I agree that the Chinese/Australian relationship hasn't been great for a while.

But I think you are radically underestimating the amount of support China has (or had) in Australia. China has made a lot of people rich (to make it clear: not from corruption, but from trade) and there is/was a lot of admiration for how far China has progressed in such a short period of time.

> I don't believe the Australian call for an investigation was genuine/scientific/objective at all. The call was meant as a political attack. There is no way Australia or the US would accept any investigation result that doesn't put the full blame on China.

The Australian Minister who made the call (Peter Dutton) did it just as he returned from a trip to the US. He's something of a mini-Trump (with a worse TV manner) and clearly made the call to get support from the US. It wasn't something that anyone else in government seems to have known about, and support for it has been lukewarm.

In an alternate world, China could have welcomed the call with the proviso that it included the response to the pandemic. The Australian public would have supported that (there is great contempt here for how badly the US handled it), and China could have weakened the Australia/US alliance from that.

> It's a case of 'guilty until proven innocent, and we won't accept evidence of innocence'.

I don't agree with that at all. I think in Australia most people think the Chinese response was good. I think there were initial errors by the regional government (which the Chinese government has already made clear by getting rid of those people) and the inquiry should have found that.

> This is shown by the fact that Australia and the US are not interested in investigating whether other countries (including their own) could be related to the origin

Well there's no real compelling evidence, but I'm sure that could have been included in the inquiry if China had gone to work influencing the terms of reference.

> Australia went full in on Trump's rhetoric about China being a bully/threat, and has been blasting China in its media for years now

This isn't true. Australia signed a free trade agreement the year before Trump came to power and was generally seen as a great trading partner.

Australia had been opposed to Chinese policy in the South China Sea, in Hong Kong and in Tibet, but didn't do anything to help Trump in his stupid trade war.

> Things inside Australia have escalated so much, that anybody with a Chinese origin is viewed with suspicion for being a potential CCP agent, even if no evidence exists, and even if said person was Australia-born.

I can't emphasise enough how strange it is to hear someone claim that. Over 1/3 the population of Australia was born outside Australia, and China is the second most common place of birth of those. I worked in the university sector and we funded almost as many PhD students from China as were born in Australia.

It's true there have been some recent spy cases uncovered. But these have included people with no family relationship to China as well as some born there.

> In my opinion, Australia needs a dose of self-reflection too, and admit that they too played a part in deteriorating relations.

Well I think this incident was entirely Australia's fault, and I think most people realise that and the media has acknowledged it.

But there is no face saving way for Australia to back down, and there is no political appetite in any Australian political party for being seen as bowing to Chinese pressure and suggesting the call would be withdrawn.

My point is that if China had been smarter about this they could have come out ahead in Australia while making the US look bad. Instead they play the "oh we are offended" card and have lost a lot of the support they enjoyed in Australia over it.