Today stories are framed, right from the beginning, with outrage in mind. Grabbing attention is vital; which means you need to seize people's attention from that very first sentence.

There's no time for explanation, thought or, most critically, the point-of-view from which the story's told is definitive. Nuance, is squeezed out as uncomplicated protagonists charge towards inevitable conflict and the audience is encouraged to stand back and enjoy the fireworks.

The problem is life's not like that. The real challenge is, always, working out what's really going on. This has never been more vital than today.

Our relationship with China is at its lowest ebb since Australian diggers were fighting the Peoples' Army in Korea 60 years ago. It's lurched from deadlock to crisis; from not speaking to actively preventing communication.

The old joke was that the Chinese word for crisis, weiji, is a combination of the words danger and opportunity. It's a nice idea that's been popularised by US politicians (like former president John F. Kennedy) and diplomats (like former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice).

Sadly, it's not true. The real meaning of the characters is to stress that this is a point of danger; an important moment where a significant change is occurring.

Every moment we fail to recognise this risks cutting away at already frayed ties. The government wants you to think we're just drifting apart - we're not.

That's the simplistic, internet-fuelled, story that's being pushed by people who don't think you're clever enough - or have enough attention - to bother about what's actually going on. It divides the world into two: good and evil, us and them. It's a simple story and that's why it works.

It's also false, but the last thing those pushing this narrative want is for you to examine the detail and realise things aren't quite as black and white as they seem. So let's start by examining the first move, the point at which not engaging politically transferred over into harassing journalists.

Before dawn on June 26 a number of vehicles containing ASIO and AFP officers abruptly pulled up outside the homes of journalists working for the China News Service and China Radio.

Unfortunately ASIO won't say what occurred next, simply reiterating its long-standing practice of not commenting on intelligence matters. The journalists say that as soon as the doors were opened the agents pushed their way inside, waving a warrant alleging violations of the Foreign Influence Act.

As the investigators immediately spreading out through the rooms they seized phones and computers, leaving the shocked families clutching night-clothes around them. New, clean phones were offered as the search began but none of the occupants was allowed to access their own phones to retrieve numbers.

This meant simply establishing contact with the outside world took ages. Even children's iPad's were taken as the agents spread through the house, seizing documents and offering no reason for the search other than those on the warrant itself.

They were told not to tell anyone about the raid and given no further indication about why it might have taken place. It's difficult to feel any pride in the way these raids were conducted.

The families were terrified. This was not what was supposed to happen in a friendly country priding itself on its rule-of-law. Understandably traumatised, the journalists soon flew back to China.

We still have no idea what the security agencies were hoping to discover. A fortnight after this raid Foreign Affairs issued a new travel advice, warning of "arbitrary detention" in China.

This prediction that appears to have come true with the arrest of Cheng Lei, a dual citizen working for China's Global Television Network. What's evaporated is trust; the goodwill to attempt to broker a solution.

There's no talk, no admission of grey. The relationship has deteriorated to a situation where there's no ballast left to keep the ship afloat. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not comparing what happened in Sydney to what's going on in China - and that's exactly the point.

We insist our way, the Australian way, is far better. We laud open justice as far superior to the opaque way things happen in China and that's precisely why we willingly hold ourselves, our police, and our security agencies to a higher standard.

Abandoning this; reducing everything to an us/them, good/bad dichotomy squanders that superiority. Hysterically insisting that our security agencies always act appropriately won't cut it: in a democracy like ours we expect, rightly, to know what they do in our name and why they've acted as they have.

This is an information war and, if the government wants to win, we need to know why it's acting as it has. At the moment we've been left guessing.

Under Marise Payne our relationship with our most vital trading partner has completely disintegrated. Scott Morrison continues to inflame the relationship by hinting corona was hatched in a Chinese lab, an assertion now disproved by genetic testing of the virus released last week by the US.

Meanwhile the Australian media is playing along by screaming about secretive companies in China building up databases of "high-profile citizens". The reality behind this supposed mass-surveillance is simply that a company harvested details for on-sale from Facebook.

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Things are dangerous. Our relationship with Beijing is currently as low as it's been since Aussie diggers were fighting in Korea.

The government, however, is mum about reality. Instead it pretends the current diplomatic clash as something regrettable that will soon blow over. It won't. We need to make an effort. Now.