Patrick Carlyon: China, outbursts are stretching friendship
China says our leaders are on an unfair “all-out crusade” against their nation simply because we are leading the calls to find out the truth of the coronavirus outbreak. So if China has really done nothing wrong, why are they so scared of an investigation, asks Patrick Carlyon.
Patrick Carlyon
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Dear China, Thank you for your latest observations about our country and people. Being likened to chewing gum on China’s shoe is a big improvement on being labelled a British offshore prison on the fringes of civilisation.
We have enjoyed your insults over the years. After we queried your claim for the South China Sea, you said we were not a paper tiger, but a “paper cat”.
After Mack Horton called out Chinese swimmer Sun Yang as a drug cheat, millions of your people trolled his social media accounts.
“He is white rubbish in the water and is toxic waste after he gets out,” someone said.
Such name-calling is a kind of sport, isn’t it? Your abuse conjures angry drunks who spitball the most childish put-downs for what they think will stun their targets into submission.
Despite these outbursts, we’ve been friends for a long time. We make one another rich. As several Australian billionaires have pointed out, let’s not upset trade arrangements. If our billionaires won’t mention one million Uyghur people in your concentration camps, neither will we.
But this virus thing, and your increasingly odd retorts, raises concerns. Even by your usual standards of anti-social behaviour and oppositional defiance, you seem more unhinged. You have spoken of Prime Minister Scott Morrison receiving a “slap on the face”.
So here’s a little history. Australian leaders are known for speaking beyond their perceived station. A (very short) man, Billy Hughes, was a long ago leader of this country. He went to Europe after World War 1 to discuss putting the world back together again.
First, Hughes clashed with Woodrow Wilson, the American president, then Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George. They wanted him to assume his place as head of a minor nation. But Hughes would not. Wilson called Hughes a “pestiferous varmint” (others went for “shrimp” and “cannibal”).
You represent only five million people, Wilson told Hughes.
“I speak for 60,000 dead,” Hughes replied.
The tale is worth noting after your recent attacks against Morrison, as well as Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. They have expressed the need to find the truth of the coronavirus outbreak.
Perhaps Morrison could borrow from Hughes to explain his thinking. “I speak for 260,000 dead,” he could say.
That’s how many people worldwide have so far been lost to coronavirus. Yet you have labelled their collective stand as “groundless”, “malicious” and “outlandish”.
Don’t you want to settle claims that you wilfully mismanaged a crisis and a few hundred thousand people died as a consequence? You should. The circumstantial evidence against you keeps mounting.
Did you destroy laboratory evidence? Delay the release of information? Allow millions of people to leave Wuhan — and infect the world — while keeping your secret to stockpile essential goods from countries such as Australia?
Did the virus spread from a market or a laboratory? Was the first case as early as last October? Why did you only tell the World Health Organisation about the contagion in late January? Did saving face trump saving lives?
To apply the kind of poor quip that arms your recalcitrance, has the bat got your tongue?
We get that you don’t want to talk about it. But that’s not how it goes in the free world.
Take America. Its leader Donald Trump says silly things, much as your officials do. The difference is his opponents say he’s silly and they don’t get “disappeared”.
An independent inquiry, as proposed by Morrison, would address worldwide concerns best encapsulated by White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro: “As early as December Chinese officials were well aware of the possibility of a pandemic and at that point over the next six weeks they started doing the biggest cover-up in world history.”
You, naturally, have applied your default victimhood response.
“This is an all-out crusade against China and Chinese culture, led by Australia,’ the Global Times wrote.
Your infantile rhetoric is one marker. But it resonates more for what you do not say than what you do. Your officials borrow from Russia’s denials after its soldiers shot down MH17 in 2014. Or the cover-up of Chernobyl.
The Global Post delivered the line that likened Australia to chewing gum on China’s shoes. President Wilson sought to similarly deride Billy Hughes in 1919.
Australia didn’t bow to the United States then, and public opinion goes that it should not kow-tow to China now. Public opinion matters in Australia, by the way, as inconvenient as it can be to our political leaders.
Anyway, it’s good to catch up, old friend, even if the subject of your perceived crimes against humanity is a downer. Should we save the plight of the Uyghurs for another letter?
In the meantime, please enjoy the enclosed slab of Foster’s beer. As you know, every man, woman and child in this country guzzles six cans of it before breakfast, because all Australians are “delirious” convicts.
Yours Sincerely,
Just another journalist who has, as you like to say, “lost their self-professed journalistic professionalism and independence”.
Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist