The Stern Hu affair is a worrying preview of a world run on China’s rules

Wednesday, 22nd July 2009

The Chinese are happy to call Australia their true friend until we dare to question their unarguable rightness, says Eric Ellis

Since Hu was detained on 5 July, we’ve learned much about the Sino-Australian relationship. We’ve learned that Canberra was chummy with China’s senior leadership because Rudd is an ex-diplomat who impressed Hu Jintao with his Mandarin at APEC and meets secretly with junketing Politburo members. Canberra first claimed the Hu matter had nothing to do with it, maybe hoping no one would notice. As the heat increased on a Rudd singed as China’s ‘Manchurian Candidate’ by the Joel Fitzgibbon affair, he expressed ‘concern’ about Hu. The press and talkback shock jocks got hold of him, so Rudd talked tough, doing that ‘We warn the Czar’ thing Australian pols love, to show us how hairy-chested they are — except it only shows them depilated. After moving on Hu, Beijing has done mostly nothing. It pre-judged Hu as a corrupt spy, and all the more traitorous because he switched nationality, and then told Australia to pipe down lest the ire of our biggest trading partner impact badly elsewhere. Rudd flubbed around trying to present low-level municipal types and sub-ministers as Chinese rainmakers, the best he could summon. What good is a zhengyou — a true friend — when your fair-weather Chinese mates won’t take your calls?

Hu has also exposed as nonsense that Australia ‘punches above its weight’. That pompous twaddle that we are at the centre of things only seems to be true when it doesn’t matter — while supping at the White House — and never when it does, like now, when Australia really is at the centre of things because Hu has become an international metaphor for what happens in China. Pace the bellicose Fijian junta, it’s not even true in the western Pacific, where Australia claims to be the superpower. About the only field of human endeavour in which Australia punches above its weight is on the sporting field.

No, as Stern Hu now knows, the world sees his adopted country as what it is — a massive mine packaged into a blousy democracy of 21 million people, an international welterweight at best whose grumpy calls you can ignore. It’s left to DFAT to pathetically remind Mrs Hu that Australians abroad must be aware that the laws of foreign countries can be different to those of Australia, as it figures out how deep to kowtow.