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
And so it went on.
And so as I wandered around the square and saw this site for the first time, as a scholar or as a student of Chinese, modern Chinese history in particular, but classical Chinese history as well, I could see the instinctive reaction, fairly instinctive reaction of someone like Deng, an old-fashioned Leninist, who would just say, this is gaoluan, Chinese expression meaning creating chaos.
And I had this enormous sense of foreboding that the clock was already ticking.
So why did they do it?
I think Deng had concluded that unless he drew parameters around this, that the party would rapidly lose power, and furthermore, that you would have this sort of chaos spread right across China.
And so they acted.
But then through the rest of the 90s, through until probably about 2000, there continues this internal debate within the Chinese Communist Party about whether we could execute a form of political transition to a Singaporean-style long-term democracy or guided democracy, as they would see it, in order to create an exit ramp for the Chinese Communist Party over time.
After Deng died in 97, that debate rapidly reached its conclusion, and they said, no, we're hanging on for the long term.
And that's where I see the fundamental changes having occurred.
Remember, that's a decade before Xi Jinping comes to power.
From his first year in office from 2013, you could already see the directives going out to pull in on the reins of control over the exercise of freedom in multiple domains.
Religious freedom, for example, the independence of journalists to the extent that they had it before, but they did have some.
There was some investigative reporting underway.
the legal system, the independence of lawyers, and also those who had been engaged in academic-level discussions about, shall we say, other forms of democratic governance experimentation in China at the village level.
Xi Jinping's conclusion was that all these added up to an erosion of the Leninist control of the party.
And therefore, crackdowns unfolded in the case of religion.
Because religious practice is so widespread in China, it's not an abolition of all forms of religious expression, not at all, but reining in anything which was not authorized so that if you were to look at it in 2026, it's vastly less free than it was a decade before.
More recently, we've seen some purging happening in the military.
What have you made of that?
With the military in particular, he has sought to reassert his control.
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