Stern Hu is in jail because he broke the law.

Westerners good for Africa? It is all relative, no? After 300 years of caring, cuddling, and help from the West, Africa is 100 times POORER than when it all started. Those are the objective facts. Brits building Olympic sized swimming pools and providing schools and health care for mine workers in Africa??!! You mean like the last colonial governor in Hong Kong suddenly caring about representative democracy for the city, just a couple years before the Brits were kicked out (after over 100 years of not caring)? History repeats itself.

China's presence in Africa is best judged by how well Africa is doing - in the short decade after China comes back, the competition alone is bringing the Africans MUCH BETTER terms on all of their deals

One thing is for certain. We will be seeing many more articles like this in the coming years.

Full of whining self-pity. Plus a total blindness to the lessons of modern history.

This one has its fair share of colourful, colonial-bully-boy imagery.

"another flex of the muscles in its increasingly tense arm wrestle... pay-back was probably inevitable... China is on the march, and getting in its way is a dangerous exercise... probably the least altruistic nation on earth [eh? really?]... the Chinese were moving in... aggressively promoting its own brand of rigid social control... its aggressive, sometimes ruthless, economic expansion... preferring deals with dictators and juntas"

And so on and so on.

It would be instructive, as Zhuubaajie is too polite to propose, for the author to apply the same rigour, the same blow-torch of self-righteous indignation, to the activities of European empire-builders in previous centuries. I suspect the language would be equally colourful, and the condemnation equally scathing.

But what can we learn from this?

I could suggest a bunch of well-worn clichés, along the lines of "what goes around, comes around".

Or more simply, "that's life". Suck it up.

We are extremely privileged in our lifestyle, thanks to our own settlers' history of commerce with under-developed nations. Before the arrival of the British, India produced close to 25% of the world's GDP. 300 years later, it produced less than 1%. While blatant pillaging on such a scale is highly unlikely in today's global economy, we should not ignore the fact that from the outside, we ourselves have not in the past been particularly squeaky-clean in our handling of international relations.

Stern Hu, being Australian, is automatically assumed to be innocent of any or all charges. This is consistent with our attitude to those dinki-di Aussie blokes 'n' sheilas who smuggle drugs into Indonesia, and makes for great headlines. But we do not have a monopoly on justice, nor any right to involvement in the judicial system of another country.

Calling Stern Hu "a pawn in the game" is empty of all real meaning. Just another cliché. Amongst many.

Zhuubaajie: "Stern Hu is in jail because he broke the law."

The problem is, it is not the law as we Australian's know it.

For example, in Australia, the government is subject to the law. If suspected it is wrong it can be forced to sit in front of an independent judge, just like we citizens are forced to do if we do something wrong. We won't get into trouble for making the government do that. That doesn't seem to be the case in China. We all remember what happened to the old lady who complained during the Olympics, after being told she could complain.

Another difference is we don't permit laws that allow the government to make it up as they go along. Well, they do pass one occasionally, but it is frowned upon. Yet it appears Stern Hu fell afoul of just just such a law.

And the Chinese process of enforcing the law is all very foreign to us. We are a very suspicious people by nature. We don't accept it is all above board unless we can see it is all above board. To put it bluntly we don't trust our own government - so why would we trust China's? What is this thing with a closed court? Why doesn't the media have access? Why can't Stern Hu appoint his own defence lawyer?

And finally, why all the secrecy if all the Chinese government is doing is just enforcing the law? We are proud of our laws and how we implement them, and we do it in the open for everybody to see. Why don't the Chinese do that?

It seems nothing like what we call "the law". In fact, it seems like the Chinese are playing work games with us. They know we have a deep respect for the rule of law, and would never object to it. So they call what they are doing "implementing the law", and hope we won't complain.

Fat chance. If there is one thing we Aussies are good at, it is complaining loudly.

It seems to me that in Australia we believe in the so called
separation of the powers, wheras I doubt that this matters in
China.

As far as trusting or doing business with China, putting too
many Australian eggs in one basket, would not be in our
interest, IMHO.

We saw what happened to long term iron ore contracts, during
the GFC. They were simply ignored. The same has happened with
wool contracts. Many an Australian businessman will have his
fingers burnt, by assuming that China plays by Western values.

Its the law of the jungle out there, so many will learn the
hard way.

Given the nature of the Chinese,and Asians in general,we can expect much more of what the author describes.

Unfortunately,we have a supine political and business leadership in Australia who will continue to court the Chinese for various reasons,but mainly greed.

Nothing new in this inability to think of Australia as an independent nation.That requires hard work and thinking outside of the box.

I believe we are heading for a global war as geopolitical considerations,resource shortage and,above all,population pressures,compel confrontation.I don't see much,if any,planning for that with our leadership either.

We do well to remember, the malevolent imperialism now being observed of the totalitarian regime of China, is a product of that same malice attributed to the west. What percentage of other significant conflicts in history, that led to the effective immediate enslavement of the largest population in the world of its time, by the west, are recorded with an insidious title alike 'The Opium War.'

The myopic duplicity/double standard of western observers is consistently breathtaking of its hypocrisy and arrogance.

The remaining 90% of iron ore reserves in the world are shared between Australia and Brazil, and although the pursuit of resources by China as a transcending economic nation is accurate, omitting the inclusion of Brazil as a major stakeholder is misleading.

Add to that the omission of the record of corporate propriety of the executive management of entities such as Rio Tinto and their ilk, and you may readily observe privateers as unscrupulous as those that ignited the opium war.

It may be suggested then, the tragedy of Stern Hu in such a volatile political mix, may only be observed as a train crash looking for a place to happen. In fact when you observe the record of corporate imperialism of Rio Tinto, you may well wonder the fate of those that fell for this country, to secure it from the obsessive malevolence of dysfunctional predators.

Climate change and the GFC are not a product of China, but the west. The imperialist notion of the west that compliance with ethical integrity, is incumbent upon everyone else except itself, as the self proclaimed inheritors of that high ground, is as incredulous as it is deranged.

The world is crying out for the foundation of a meaningful global dialogue, and all that is served up from western commentators is diversionary rubbish alike this article.

People in glass houses etc