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
needed to be fully unleashed in order to pull China out of poverty.
And therefore, it was necessary to contemplate and embrace a long period of inequality while that occurred.
And when asked how long, he said dozens of generations, which you don't have to be a mathematical genius to work out that's hundreds of years, dozens of generations.
And that orthodoxy effectively enabled market-based reforms in the economy domestically and engaged with the capitalist world externally, which is how, frankly, a generation or two of Americans, and Australians for that matter, became familiar with Deng's China, Jiang Zemin's China, Deng's successor.
and Hu Jintao's China, who was Jiang Zemin's successor, because the overriding ambition was to grow the economy, bring people out of poverty, and make China a global economic great power, effectively for 35 years, right through until 2012, starting way back in 1978.
The second big change after Mao, though, is with Xi Jinping.
He becomes general secretary of the party at the end of 2012, and he has changed that ideological script again, back to what I would call the Marxist left, a much more state-driven and party-driven economy, and with much tighter levels of Leninist control.
through this period of reform and opening, which is quite interesting.
If we've looked at our Machiavelli carefully in The Prince, Machiavelli often speaks of the need to mask one's own ambitions and to mask one's own ideas while being a loyal servant of the prince of the time before you yourself end up in power.
And of course, there are parallel axioms in Chinese traditional political wisdom about that as well.
So bear that in mind as we trip through his political career.
By the late 70s, early 80s, he lands a position as a private secretary to the then minister for defense, whose name is Geng Biao.
And this was before I met the guy down in Xiamen.
He spent a couple of years doing that, and he's always prided himself in therefore having something of a military grounding or military background.
He then undertakes...
prefecture-level positions as party secretary, where he often refers to how much he learned from working closely with the peasants on the ground.
As party secretary in a prefecture, it's to raise local living standards, to organize, shall we say, agricultural production, to ensure that
agricultural surpluses are able to be sold on private markets on weekends, and so that you begin to see the emerging of a local, as it were, semi-capitalist economy.
So kind of technocratic governance job.
Technocratic governance, and it's a standard pathway to ultimate advancement.
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