In conversation with Provost Gillian Tett, 30 October 2026:
GT: Recently you did something remarkable. During Covid, you became, to my knowledge, the only global leader who, after leaving office, decided voluntarily to go back to university. You went to do a PhD at Oxford.
KR: At the other place.
GT: We’ll forgive you. I think you’re repenting of your sins by coming over here.
You used your knowledge of Chinese to read pretty much everything that Xi Jinping had written or said in recent years, to write a PhD on the ideology of Xi Jinping.
You were supervised by a King’s Honorary Fellow, Rana Mitter. What was it like, having been in charge of a country, suddenly to have someone else bossing you around?
KR: Genuinely humbling. I remember the first week at Jesus College, Oxford. Two things happened. One was that I discovered I had no access to the senior common room. As a DPhil student, however, I was able to join the middle common room.
GT: You must have scared the hell out of them.
KR: No, no, no. But the junior common room—they took pity on me and adopted a resolution which said: anyone who had previously served as Prime Minister of Australia between the following dates, and was now a member of Jesus College, was hereby admitted to the junior common room as an honorary member—on the condition that they provide the free beer. So I did.
GT: I think that shows admirably entrepreneurial spirit.
KR: My other great memory of week one was attending a seminar at the Oxford China Centre, and being an active and full participant in this class, which I discovered afterwards was not one of mine.
As a prime minister, you get used to someone else running your schedule. Me running my own schedule—I just screwed it up completely. But I got used to it.
GT: I’m very impressed that you had the courage to go back and do that, and essentially remake yourself through your PhD, which you did indeed pass, as your supervisor, Rana Mitter was keen to tell me. I think he takes credit for that.
He said you were a very good student. You had a bit of adapting to do first, but you wrote your PhD thesis and then produced a book.
If any of you are studying U.S.–China relations or geopolitics, I strongly recommend it. It’s a remarkable insight into the ideology and mind of the Chinese leadership, written in a pretty dispassionate, neutral way. That’s commendable, because there aren’t many people in the West who write about China in that way.
KR: 29.95. Amazon.
GT: Makes a great Christmas present. You were then tapped to become Australia’s ambassador in Washington, where you effectively became, dare I say it, one of the main bridges between the U.S. and China behind the scenes for three years. A bit of a Trump whisperer, Biden whisperer and Chinese whisperer, trying to build relations.
KR: A bit here and there.
GT: You’re now back at the Asia Society, which, as we were joking earlier, is in major colonisation mode: expanding into Washington and hopefully becoming the key place for intelligent debate about China inside America.
Understanding China from the inside out
KR: My colleagues from other think tanks will dispute that, but we’ve become probably America’s single largest think tank on China. We’ve built that up over quite a number of years.
We have about 50 full-time researchers on China and the rest of Asia, and about 50 part-timers. We’re trying to do China from the inside out. Everyone has to be a Chinese linguist, able to read Chinese documents and understand the internal debates.
We do politics, economics, political economy, tech, foreign policy, national security policy, U.S.–China and Taiwan. We call it China 360: China from the inside out.
GT: Which is fantastic and desperately needed right now.
KR: I think it helps a bit, because often in the land of the barbarians—that’s us in the West—we tend to project what China is like: “They would think that, wouldn’t they?”
That’s as opposed to diving into the internal debates, which are a little opaque because it’s a communist system. But if you apply a bit of intellectual horsepower, you can understand the fault lines within the internal discussion as well.
China’s politics and economy
GT: You’ve just come back from China. What do you think is happening within the leadership, and where are they going?
Six months or a year ago, relations between Beijing and Washington looked very bad. It looked as if Xi Jinping was becoming increasingly authoritarian, if not autocratic. People were disappearing. There was a lot of sabre-rattling around Taiwan, sky-high tariffs on both sides, and chatter about Xi becoming increasingly controlling, even to the point of locking up some of the most dynamic private-sector leaders.
Some of that now appears to have died down. Where do you think China is today?
KR: That’s a large question. Let me do politics, because we’ve just had a party plenum in Beijing, which happens once a year. Second, let’s look at the economy. Then, given that foreign policy is always an expression of those two, let’s look at U.S.–China.
