What's really embarrassing for Kevin Rudd, Australia's prime minister, is that after all his boasts of a special, personal relationship with Chinese leaders, Beijing has repeatedly ignored Canberra's attempts to extract details about the arrest in China of Rio Tinto executives.
More than a week after Stern Hu and his three colleagues were detained for allegedly spying and stealing state secrets, Canberra still doesn't really know what Mr Hu has allegedly done - or what a state secret is, precisely, in China.
