Rudd on Xi...more Western naval-gazing

I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd about Xi Jinping. Rudd speaks Chinese. He served in the Australian foreign service where he met Xi earlier in his career while he was in Xiamen. Rudd later went on to do a PhD at Oxford which seems to have been mostly focused on reading Xi's books.

I expected more nuanced and insightful views on China from someone such as Rudd with his academic and foreign service background. Instead, Rudd mostly repeated the normal Western talking points about China: OMG the repression of dissent and OMG the civil society repression and "wen invade Taiwan" OMG the oversupply of high quality goods and OMG there's not enough domestic consumption. Things that Western audiences and politicians in general are absolutely obsessed with, but are really not among the most interesting things about China.

Rudd insinuated that somehow things are not going well in China now. But things were going well before Xi and that he somehow "derailed" China's progress. As someone who's lived in China throughout that entire time, it is really hard for me to square that with the reality I see living in and traveling around the country. And looking at the live situations of friends I've known for decades.

In contrast, I'm constantly shocked at how amazing the quality of life, quality of products and services and quality of the people in the Chinese mainland have become...and not just in Tier 1 cities. Even the goverment bureaucracy has become polite, efficient, and professional...and they certainly provide better customer service than US Amazon!

I'd had hoped someone like Rudd who supposedly knows Xi so well could instead shed some light on how things work so well and what Xi's special sauce is for being such a successful and results-oriented leader. Because talent leadership skill like Xi's is very rare in this world...and he's clearly very talented. The world would be a much better place if the world had more leaders like him that could deliver such impressive results for their people.

Klein's interview of Rudd felt sort of like Rudd was someone claiming to be an expert on Steve Jobs's and spending the whole time talking about how Jobs failed because the world changing products he created never ran Windows. You may really like Windows and think it's 10000x better than macOS, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from Steve Jobs.

You don't have to like China's political system or culture or Xi personally to acknowledge that he's delivered some pretty impressive results over the decade and a half he's been leading the country. SOMETHING Xi is doing is clearly working. And wouldn't it be interesting if we could learn about how and why that is?

But looking at China dispassionately seems to be impossible for Western "China hands"...especially those of Rudd's era. They believe, or, out of political or professional necessity, pretend to believe, that China's "progress" should mainly be analyzed on the degree to which it is adopting or converging on Western ideologies and political religions. Which says a lot more about themselves, their own beliefs and their personal and national insecurities than it does about China.