On politics, the authoritarian nature of Xi Jinping’s administration remains. Party purges continue. At the most recent plenum, there were about 35 vacant seats compared with last time around. It’s a fair old number. It’s not a happy place to be at the moment. Half of those are from the military and half from civilian positions.
Xi Jinping’s message at the plenum was that the anti-corruption campaign, which began in 2012, will continue.
His underlying ideological resolve is this: we shall preserve a pure Marxist-Leninist party in order to take China to its manifest destiny, which is to become, again, the most powerful country on earth. That’s essentially his frame. I can see no challenge to Xi’s leadership.
There are still multiple arrests in the private sector; they’re just not as prominent as some of the disappearances and arrests we saw in the past. Society is more controlled than before: academic freedom, religious freedom, social freedom, even sexual freedom.
On the economy, it’s a tale of two cities. The one we read about most in the global media is China’s phenomenal success in technology. A decade ago, China was a global also-ran. With the Made in China 2025 strategy, launched in 2015, it set itself a series of targets to become a world-class player and leader in technology categories from AI through to nanotechnology, and most points in between.
After a decade, they get a solid seven out of 10 for their achievements. For the years ahead, through the 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026–2030 and beyond, priorities include AI and semiconductors, quantum, and nuclear fusion.
If you look at this techno-industrial strategy and the enormous concentration of resources within it, you’d have to say China and the United States have emerged as the two technology powerhouses in the world. The United States has been that way for a long time. China has more or less come from nowhere to being—not yet exactly a peer competitor in every domain, but getting close in most.
That’s the tale of one city. The second is China’s domestic economy, which is not doing well at all.
I first went to China in 1984 as a junior woodchuck in the Australian embassy, to run the photocopying machine. That was my job.
GT: Did your card say “Junior Woodchuck” on it?
KR: Yes. “First Secretary, Junior Woodchuck”. Mind you, I once ran into this guy from the Chinese Communist Party in the good old days. His title in English was “Apparatchik”. I kept that card. I thought it was really neato to have someone self-describe as an apparatchik.
GT: That’s fantastic.
KR: I first went and lived in China for several years with Therese, my wife, and our newborn babe. I’ve been there virtually every year since.
I went back recently, and what really hits you in the eyeballs in a city like Beijing is that I couldn’t see a single crane on the skyline. It’s a very big city. I’ve never seen Beijing like that. Nor have I been through the hutongs and seen no other foreign barbarians like me. When you finally do find one, they’re usually speaking Russian, and my Russian’s a little rusty.
Why do I say all that? The domestic economy has slowed. Private domestic consumption is weak. Private residential construction is in a prolonged downturn, with an enormous loss of accumulated wealth as a result. Private fixed capital investment is weak. These pistons are barely working.
The piston called the techno-industrial sector is working fine, but with massive state-directed investment. The other working piston, now causing dislocations across the rest of the world, is net exports. China is exporting its surplus domestic production because domestic consumption is weak. You see the ramifications in Europe, to some extent in the United States pre-tariffs, and certainly in Southeast Asia.
GT: You say Xi Jinping’s position is completely secure. Is there no sense of discontent around him?
KR: I’m sure there are bucketloads of discontent, but I’ve never seen a one-party state so empowered by the new tools of authoritarian surveillance. This is the revolution.
If Mao and Stalin had sat down over a beer and said, “Hey, we’ve got this stuff which can surveil your gait, your face, recognise your iris, collect a social credit score, and photograph you on every street corner through CCTV,” they’d regard it as their ultimate nirvana: the ability to maintain such comprehensive surveillance.
That’s the essential difference. The party’s internal surveillance networks are now razor-sharp, and the external surveillance networks are razor-sharp.
For those reasons, together with Xi Jinping’s remarkable Machiavellian skill set—consolidating power and dealing with adversaries or opponents before they’ve even worked out that they are adversaries or opponents—I see no evidence of any fundamental move against him.
There is disquiet among the private entrepreneurial class and society at large, and because of high youth unemployment. These things are occurring, but I don’t see evidence that they threaten Xi Jinping’s leadership.
Xi Jinping: the man and his worldview
GT: What kind of person, in your view, is Xi Jinping?
KR: He’s about five foot ten, dark hair, no glasses.
GT: Have you met him much?
KR: Over the years. When I was prime minister, back in the late Mesolithic period, he was about to become general secretary. I communicated with him directly, through telephone conversations and the rest, after he became general secretary. On subsequent visits to Beijing, I’ve been in small groups with him.
