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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Jiang Zemin.
Or in knowledge, you can purge whoever doesn't like the way you sounded.
That's true.
Mind you, as a junior Australian diplomatic official at the time, I appropriately applauded this performance at the Opera House.
That's kind of what you do.
But anyway, you roll the clock along.
I think Jiang Zemin has worked out that there are problems in terms of party corruption, that there are problems in terms of indiscipline, and there are problems in terms of allowing any further, as it were, slide in control, given where they ended up in 1989.
So, against the alternatives that they were faced with at the time, I think they saw in Xi Jinping someone who was a party guy, first and foremost, and secondly, having presided over a couple of, or three, heavily reformist provinces, Shanghai, Fujian, and Zhejiang, which were very much at the cutting edge of economic progress.
that the economic reform program would be safe, the opening to the outside world's economies would be safe, as it would be safe in terms of party political control.
I think that's why they made their bet with Xi Jinping.
And I think Jiang Zemin, by the time he died only a couple of years ago,
would have been deeply surprised by how much Xi Jinping then set out to change the center of gravity of the Chinese political economy in a big way.
Why would he have been surprised by that?
Because he assumed that the economic reform program would continue, that there would still be a lot of space for the Chinese entrepreneurial class.
that China's international economic engagement would continue, that China would progressively integrate itself with the global economy.
And instead what he saw, certainly by the time we get to 2015, is Xi Jinping turning the levers very much towards the Marxist left.
Greater role for central planning, lesser role for, shall we say, interim inequality as Deng had conceived of it originally.
And at the center of this, Xi Jinping's rehabilitation of an old Maoist saying, which was along these lines, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about north, south, east, and west, whether we're talking about the government, the military, the academy, or commerce, or society, the party leads in all.
And Xi Jinping pronounced that and brought it back with a certain Maoist flourish.
That's what would have surprised Jiang Zemin.
Showing 161–180 of 641 · page 9 of 33
← Previous
Next →