From the Chinese side, "standing up to them over COVID-19, HK and South China Sea" looks like "promoting baseless conspiracy theories about CoVID-19, meddling i

From the Chinese side, "standing up to them over COVID-19, HK and South China Sea" looks like "promoting baseless conspiracy theories about CoVID-19, meddling in China's domestic affairs and participating in American attempts to contain China." Australia's foreign policy has a massive contradiction at its heart: China is Australia's most important trading partner, but Australia's closest military ally, the United States, is pursuing an aggressive strategy to suppress China's rise as a peer-level state. Australia has to figure out how to reconcile these two facts, but it can't have its cake and eat it too. It's not possible to go along with American anti-Chinese initiatives while at the same time expecting the economic gravy train of exports to China to continue. In this context, the decision to call for an investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, heavily hinting at some sort of nefarious origin, was a completely unnecessary blunder. One wonders what the Australian government thought it would get out of that.