Kevin Rudd
speaker
641 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Kevin Rudd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think during the period in which he was party secretary, I haven't seen a strong evidence trail that he has led at the provincial level crackdowns against corruption.
At the same time, as soon as he takes over as party general secretary for the entire Communist Party at the end of 2012,
The first thing he does, almost, is to launch a nationwide anti-corruption campaign.
So he has been, I think, observing, noting, seeing how corruption under his predecessors had moved from a retail level to a commercial level to an industrial scale.
And he very quickly draws out the analogies with the collapse of the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and says, in effect, that the fish rots from the head.
And what happens when a fish rots from the head is that ideological corruption gives rise to physical corruption, gives rise to the dissipation of all forms of political discipline.
And he saw that as fundamental to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has become this sort of long playing training video for various folks in the Chinese Communist Party of everything that you should not do.
One, remember in the Gorbachev period, it was governed by these dual disciplines of glashnost and perestroika, which translated effectively mean glashnost, opening, and perestroika, reform.
Sound familiar to reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping?
So he's got this rolling around on the back of his head that if you unleash too much of the capitalist impulses of the Chinese people, like the Russian people, then ultimately you're going to shake the inherent disciplinary structures of the ruling party, point one.
Point two, what he said more specifically, particularly in a remarkable speech he gave, I think, in 2013 to a meeting of funsters otherwise called the Propaganda and Ideology Department of the CCP.
That should be a fun conference if ever you want to go to one.
I've never been invited, but I think that's where they really get into their Marxism and Leninism and propaganda together.
And that's where he spoke most clearly about the corrosive influence of capitalist values and about the attrition of communist ideological values
in the last days of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The third reason he gives in his extensive corpus of writings and teachings is his wistful reflection that there was not one single man prepared to stand up in the Soviet Red Army to defend the party
when things got to extremists in 1991.
And so it has caused him again to double down in terms of his determination that the party will always be in control of the army, absolute control of the army.
Yeah, I'd finished my diplomatic posting by then, but I happened to be back in Beijing at the time, working in a different incarnation.
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