Book Review Including Extensive Context - On Xi Jinping - The Telegraph (London)

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Kevin Rudd: ‘President Trump could deter China from World War Three’
Australia’s ambassador to the US knows President Xi Jinping better than anyone in the West, making him an invaluable voice of diplomacy

Toby Harnden – British-American author and journalist.

03 February 2025 6:00am GMT


The field of view through the arched windows in the Australian ambassador’s residence is one that appealed to General George Patton when he lived here almost a century ago. In the afternoons, wearing silk pyjamas, the future commander of the US Third Army after D-Day would take aim with his pistol at passing deer on the lawn.

Right now, Ambassador Kevin Rudd, who enjoyed clay pigeon shooting back in the day, could be forgiven for creeping into Patton’s wood-panelled study with a weapon, ready to repel barbarian hordes of Trump loyalists.

The former Australian prime minister (twice), distinguished China scholar and (for now at least) Canberra’s Man in Washington is a prime target for Team Trump. The American capital is in turmoil as President Donald Trump and his new administration ruthlessly settle domestic scores. Rudd could be one of the first foreign casualties.

It’s 7am and the sun is about to rise over the melting snow outside. Rudd chats about his English forbears, who were convicts shipped to Australia – and his new passion for collecting Patton memorabilia. His press secretary apologises for the ungodly hour. “Take a pew,” Rudd says, sinking into an armchair.

Our meeting has been rearranged due to Rudd’s frenetic schedule; in the days following Trump’s inauguration, Rudd has been flying all over the US, pressing the flesh and posing for selfies with Republicans.

Rudd, who led Australia’s Labour Party, is a convinced liberal firmly on the opposite side of the political spectrum to Trump. His detractors have gleefully reprised how Rudd, before he became ambassador in March 2023, branded Trump a “village idiot” who was “nuts” and a “traitor to the West”.

To make him even less palatable, Rudd has long been a vehement critic of Rupert Murdoch – “an arrogant cancer on our democracy” – whose Fox News cable television channel is a megaphone for Trump and his allies. The Trump administration is stuffed with Fox News alumni, including Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon chief.

When Rudd deleted his jibes after Trump’s decisive election win and offered his official congratulations to the victor, the reaction was savage. Dan Scavino, a senior aide to Trump, posted a gif of sand slipping through an hourglass to his two million followers on X. The message was Rudd should start packing his bags.

But Rudd, who in an hour’s time will be heading downtown to address a Council on Foreign Relations forum on China, is a key figure in Washington as Trump grapples with how to deal with the relationship between the two most powerful nations in the world.

A China specialist for more than four decades, Rudd could legitimately claim to know President Xi Jinping better than any senior figure in the West. His recent acclaimed book On Xi Jinping is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this enigmatic and immensely important figure.

Moreover, his view that Xi is an aggressive nationalist who might well resort to military force resonates with the hardline China stance of Trump’s top officials.

Perhaps surprisingly, he believes that Trump’s approach to China could avert a Third World War. “The Chinese system is deeply respectful of him because President Trump’s signature message to the body politic at home and the body politic abroad can be summarised in a single word – strength,” he says.

“The Chinese know they’ve got a real challenge on their hands that goes to the absolute core of a Chinese strategic world view, which is to respect power and be contemptuous of weakness.” This means that “President Trump as a deterrent force in the mind of the Chinese at this stage is highly persuasive”.

Rudd, 65, wearing a dark suit and turquoise tie, is relaxed and affable as he leads me into the study, home to his back-lit library of books on China. Scampering behind us are his two resident black cats, Possum – found in a box in New York’s Chinatown – and Qing Qing, a Washington rescue named after Song Qingling, the wife of the Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen.

Rudd’s official portrait by the Australian artist Ralph Heimans, who painted the late Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III, features what Heimans called Rudd’s “Hemingway beard”, a remnant from Covid lockdown, as well as scores of books – many in Mandarin – and Chinese vases.

China is everywhere in Rudd’s life and central to the case for his remaining in Washington. He speaks fluent Mandarin and first met Xi in 1986 “when he was vice mayor of Xiamen, in Fujian province, and I was a self-important first secretary from the Australian Embassy” in Beijing.

They met again in 2010, when Rudd was Australian prime minister and Xi was poised to assume power, “just talking [in Mandarin] about Chinese history for a couple of hours” over a bottle of Penfolds red wine. There have been a number of conflabs since.

