China is deliberately singling out Australia to intimidate the region

Yesterday’s ugly, viciously confrontational Chinese tweet insulting Australia has been instructive to onlookers.

Flat White asked a seasoned Asian diplomat for his take on the Chinese Communist Party’s current ramping up of trade war tensions. The reply was blunt:

China never acts simply out if pique. This was a carefully stage-managed escalation taking opportunistic advantage of a domestic situation that got out of hand.

The CCP is not out just to humiliate Australia. It is demonstrating to the ‘small dragons’ of South East Asia that if China can bring a western country like Australia to heel, it can do much more and worse, to them.

Australia’s “mistake”e, if you will, was to make so much of what, in China…