I can’t say we’re drinking buddies, but I’ve had a reasonable amount of face time with him. I went back and looked at some notes from my first meetings. He doesn’t use notes or a briefing paper. He simply speaks extemporaneously.
GT: Even in public speeches?
KR: I’d leave that to one side; that’s different. But in dealings with foreign barbarians, individually or in groups, he just speaks.
The contrast with Hu Jintao was that Hu would read a briefing paper when it was time to go to the men’s room. He was terribly scripted. Not Xi Jinping. He knows his mind, he knows his worldview, and he’s comfortable in his own skin.
I had a long chat with him at the prime minister’s residence in Canberra, late one night, for many hours in Chinese, about party history. The history of the Chinese Communist Party fascinates me. We also talked about his father, Xi Zhongxun, who was alive when I was working in the embassy in Beijing and was then a member of the Politburo.
What you sense from Xi, the man, is a person steeped in his country’s history and his party’s history. He’s a formidable party historian, which is important for knowing where all the bodies are buried.
Also, in a Carlylean sense, he sees himself as a man of history: not a political journeyman but, in his own assessment, a transformational leader.
The U.S.–China relationship
GT: Tell us what this means for U.S.–China relations. You couldn’t get a more unlikely duo than Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump, with whom you’ve also spent a fair amount of time.
KR: He gave me a rich character assessment.
GT: The idea of President Trump squaring off against Xi Jinping—you couldn’t make it up if you were writing a movie script. Where do you assess U.S.–China relations are right now?
KR: The starting premise is: what do both leaders want, given that they’re paramount leaders within their systems?
GT: They’re both autocrats.
KR: They’re both paramount leaders within their own systems. Sorry, I’ve still got this diplomat overhang.
GT: I can say they’re authoritarian autocrats. One is very controlled and one is not.
KR: That’s true. Where is Xi Jinping coming from in his engagement with Trump? They’ve had two recent summits, one in Beijing and the most recent in Washington, with two more to come: one off the back of APEC in Shenzhen in November, and one off the back of the G20 in Miami in December. It’s a fairly intensive set of speed-dating sessions.
The Chinese system has made it very plain that it wants to stabilise the relationship. Their framing is “constructive strategic stability”. Our Chinese friends here will know the phrase. These terms aren’t plucked out of the air. They’ve been workshopped intensively within the Chinese system to mean something.
Without parsing it in great detail, they want a framework with the United States where, to use their phrases, cooperation is the mainstream, strategic competition occurs within bounds, and strategic differences are managed. If you pass A, B and C, you end up on the ultimate heavenly course, which is called stability.
It’s all in the diagrammatic illustration of this concept. On the Chinese embassy in Washington’s website, they’ve literally lifted the NATO insignia and stuck over it the four cardinal points of this new orthodoxy devised by the Chinese Communist Party to describe the U.S.–China relationship. There it is in black and white.
But why do they want stability? That’s the more foundational question. Go back to my earlier remarks about the economy: weak domestic demand. The only working pistons are net exports and state-driven techno-industrial investment.
Xi Jinping doesn’t want another fundamental shock delivered by Trump once again reaching unilaterally for the tariff lever. That would be deeply destabilising for the export piston working in the growth engine at present.
Now flip it around. Why is President Trump interested in stabilising the U.S.–China relationship? He wants Xi Jinping to normalise the supply of critical minerals and rare earths. This has been the case in their last three meetings: Busan in South Korea at the end of last year, then Beijing and Washington.
It hasn’t happened yet. The big question for the two remaining summits this year is whether they will normalise that supply, or whether China will hold out for what it wants: a further relaxation of export controls on critical technologies, particularly the most advanced semiconductors.
Trump says, “You want no tariffs? Give me critical minerals and rare earths.” Xi Jinping says, “You want critical minerals and rare earths? Open up the floodgates on semiconductors.”
Who’s going to blink first? I’m not sure. But these are the perhaps somewhat unstable parameters within which the current stability compact is being conducted.
Strategic competition and AI safety
GT: A few years ago, people like Mark Carney, now Prime Minister of Canada, used to tell me they thought green issues and climate change could be an area of global cooperation. Then it turned into an area of geostrategic competition in quite a brutal way.
