Episode 5 of the Lowy Institute’s new podcast, Rules Based Audio, is out today. In Xi Jinping - The Backlash, Lowy Senior Fellow Richard McGregor discusses his new book on the Chinese leader, which studies the domestic and international reaction to Xi’s centralisation of political control and assertion of Chinese power on the world stage.
Xi has centralised power, cracked down on dissidents and purged the party with a popular, ruthless and sometimes politically convenient anti-corruption campaign. He has tightened the spaces for dissent in China, had Xi Jinping Thought written into the guiding ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and removed his own presidential term limits. But with a slowing economy, demographic pressures, and increasing pushback from adversaries without and within, how long can Xi’s grip on China last?
Richard McGregor is a globally recognised authority on the Chinese Communist Party. He was the Financial Times bureau chief in Beijing and Shanghai between 2000 and 2009, and headed the Washington office for four years from 2011. Prior to joining the FT, he was the chief political correspondent and China and Japan correspondent for The Australian. His book The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers won numerous awards, including the Asia Society in New York award in 2011 for best book on Asia. His latest book, Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century, was described as “shrewd and knowing” by The Wall Street Journal, and a “compelling and impressive” read by The Economist and won the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for non-fiction in 2018. He was a fellow at the Wilson Center in 2015 and a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center at George Washington University in 2016. He has lectured widely, in the United States and elsewhere, on Chinese politics and Asia.
Rules Based Audio is a half-hour, fortnightly podcast covering stories from the cracks and faultlines in the global order, hosted by Kelsey Munro and powered by the Lowy Institute.
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