Six years ago, at the age of 59, Rudd enrolled at Jesus College, Oxford to research a doctoral thesis that would answer the question: What does Xi Jinping believe? That thesis led to him becoming Dr Rudd in 2022 and formed the basis of his book On Xi Jinping.

He felt like “Grandpa Moses” but appreciated the “rigorous intellectual tradition at Oxford, plus its inherent eccentricity, which meant it was able to accommodate a visiting Antipodean pursuing an obscure question about modern Chinese ideology”. The undergraduates passed a motion stating that Rudd could use their pool table if he provided the beer, which he duly did.

Rudd interrupted his Oxford studies in 2022 to write The Avoidable War, a policy primer on the relationship between the US and China that was widely praised.

Xi is a crucial world figure, Rudd explains, because he has broken with his three predecessors to assert the precedence of Marxist-Leninist ideology over working within capitalist systems, and has made his position within the Chinese communist party unassailable. At 71, he is likely to be China’s leader for the rest of his life.

Rudd stresses that Xi was deeply affected by his father, a member of the Chinese politburo, being purged by Mao Zedong three times in his political career, including during the Cultural Revolution.

“Xi has this extraordinary sense of self-assurance, which I think comes from being a political scion, and is a phenomenal student of his own country’s and own party’s history.”

Rudd argues that Xi has moved China towards Leninism in terms of one-party control, Marxism economically and the nationalist right in foreign policy.

“Xi Jinping has made it plain that reunification with Taiwan is part of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, which is to be completed by 2049,” he says, referring to the centenary of the creation of the People’s Republic of China.

While China’s economy has slowed, putting the West in a stronger position, its recent advances in artificial intelligence “should all give us pause about the common assumption that the Chinese are in some sort of terminal economic decline”, Rudd advises.

It all adds up to an ominous picture. Military action over Taiwan, a key US ally, could trigger a global conflagration. But Rudd feels that the “raw political and strategic fact” of Trump’s determination to project American strength could prevent a global conflagration.

“If the Chinese were tempted to pull the lever on Taiwan, which I’m sure they are… their analysis of President Trump’s likely response would be such that it would deter them,” Rudd says.

He also believes that Trump has surrounded himself with astute figures who have the right instincts about China. “We know he’s got a good team. I’ve known Mike Waltz [national security adviser] for years, from when he was a congressman, I’ve known Marco Rubio [secretary of state] from when he was a senator. Ratcliffe at the CIA is smart and incisive. These are sharp minds who are deeply analytical on these questions.”

Trump is a dealmaker and Rudd thinks it possible that he could secure an unlikely accommodation with China just as President Richard Nixon did in 1972, two years before resigning in disgrace.

Rudd used to lunch frequently with Henry Kissinger, the realpolitik architect of Nixon’s rapprochement with China, who died aged 100 in 2023, and discuss how the breakthrough was achieved. “There are deep resonances of this with the Trumpian worldview,” Rudd observes.

The problem, he warns, is that while a split between the Soviet Union and China gave Nixon his opening, today Russia is dependent on China. “I’m sure President Trump will be alert to those realities as well,” he says.

All this leads us back to the beginning for Kevin Rudd, who grew up in rural Queensland, which he has described as “the Texas of Australia” – where his father was a share farmer.

At the age of nine, Rudd’s father told him it was time to decide the path he should take in life. “Have you made your mind up, Kev?” he asked. “Is it going to be beef or dairy?” Young Kev felt there must be something else.

Rudd’s childhood was in many ways idyllic, but at the age of 11 his father was killed in a car accident. And at the same, he developed a political and social conscience. Both his parents had been shaped by their experience of the Second World War. “My mother was a nurse [in a military hospital]. My father was a serviceman in the Palestine campaign and in south-east Asia.”

They’d had little education. “But my mother had an intrinsic interest in the world and so she was one of those self-educated working-class women who just read.”

In 1971, Rudd saw his future as Kissinger and Nixon were secretly negotiating with China. “I remember my mother walking into my room when I was 14 and handing me this newspaper which had the front-page story, ‘China enters the UN,’” Rudd says.

His mother told him: “This will change the world and change the future for you as well.”

That planted the seed that led Rudd to specialise in Chinese history and language at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977. And following his father’s death there was a dramatic change in circumstances: “We had to leave the farm,” says Rudd. “I just remember the serious indignity of not really having anywhere to stay.”

