• 309: Kevin Rudd: The World According to Xi Jinping. What China’s Ideologue in Chief Really Believes, submitted on 2022-10-10 21:21:32+08:00.
• 310: Ukraine’s Path to Victory: How the Country Can Take Back All Its Territory, submitted on 2022-10-13 00:01:28+08:00.
• 311: Party of One: The CCP Congress and Xi Jinping’s Quest to Control China, submitted on 2022-10-14 22:14:53+08:00.

309: Kevin Rudd: The World According to Xi Jinping. What China’s Ideologue in Chief Really Believes, submitted on 2022-10-10 21:21:32+08:00.

—– 309.1 —–2022-10-10 21:24:00+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Kevin Rudd, President of the Asia Society, in New York, and previously served as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Australia.]

Xi has brought that era of pragmatic, nonideological governance to a crashing halt. In its place, he has developed a new form of Marxist nationalism that now shapes the presentation and substance of China’s politics, economy, and foreign policy. In doing so, Xi is not constructing theoretical castles in the air to rationalize decisions that the CCP has made for other, more practical reasons. Under Xi, ideology drives policy more often than the other way around. Xi has pushed politics to the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left, and foreign policy to the nationalist right. He has reasserted the influence and control the CCP exerts over all domains of public policy and private life, reinvigorated state-owned enterprises, and placed new restrictions on the private sector. Meanwhile, he has stoked nationalism by pursuing an increasingly assertive foreign policy, turbocharged by a Marxist-inspired belief that history is irreversibly on China’s side and that a world anchored in Chinese power would produce a more just international order. In short, Xi’s rise has meant nothing less than the return of Ideological Man.

These ideological trends are not simply a throwback to the Mao era. Xi’s worldview is more complex than Mao’s, blending ideological purity with technocratic pragmatism. Xi’s pronouncements about history, power, and justice might strike Western audiences as impenetrable or irrelevant. But the West ignores Xi’s ideological messaging at its own peril. No matter how abstract and unfamiliar his ideas might be, they are having profound effects on the real-world content of Chinese politics and foreign policy—and thus, as China’s rise continues, on the rest of the world.

310: Ukraine’s Path to Victory: How the Country Can Take Back All Its Territory, submitted on 2022-10-13 00:01:28+08:00.

—– 310.1 —–2022-10-13 00:08:14+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Chair of the Centre for Defence Strategies. From 2019 to 2020, he was Minister of Defense of Ukraine.]

The West must join Kyiv in aiming for an unequivocal Ukrainian victory. It should recognize that Ukraine’s military is not just more motivated than Russia’s but also better led and better trained. To win, Ukraine doesn’t need a miracle; it just needs the West to increase its supply of sophisticated weaponry. Ukrainian forces can then move deeper and faster into enemy lines and overrun more of Russia’s disorganized troops. Putin may respond by calling up additional soldiers, but poorly motivated forces can only delay a well-equipped Ukraine’s eventual triumph. Putin will then be out of conventional tools to forestall losing.
Outside analysts worry that before facing defeat, Putin would try to inflict massive civilian casualties on Ukraine, seeking to coerce the Ukrainian government into making concessions or even into surrendering. He might do so, Western analysts fear, by continuously targeting densely populated areas in Ukrainian cities with long-range missiles—as he has done this week—or through carpet-bombing raids. But Putin lacks the resources to truly level Ukrainian cities. Russia’s remaining inventory of conventional missiles and bombs is large enough to cause substantial damage, but it is not big enough to destroy swaths of Ukraine. And Ukraine has already proved that it will fight on even when Russia reduces cities to rubble. Putin destroyed Mariupol, ruined large parts of Kharkiv, and launched thousands of strikes on other cities and regions. The damage just made Ukrainians more committed to victory and closed off chances for negotiated settlements.

311: Party of One: The CCP Congress and Xi Jinping’s Quest to Control China, submitted on 2022-10-14 22:14:53+08:00.

—– 311.1 —–2022-10-14 22:23:57+08:00:

[SS from the article by Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong.]

A key question that the congress may well answer is just how much further Xi is going to push the system toward a personalized dictatorship. Although much has been made of Xi’s cult of personality, it is a rather banal cult with very little personality. No one is yet paying tribute to Xi in the form of mangoes, as many ordinary Chinese did to Mao after he received a gift of the fruit from a Pakistani delegation in 1968. But if Xi claims new titles at the congress, such as party chairman, and if Xi Jinping Thought is formalized in the party’s charter, it would mean Xi is so unconstrained and so focused on consolidating institutional and political power that he fails to see the dangers ahead, and those around him are unable to do anything about it.
It was, until very recently, an established truth in formal party historiography that the trappings of absolute power under Mao had nearly brought the country to ruin. Imperfect efforts to address this—term limits on the office of the presidency, abolishing the title of party chair—have either been rolled back or reconsidered under Xi. This does not, however, make Xi a new Mao. The men are drastically different in temperament, outlook, and style. But the governing pathologies unique to the CCP system accommodated both of their pursuits of unchecked power.