Do you think AI, which people currently see as a point of great competition and conflict, could end up being an area of cooperation around safety risks? Is there any reason to think China and the U.S. could collaborate on a safety framework?
KR: I think there’s some possibility, but let me explain how much.
Stepping back, my frame for looking at the U.S.–China relationship is pretty simple. There’s a fundamental strategic competition over which country will act as the fulcrum of the global order in the 21st century. Will it be the United States, as it has been since the end of the Second World War, or China?
Strip it back and it’s geopolitics, geo-economics, geotechnology and AI, as well as climate and climate action. Both sides have semi-grudgingly declared that this strategic competition is underway—the Chinese more grudgingly than the United States.
The real question in my mind is whether it can be conducted as a managed strategic competition, without a rolling risk of kinetic escalation, or whether it’s completely unmanaged. In that case, it’s a shootout at the OK Corral, where anything could happen any day of the week.
I’m just a conservative Australian guy. I tend to prefer Plan A over Plan B, not because it necessarily guarantees peace, brotherhood and enlightenment all round, but because it carries fewer risks.
What is managed strategic competition in my framing? First, mutual acknowledgement of each other’s fundamental strategic red lines—Taiwan, for example—where there should be mutual deterrence.
Second, peaceful strategic competition in all other domains: trade, investment, technology, talent, foreign policy and ideology. May the best system win.
Third, sufficient political capital and space for defined areas of strategic cooperation. Climate has historically been one. Another is preparation for the next pandemic, because there will be one, and we failed so miserably on the last. Then there are new domains, of which AI security is now looming as probably the most prominent.
On AI itself, having been engaged in Track 1.5 exercises between the U.S. and China over the last couple of months, my observation is this. It’s taken a while, but the Chinese system has slowly come to recognise what the U.S. system has recognised: recent, rapid developments in frontier models and agentic AI, acting autonomously through recursive self-improvement and swarming, pose growing risks of autonomous cyberattacks on networks and associated infrastructure—social, economic, financial, political, military, or the whole shooting match.
Six months ago, if you’d asked whether that was the view in Washington and Beijing, the answer from both administrations would have been no. Sometime over the last three months or so, the United States crab-walked towards recognising, on the basis of a number of breakouts from sandboxes, that there was a real problem, both from OpenAI and Anthropic and elsewhere.
In the last three months, you start to see what I describe as the convergence of a “come to Jesus, come to Marx” moment.
The Chinese system, through the Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin, published an article in China Cyberspace in September 2026 saying that, objectively, this is a problem for everybody. Secondly, of course, the United States is to blame. That’s America’s responsibility in the world: to be blamed for everything, even though this is common to frontier models produced in both countries.
By an inelegant process, we’ve reached a common recognition over the last two or three months that this is a real-world problem. The dialogue channel between the U.S. and China on this is open.
The little wrinkle was that, just before the last summit, Dario Amodei released his essay “We Must Pace the Frontier”—his famous public encyclical. Not the Pope’s, but Dario’s encyclical.
GT: I think Dario thinks he is a pope, but yes.
KR: I couldn’t possibly comment. It said: here is the problem; this is what we must do. We must regulate it, ensure proper alignment of AI models before release, and test against cyber defences before allowing dissemination, diffusion and adaptation through the rest of the economy and the world.
Trump reacted by saying, “Not on your nelly.” He was more explicit than that. The Chinese also reacted negatively because Dario’s public position was that this collaboration was absolutely necessary unless we were going to risk China running away with the AI race altogether.
It wasn’t a helpful public intervention, and I’ve reflected that to his own system. You know what they’re like over there in the Valley: “I have truth. I therefore announce it.” They don’t consider things through a normal social or political filter: how will this be received, and what reaction will it give rise to? We sometimes just call that politics.
GT: They don’t believe in politics.
KR: Apparently not, because these truths are self-evident in the Valley.
GT: Very strong tunnel vision.
KR: True, and they’ve got a tunnel within a tunnel. But some clever wordsmith in D.C., at the time of the Washington summit, decided to reframe this as the mutual dangers arising from superintelligence.
There’s artificial intelligence over there. Let’s forget about artificial general intelligence: we’ve already lurched onto superintelligence, this future problem which mysteriously exhibits all the problems we were talking about before. So we’ve managed the language.
