Last week while I was fighting off a virus, the APEC summit was held in Sydney. One of the main features of the APEC summit (besides George Bush’s gaffes) was the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao and his encounter with a nerdy-looking Australian called Kevin Rudd, who happens to be the Australian opposition leader. From what I can gather, Rudd addressed Hu at a business meeting and started his speech with a flourish of Mandarin. Rudd has worked in Beijing for Austrade, has owned a China-related consultancy and studied Asian Studies at the ANU. When I first heard that Rudd spoke Mandarin during APEC, I didn’t expect his Mandarin to be great. But after watching a few different videos on Youtube, I can say that his pronunciation was excellent, but the content of his speech was a bit strange. However, speaking Mandarin to the President of China definitely takes some balls. Here’s a rundown of what Rudd said during the Youtube video that is posted below. Apparently he also said stuff about when his family went to China during the 1980s, but that part of the speech isn’t in this video.
“Chairman Mr Hu Jintao, in our country you are our most respected guest. I hope you can take a rest, visit our beautiful places, our attractive scenery and our beautiful cities.”
Judging from the above, Rudd was being a wee bit repetitive – aren’t beautiful places and attractive scenery pretty much the same? Anyway, he has done enough to be remembered by the Chinese media for the next 50 years and I am sure he will always be known as the Australian politician who can speak good Chinese. And on the domestic front, the Chinese vote does seem to be very important – on June 23, I translated a Chinese article that praised John Howard’s contributions to multiculturalism and seemingly came straight from the Liberal Party. And George Megalogenis from the Australian reckons that Kevin Rudd’s Mandarin speech was partly motivated by the wish to gather more votes in Howard’s local seat of Bennelong, which is home to Australia’s second-largest Chinese-born population.
