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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · What Xi Jinping Wants · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

And we arrived in Beijing on the 20th of May, which was the day they declared martial law.

And we're already into those massive set of student protests within the square.

And of course, the crackdown, the military crackdown, and when all the students were killed was on the 4th of June.

So because our entire program of whatever else we were supposed to be doing was canceled because of chaos under heaven, I then went wandering in the square for a week to talk to all these kids.

And

And it was remarkable to see the spontaneous outburst from kids, and not just kids, not just university students, but from other units of the Chinese Communist Party calling out for freedom and democracy.

Yeah.

I remember, if you've been to Beijing, walking to the square for the first time, coming down across the ceremonial bridges in front of Mao's portrait beneath the Gate of Heavenly Peace to look at the square for the first time.

And I'd seen the square on multiple occasions when it's full of the normal Communist Party paraphernalia.

And this time, it was like a massive comprehensive exercise in iconoclasm.

That is, to the left was the Museum for the History of the Chinese Revolution, which had one giant flag planted on top in the Chinese characters saying, Mingzhu, democracy.

Great hall of the people, full of big character posters, as they call them.

calling for the purge of a whole bunch of people within the Chinese leadership who are old-fashioned leftists.

And then in front of you, there was this crowd of, I think on our particular day, half a million kids in the middle.

It's quite a large gathering.

The scale is unbelievable.

And then in front of them, as I looked, there were these

parade marshals who were organizing individual, shall I say, protest marches of various units of the party.

And I looked to see which ones they were.

One protest group from the Central Party School, another protest group from such and such a foreign policy academy.

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