He’s good at branding. This track is on, but has it yielded anything in the three to four weeks since the Washington summit? I don’t know. That’s where we’re up to.
Britain’s role in AI safety
GT: Some people I’ve spoken to hope Britain, against the odds, could become a bridging point on this through the AI Security Institute. The argument is that Britain has AI talent and, because it’s neither the U.S. nor China, would be the perfect place. Do you think that could happen?
KR: First, I think your UK AI Security Institute has done remarkably well.
GT: It’s won a lot of plaudits, even in the Valley, which I find amazing.
KR: That’s not just self-congratulatory Brits. That’s me rolling around the world and hearing it, both from the Valley and from industry—not necessarily government or the party—in China.
Second, there’s no other game in town at present. If you wanted a guardrail between China and the United States, given that’s where all the frontier models are being produced, and wanted it independently tested, this is the only show in town.
However, it’s my melancholy duty to inform you, Gillian, that you’re an ally of the United States, and so are we. When the Chinese look at you and us, they say, “Yes, but you are stitched at the hip to Uncle Sam.” That’s a geopolitical reality we’ve got to deal with.
The encouraging thing is that when, unpaid and unbeckoned by the British government, I’ve told our Chinese interlocutors that the UK AI Security Institute is worth looking at, they don’t push back.
We’ll see how it goes. It has some potential. Those behind its early development deserve full marks. We’re seeking to replicate it down under in our own curious Antipodean way.
Australia and the role of middle powers
GT: That brings me to Down Under. Where does this leave the middle powers in terms of the U.S.–China relationship?
Are you with Mark Carney in believing it’s possible to create a coalition of the willing? Is that feasible? What the hell is Australia going to do, given that your economy depends so utterly on China, yet you’re in AUKUS and tied at the hip to America too? Can Australia play the two off against each other, or survive on that tightrope?
KR: You’ve not heard of the Australian school of international relations theory, have you?
GT: No. Tell me.
KR: It’s complex. It’s called: we walk and chew gum at the same time.
We’ve been doing it for a quarter of a century, since China became our largest trading partner. For three-quarters of a century, we’ve been an ally of the United States. I think the Americans would say their two strongest and continuing allies are the Brits and ourselves.
Day to day, in the praxis of the Australian government and corporate community, this is just what we do. How do we give effect to it? We choose to put the megaphone away rather than deliver public broadcasts and broadsides against the Chinese leadership.
Are we fundamentally aligned with the United States on national security? Yes. With the United States and Western democracies on underlying values? Yes. Are we an open society? Yes. Is China our largest trading partner? Yes.
You can execute that. It involves a degree of difficulty and requires management on both sides.
On your broader question about Prime Minister Carney and his Davos address on the role of middle powers in constructing alternative orders, that can occur within parameters.
If you sat down for a hard-nosed conversation with U.S. allies and strategic partners in Asia or Europe and asked whether there is a credible alternative security partner at scale, most would say no.
Is there a management problem in dealing with the Trump administration, its politics and the pyrotechnics in the external dynamics of those relationships, generated by real things or other things? Of course.
Poll this room for stitched-up members of the MAGA movement, or poll the British body politic on its view of the Trump administration. I dare say the vote would be fairly thin, just as it is down under. That presents a problem for democracies in managing the relationship.
But on the hard-edged question of an alternative to the U.S. role in NATO and Indo-Pacific Command, counterbalancing Russia and China respectively, most hard-headed circles in allied capitals would say no. That’s why each is choosing to manage the relationship with the United States.
On broader questions of the global order beyond the security order, Prime Minister Carney provides much food for thought, and hopefully for action. We all need national and international regulatory environments for artificial intelligence.
It stands to reason. We can’t simply become price-takers for the regulatory or non-regulatory environments emerging from Washington or Beijing.
Middle powers, together with constructive powers around the world—large, small or somewhere in between—need to craft that regulatory environment, particularly for the safety and security of the agentic AI we discussed.
Look at the wider order and the institutions the United States has decided to leave, including the World Health Organization and the UNFCCC. The list goes on. In January 2026, Washington directed withdrawal from 66 international organisations and UN entities.
The opportunity, and I think responsibility, for constructive powers, including middle powers, is to fill the gap in funding, resources and personnel. Whatever these institutions’ imperfections, we have a responsibility to sustain them because they perform critical functions.
