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
But I'd be fibbing to you if I said to you today that the room shook for me when I first met him.
Much later on, when I was Prime Minister of Australia and he was visiting Australia as Vice President of China,
And I remember sitting in front of the fireplace in the Prime Minister's residence in Canberra.
It was winter.
And spending a couple of hours over a glass of Australian bread, talking about the state of the world with him in Chinese.
That's when I sensed that this was a man of history for the simple reason that all of his references were about his place in the context of unfolding Chinese history.
So that's the first time in which I had that sense we were dealing with something, somebody, some person who was unique.
That's true.
And when his position was still somewhat contested, it wasn't absolutely clear that he would become paramount leader.
In the conversation, which, as I said, ran for a couple of hours, was free-flowing.
We didn't have interpreters.
And essentially, his thesis was that China intrinsically is a great power, historically was demonstrated as such throughout a couple of thousand years of recorded history.
Not the 5,000 that the Chinese often boast about, but just a couple of thousand.
Which, you know, given we're up to the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country as a republic, you know, a couple of thousand is pretty good.
And certainly measured against Australia, it's very good.
But he saw that the trend of Chinese history was China was a great power when it was A, unified, and B, able to keep foreign adversaries under control and divided.
And China collapsed as a great power when neither of those propositions held true.
And so for those reasons, spinning it into the 20th century and then into the 21st century when I was meeting with him, he saw the contemporary mandate of the Chinese Communist Party, which is to maintain China's domestic unity and to keep it free from external pressure so that it could once again become a global great power.
And that whereas he wouldn't say, quote, I, Xi Jinping, therefore have a unique mandate to do this on behalf of 1.4 billion Chinese people, close quote.
For me, the subtext is pretty clear.
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