1:34.5	Then after serving his prime minister, Rudd went on to pursue a doctorate at Oxford, and he wrote
1:38.6	his dissertation on Xi Jinping's ideology, reading everything that has come out under Xi's name,
1:44.0	which is quite a lot.
1:45.7	He's published that in a book on Xi Jinping. He's also the author of the Evoidable War.
1:51.3	He recently served as the Australian ambassador to the U.S., and he is now the president of the Asia
1:56.7	Society. And so he has a really rare set of perspectives. He has an academic perspective,
2:04.0	a diplomatic perspective, a political perspective on China and Xi Jinping and the U.S.-China
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 21 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New York Times Opinion and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.