Around 72 per cent of global merchandise trade still takes place on WTO most-favoured-nation tariff terms. Without the WHO, we have no governance arrangements for future pandemic management.
The UNFCCC is about to meet in Turkey. Without it and the United Nations climate science panel, we would lose essential international frameworks for assessing the science and coordinating action to bring down carbon emissions over time.
These are imperfect institutions. But in the absence of all three, to quote the great Australian poets, we’re totally buggered.
So step up, speak less, act more, and do so with your pocketbook. Plug the funding gap, including for the UN humanitarian agencies and UNHCR, which do critical work in humanitarian disasters across the world.
There is real work to be done. Think of the security domain; the critical new regulatory environment for these extraordinary technologies around AI, let alone what happens when quantum arrives; and the continuing fabric of multilateral institutions.
We need to backfill budgets, personnel and the rest to sustain their ongoing legitimacy. If they collapse, rebuilding them from nothing is really, really difficult. Look at the history of the League.
Taiwan and the risk of conflict
GT: There’s lots of chatter in Washington that Beijing will go into Taiwan in 2027. Is that likely?
KR: No.
GT: Good.
KR: But—when you read the People’s Daily, and there are Chinese folks here who’ll know this, their editorials have paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three, and paragraph four always begins with “but”. That’s the paragraph you go to.
GT: When I was in the Soviet Union doing a PhD, I quickly learnt to ignore the first and last chapters, because they were hymns of praise to the Communist Party. The meat was always in the middle—the opposite of how you read a Western textbook.
KR: The People’s Daily is a variation on that. It’s the “but” paragraph.
The “but” over Taiwan is this: I see an elevated risk of military action of one form or another in 2028. Why? In January 2028, we have a triggering mechanism: Taiwan’s presidential elections. The pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party is up for its fourth consecutive election in office.
Second, Chinese military exercises around Taiwan over the last five years increasingly resemble rehearsals, not just exercises.
Third, there’s a real and active concern about whether the Chinese conclude that the United States is no longer serious about defending Taiwan, and classical deterrence fails. These factors need to be looked at particularly carefully in relation to 2028.
The final twist is Chinese perceptions and analysis of Iran: U.S. staying power, appetite for casualties, and the depletion of the U.S. arsenal—“magazine depth”, to use the term of trade.
Does that make military action over Taiwan a probability for 2028? No. But we’re wrong and complacent if we don’t conclude it’s an elevated possibility, particularly if things go awry in the January elections and Beijing sees that as a tripwire under China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law.
That provides for non-peaceful means not only in the event of secession or major incidents entailing secession, but also if the possibilities for peaceful reunification are completely exhausted. I simply put that out as a sober message.
Audience questions
Q: Based on your reading of Xi Jinping’s works, your meetings with him and your reading of his history, what are your thoughts on policy towards ethnic minorities under Xi, particularly in Xinjiang and other places? What’s the reason behind it? What’s the vision?
KR: The overarching lens for policy—foreign and domestic, economic, social, political and military—is, in a word, security. It’s the securitisation of all domains.
When you look at social policy, and within it policy towards ethnic minorities, whether in Xinjiang, Tibet or Inner Mongolia, the lens is to ensure that national security is maintained, if necessary at all costs.
You see a doubling down on control systems in Xinjiang and Tibet, although the latter has received much less global attention. Look carefully at the Mongolian minority as well.
This proceeds from a deep view of the Chinese state, through classical Chinese historiography: massive problems arise at home if the periphery is in any way in chaos. Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia are seen through that traditional historiographical lens.
That’s the prism he takes. You’ll have seen various international reports about what’s happening on the ground in each of those domains.
Q: China is pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure projects, particularly across Central Asia and Pakistan, all the way down to Gwadar Port on the border of Iran. They’re not making much out of it. It’s not profitable, and it’s politically unstable, given militant groups and now the war in Iran. What is the Chinese state’s approach, given how decentralised OBR is? What’s the point of One Belt One Road?
KR: Two things. By the way, OBOR has become BRI: the Belt and Road Initiative, from One Belt One Road.
First, over time, the Chinese have scaled it back by about two-thirds. Looking at the varying calculations of its original financial parameters, it was something in the vicinity of a US$3 trillion global initiative.
