There is a lot wrong with China. Goodness knows there is.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Where should we start?
Human rights, of course.
"The human rights situation continued to be marked by a systematic crackdown on dissent," reports Amnesty International of the PRC's 2019.
"The justice system remained plagued by unfair trials and torture and other ill-treatment in detention. China still classified information on its extensive use of the death penalty as a state secret."
Neighbourliness? In hitherto open water in the South China Sea, China is building islands and creating military bases on them.
Tiananmen Square? Democracy? If you're in China, don't look them up on the web. The search engine won't come up with anything.
And certainly don't stand in Tiananmen Square with a placard mentioning the massacre of protesters there in 1989 - you will find yourself in prison indefinitely.
But all these damning failings don't mean we should blame China for the coronavirus currently crashing the world economy and all our livelihoods with it.
With the stock market tanked and virus deaths and unemployment soaring, blame is now the name of the game.
Even if it started in China - and all the evidence is that it did - branding it as "the Chinese virus" is to play the Trumpian game.
Mr Trump is worried about November, and his falling poll ratings in the blue-collar states he needs to win for re-election.
With the stock market tanked and virus deaths and unemployment soaring, blame is now the name of the game.
But SARS-CoV-2 is no more a "Chinese virus" than the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 was Spanish (that one actually started in Kansas, as the Kansas Historical Society points out).
We shouldn't, and didn't, call it Kansan flu - so let's not co-operate with Mr Trump in his blatantly transparent re-election tactic of pinning blame for the current plague on China.
President Truman said "the buck stops here", not "the buck stops in Beijing".
So why is Australia playing along with the Trump re-election campaign?
READ MORE:
There is a view that the call for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic is nothing but a genuine search for important knowledge.
But there is another, more sceptical view - and that is that the Morrison government is doing America's bidding.
The Financial Times noted the coincidence: "Australia's Daily Telegraph, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, ran an apparent scoop that the 'Five Eyes' - the intelligence agencies of the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - had concluded the disease came from the Wuhan lab, whether by accident or design."
The story was widely dismissed, but the narrative remains: it's China's fault.
In his memoirs, Malcolm Turnbull relates how he saw the newspaper proprietor and the President together.
He says of Mr Trump: "His deference to Murdoch was greater than I've ever seen from any Australian politician, and was in marked contrast to the high-handed way Trump treats most people."
A re-election campaign is under way. It involves the buck stopping in Beijing.
Do we want to get involved?