His ability as a Chinese linguist meant becoming a diplomat was a natural next step. Of course, he was initially sent to Sweden, he laughs: “When I’ve had a few to drink, my Swedish is still quite entertaining.”

Rudd itched for more, however, feeling as he penned missives on internal Chinese politics that he was “a voyeur on the world with a narrow audience, which is the half dozen people who might read your diplomatic cable”.

After working for the Queensland state government, he became an MP in 1998 and led Australian Labour to a landslide general election victory in 2007. He was replaced by his deputy, Julia Gillard, who made him her foreign minister. After defeating her as Labour leader in 2013, he was prime minister for just two months before the party lost power to the Liberals.

Australian politics is bruising and Rudd certainly took his knocks. There was his pitiful attempt at chin-ups, of which he gamely posted a video on his social media. Then there was his apology for visiting a New York strip club in which he said he’d had “too much to drink” and couldn’t recall anything that happened.

There’s an inherent tension between the roles of academic, diplomat, and politician. Even two of these can be problematic, as Lord Mandelson, poised to be the first non-diplomat British ambassador to Washington since Peter Jay in the 1970s, might soon find out.

Rudd has toggled between all three. This means he brings an immense amount to any table, but also some baggage. We’re in Australian “public housing”, as he puts it, but for the purposes of this interview, he stresses that he’s talking as a private individual and scholar rather than as an ambassador.

Inevitably, however, we have to address the elephant in the room: how the potential wrath of President Donald J Trump might be visited on him. As I raise the matter, Rudd parries my question with a cheery “no comment”. He doubtless has a lot to say, but knows that he must keep his counsel, and looks a little uncomfortable.

“It’s on the public record,” he says. “You can see that when President Trump was elected, as a mark of respect for the office of the presidency I withdrew my historical remarks as a think tanker engaged in the hurly-burly of the American domestic political debates.”

I try again and again, briefly feeling a bit like Jeremy Paxman. Rudd isn’t letting me get a toehold: “No comment, just not talking about that… No comment, I’m a diplomat, right?… Nice try. No comment.”

Australian officials point out that Vice President JD Vance and Rubio once said lots of rude things about Trump. The difference, of course, is that both subsequently spent years recanting, kissing the ring or prostrating themselves before King Trump – choose your characterisation. And Rudd is clearly not inclined to do any of those things.

Trump, however, is transactional and could view Rudd’s expertise on Xi as valuable. He’s already hit back at Rudd, in a GB News interview months before the election last year, prodded by Nigel Farage, whom Trump once floated as British ambassador to Washington. “I heard he was a little bit nasty,” Trump said. “I hear he’s not the brightest bulb.”

Rudd might be well advised to emulate Mandelson, who went on Fox News earlier this week to eat humble pie and declare his past remarks about Trump being “reckless and a danger to the world” as “ill-judged and wrong”.

But Rudd once recommended a China policy that was “neither conflict nor kowtow”, and that seems to be his approach to Trump.

A US president can’t dismiss an ambassador, but he can make their position untenable by refusing to deal with them, which is what happened to Sir Kim Darroch, British ambassador to Washington during Trump’s first administration. Darroch, who resigned in 2019 after leaks of diplomatic cables in which he wrote that Trump “radiates insecurity” and his administration was “inept”.

There’s no sign yet of Rudd being frozen out. He attended Trump’s second inauguration after having a few words with the US president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida several days earlier. Trump has shown he’s eager to work with politicians on the Left, including Sir Keir Starmer, whom he recently described as doing “a very good job so far”.

If Rudd does end up out on his ear, he will be at peace. In November, he will celebrate his 44th wedding anniversary with Thérèse Rein, an entrepreneur and psychologist who has worked extensively in the field of human rights. They have three children and three grandchildren together.

Rudd is rooted in what he describes as “a profound set of Christian beliefs which lies doctrinally somewhere between Anglicanism and Catholicism”. The room next to his study is lined with books on theology.

“There are bigger things,” Rudd reflects, referencing the New Testament’s Beatitudes. “When you run into life’s brick walls, and there are many, unless you have an animating moral compass, be it philosophical or theological, then it’s very easy to fall apart.

“Unless you know not just what you’re doing but why you’re doing it, then you can become bitter and twisted and brittle and fold into a heap. Or you just keep bouncing back. So, yeah, I’m completely relaxed about what I’m doing in life.”

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On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World (Oxford University Press, RRP £26.99) is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books