It’s not enormously popular even within the Communist Party, because they know there’s an active localist, nativist debate among the Chinese people: “What about us at home?” So it’s been scaled back.
Second, from the Chinese perspective, BRI has delivered not inconsiderable political and foreign policy leverage in countries where significant infrastructure projects have been delivered.
In some countries, it’s backfired badly. We’re most familiar with the Sri Lankan port, where China Merchants Port Holdings took on a 99-year concession in 2017 amid Sri Lanka’s broader debt pressures.
That’s created what I describe as a range of antibodies around the world towards elements of BRI’s execution.
From Beijing’s perspective: A, it can’t be wrong. Why? Because it’s Xi Jinping’s idea. B, it’s been scaled back because we’re mindful of the folks at home. C, we’ve discovered that not everyone we lend to can service those loans.
Much of the financing is through loans rather than grants, and not all those loans can be serviced. That raises real questions about project selection and debt sustainability.
The realist calculation is whether China’s influence in Latin America, Africa, other parts of Asia and the Middle East is larger or smaller as a result of BRI. The Chinese net conclusion would be: larger.
Q: Do you think the Commonwealth is fit for purpose in the modern age, given the discrepancy between national contributions and the rise in nationalist rhetoric? At CHOGM, what would you like leaders to focus on?
KR: Oh, the Empire! I have a simple view. In today’s world, any international organisation that can bring countries together in a common cause—particularly given the fracturing across most international and global institutions—is positive.
The Commonwealth represents an essential piece of soft power: a gold standard for the functioning of democracies across its membership. At the risk of running into difficulty with the Francophone world, that’s not necessarily the case there.
Within the Commonwealth community of 56 member states—there’s an enforced gold standard. Membership carries a commitment to democracy, free and fair elections, representative legislatures and the rule of law. Serious breaches can lead to suspension, as happened with Fiji.
Within the body politic of those countries, suspension from the Commonwealth matters. There’s an enforcement mechanism called the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group.
CMAG met regularly to look at aberrant states. Members took it seriously that if you stepped outside the functional definitions of democracy, you could be suspended, ultimately kicked out, or brought back in.
In Fiji’s case, it took five to 10 years before it brought itself back in through regular, free and fair parliamentary elections.
Given democracy’s many challenges today, having an institution with this capability among its member states—56 of the United Nations, the vast bulk from emerging economies and the developing world—is not a bad achievement. Not a bad achievement at all. Therefore, God save the King.
I think the King’s doing a great job.
Q: To what extent has China’s interest in security informed its global ambitions?
KR: It’s a super-complex question: what are the constituent elements of China’s current strategy towards the future of global governance and its role in the world writ large?
There are multiple streams of thinking. One is its own historiography: how it views itself as the Middle Kingdom, at the centre of what was once a system of tributary states across broader East Asia and the Western Pacific during the Ming and Qing periods.
Second, Marxism-Leninism, and the view through dialectical and historical materialism that the East is rising—China—and the West is declining—the United States. The forces of history are behind China.
Third, a deeply realist analysis of the balance of power and how it’s materially changing over time, particularly in relation to the United States, and particularly militarily.
Fourth, going back to where Gillian and I began, their analysis of where artificial intelligence will take real power in the future.
When I look at their literature and understanding of their future place in the world, all these forces are at work within Chinese political consciousness. Whatever the driving factors, they see themselves in a binary strategic competition with the United States, representing an alternative order.
Some of you will have read the Global Civilization Initiative, Global Development Initiative, Global Governance Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Belt and Road Initiative.
In the literature coming out of the party’s deliberations, it states in black and white that each is a product of China’s Marxist-Leninist worldview. They represent its worldview and values proposition. So, yes.
Q: You mentioned that Chinese domestic consumption is flat, but on the other hand the techno-industrial sector is still strong. How do see that evolving over the next three to five years?
KR: It’s an excellent question, because it goes to the foundational proposition: is China’s current unbalanced development model financially sustainable in the long term?
Xi Jinping’s answer so far seems to be: “I’m making a huge bet on technology, the technology stack and the AI stack in particular.”
In the literature, it’s described as: 新质生产力: “new quality productive forces”, and it’s buried in Marxist economics and the Marxist theory of surplus labour value. This massive investment in the techno-industrial strategy, particularly AI, will so turbocharge China’s productivity growth that it will leapfrog the U.S., the West and the rest.
It will shift the paradigm as well, because these algorithms at scale give the visible hand of the state an ability to allocate resources efficiently that surpasses the invisible hand of the market. That’s my reading of the literature. It’s a very big bet.
His second big bet is that, once that happens, China will have emerged as the world’s largest and prospectively most efficient economy. It will unleash a new consumer revolution in AI-derived products, solving the current deficiency in consumption. That’s the worldview.
Third, the techno-industrial strategy is currently suppressing competition elsewhere: German manufacturing, for example, and the decline of German industry as a consequence of Chinese oversupply exported at sub-market prices—what the Chinese call “involution” prices.
The bet is that once the competition is eliminated or reduced, prices can be reflated, overcoming the involution effect of producing at sub-market prices within China. That’s the theory of the case.
In the interim, what are the sources of finance for this mega techno-industrial strategy, given that the Chinese budget is, in relative terms, no healthier than the U.S. budget?
There are two sources. One is the budget itself, but it’s a limited fiscal envelope. If the choice is between improving the social safety net to boost consumption, or doubling down on the AI stack with massive compute, Xi Jinping will go to Plan B: keep betting on the grand roll of the dice.
In the meantime, there’s another source: soft loans from local banks, propped up by Chinese consumers saving at very low interest rates across the state savings bank system.
Consumers aren’t investing in real estate any more because it’s a source of negative equity, and they’ve already lost so much wealth. Their savings form an enormous amount of credit used to invest in and subsidise firms that might otherwise go to the wall.
There is a source of finance. I’m not saying the largest successful Chinese AI firms—the ByteDances of the world—aren’t profitable. Of course they are. But ultimately it’s private finance, public finance or banking-system credit. That’s how it works.
That’s what’s being used in the interim, against the big bet that China leapfrogs the U.S., the West and the rest, changes the paradigm since Adam Smith invented it 250 years ago, and spawns a new domestic consumer revolution on the basis of reflated prices.
These are very large bets indeed.
Why do a PhD?
GT: One last quick question: was it worth doing a PhD? Half the audience is doing one. And why did you choose the UK rather than Australia or America?
KR: The weather. No—let me take those in sequence.
Why do a PhD? For me, there was a question I didn’t know the answer to. Leaders around the world asked: “What does Xi Jinping think, and why does he think that way?” That’s the best indication of where China will go in the future.
I realised I didn’t have a disciplined answer. I had intimations of what it might be, but I hadn’t done the primary research.
Within the Chinese ideological system, ideology and ideological discourse are a coding mechanism through which you explain to the system writ large what macro changes are about to unfold, and why. Think of ideology as the headwaters of change, translating into strategy, then policy, then behaviour.
I did it because I didn’t know the bloody answer. For me, it was a genuine voyage of discovery. Did I find it bloody frustrating? Of course. Reading all this turgid stuff in the Chinese theoretical journal Qiushi—wow. It’s enough to make you want to eat sawdust of an evening.
GT: How did you find the writing-up period? How long did it take to write your PhD?
KR: I was working at the time, still running the Asia Society. From go to whoa, part-time, four years. I enrolled at the end of 2017, handed it in at the end of 2021 and graduated in 2022.
GT: Why Britain?
KR: Why His Britannic Majesty’s realm?
GT: Why Oxford? Why not Cambridge?
KR: Why the other place? I knew Rana Mitter—your mate and now mine, as a member of this college. He’s a formidable historian of modern China, specialising in the Republican period, and therefore also of Chinese Communist Party history from 1921 to 1949 and subsequently.
He had the right historical frame. When I said, “This is what I want to answer,” he said, “That sounds reasonable.” Then he said, “Can you narrow the topic?”
I said no, because I needed to answer the question: what is Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview, and why does he have it, as a predictor of where China will go?
Whatever your field, if you’ve got a question you want answered, which you think is relevant to your field and beyond it, go for it.
My only word of personal counsel: please do it early in life. Don’t be a dope like me and start at 59.
GT: We’re very glad you did start at 59. There’s never a bad moment to do a PhD. You’re an inspiration not just to the young people doing PhDs, MPhils or undergraduate degrees, but to anyone who’d like to try later in life. It’s never too late to start.