Coronavirus Australia: Biggest bully China can’t run and can’t hide

Then-Labor leader Gough Whitlam speaks with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai in China in 1971. Picture: AP

Almost 50 years ago, an ALP delegation visited China. It was as gutsy as it was risky but, in the end, it was a triumph for Gough Whitlam. He looked like a leader when Australia desperately needed one.

Since then, Australia has enjoyed a good relationship with China. We occasionally protest sotto voce about its human rights performance but we don’t make it a deal breaker. In reality, there is nothing anyone can do about life in China except for the Chinese government, which is steeped in thousands of years of demonstrating a fundamental belief in looking after the elite.

Just how you censure China or make it face some kind of reckoning no one has ever been able to explain to me.

Now that it has announced it will work with an inquiry into how COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, we might discover how to prevent further escapes. The human factor is ever-present and we know we are not infallible. The lock on a cage in a laboratory somewhere in the world will not be properly latched or a tap won’t be totally turned off or a hundred other lapses might be possible. The Chinese should never have been so sensitive because no one accused them of a wilful release of the disease. Accidents do happen, even in totalitarian countries run by paranoid chauvinists.

Australia has been deemed “a joke” by China but the joke is on China — and it is a pretty sick one at that. Embassies don’t release statements with this sort of tough language as standard fare. China has ramped up its rhetoric to a degree rarely seen in diplomatic circles in a fit of childish pique. Whacking anyone who dares to criticise is the way it always reacts.

Why Beijing doesn’t realise how silly it looks in these tired old poses I really don’t know. There is no point in denial when there are witnesses to your mistakes. A jury would come back pretty quickly and proclaim China’s guilt in this episode. As my father would say: “Get out and get out quick.”

The Trump administration is not talking with China. US President Donald Trump can come up with some pretty wild rhetoric in his often off-the-cuff forays into foreign affairs, so his silence could be a blessing.

The frustration for the Chinese is that everyone knows they got this terribly wrong. No amount of twisting, turning or spinning will allow them to escape responsibility. The biggest bully on the block can’t run and can’t hide.

The tragedy is that China does not know how to accept criticism. International squabbling has gone on with this issue for months, when a simple mea culpa could have silenced the critics. As the song says: “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.”