We've learnt a lot this week about the expert Chinese eye for a good saying.

"Cry up wine and sell vinegar," sniffed the Chinese Embassy at the Australian Government in a most undiplomatic public cable posted on its website.

Not to be outdone, the editor of the state-run Global Times, Hu Xijin, described Australia as "chewing gum stuck on the sole of China's shoes".

"Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off," Hu posted on Weibo.

And what sin had Australia committed to invite such astonishing hostility?

The Government had proposed an independent inquiry into the COVID-19 outbreak.

Worse, it seems, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had pushed the idea in conversations with US President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The PM intends building an international coalition in support of such an inquiry, for two purposes: firstly, to better understand the origin and spread of the pandemic; and secondly, to force change in the World Health Organization which the Government claims was tardy and ineffectual in the early days of the outbreak.

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From one case a pandemic grows

While the US and European nations might currently regard an inquiry a second-order issue, given they are in the midst of a once-in-a-century health crisis, Australia's relative success in containing the deadly virus has allowed it greater capacity to consider the post-Covid world.

The PM firmly believes an inquiry is appropriate, warranted and simple common sense. After all, a virus first reported to the WHO on December 31 last year, has already infected more than three million people and officially killed at almost 220,000 so far.

According to Chinese government data seen by the South China Morning Post, a 55-year-old man from Hubei Province might have been the first person to have contracted the disease on November 17.

By the time the WHO was notified, there were 261 confirmed cases of what was believed to be an unknown coronavirus.

Trump, whose re-election year has been blighted by his cack-handed oversight of America's response to COVID-19, has called it the "Chinese virus".

Morrison hasn't been so crass but nevertheless believes the coronavirus emanated in Wuhan, likely in its wildlife wet markets. Australia is largely discounting suggestions the coronavirus escaped a pathogen laboratory, notwithstanding global concerns about the security of Wuhan's National Bio-safety Laboratory that date back to its inception.

China doesn't agree

China's response to global curiosity about COVID-19's origin has at times bordered on delusional paranoia.

In mid-March, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lijian Zhao, suggested the US military may have exported the virus to Wuhan.

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While Beijing's man in Canberra, Ambassador Cheng Jingye, didn't repeat this theory when he was interviewed by the Australian Financial Review's Andrew Tillett this week, he toed the company line with purpose.

"Some politicians [in Australia] claim the virus originated in Wuhan, China, which is not the case. The fact that the epidemic first broke out in China … does not mean the source of the virus originated in China," Cheng said.

Morrison's demands for an inquiry into the virus outbreak were denounced by the Ambassador as "dangerous" and undermining of the global fight against the pandemic. Then Cheng warned of dark retaliation in key trade.

"If the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think 'Why should we go to such a country that is not so friendly to China? The tourists may have second thoughts," he told the AFR.

"The parents of the students would also think whether this place which they found is not so friendly, even hostile, whether this is the best place to send their kids.

"Maybe the ordinary people will say 'Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?'"

A Chinese emissary to this country has never put the relationship in such shockingly raw calculation.

Were it not for the firm knowledge that the Chinese economy, which shrank 9.8 per cent in the March quarter, will need new vigour in the months ahead, powered by Australian coal, iron ore and gas, the concern would have been greater.

And a burgeoning Chinese middle class, already robbed of cheap pork because of African swine flu, might listen to its stomach more than its nationalistic heart when it comes to clean Australian beef.

As for foreign students, the damage has already been wrought by the Government's closure of the border, which came first to Chinese nationals in early February.

We're far from alone

Beijing has a lot of skin in the game too.

Australia's long fretted that its economic bounty being over-reliant on China, but COVID-19 forced a higher priority on the Morrison Government.

But normalising the China-Australia relationship or moreover, stepping it down from these rhetorical heights, will take time.

Australia will not budge from its calls for an independent review of the COVID-19 outbreak, but nor does it want to inflame relations.

It knows too that it is not the only nation to feel flame from the Chinese dragon.

Morrison raised his proposal for an independent inquiry with Macron and Merkel knowing this.

The Chinese Embassy in France has been very active in promoting China's success in quelling the coronavirus while being critical of the response in France and Europe.

A fortnight ago, the embassy posted on its website, "Restoring distorted facts — Observations of a Chinese diplomat posted to Paris", in which an unnamed Chinese official accused workers at French nursing homes of "abandoning their posts overnight … and leaving their residents to die of hunger and disease".

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian summoned the Chinese Ambassador to express his displeasure, later releasing a statement saying there was "no room for polemics".

In Germany, Chinese diplomats have been seeking to elicit praise for Beijing's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"The German government is aware of individual contacts made by Chinese diplomats with the aim of effecting positive public statements on the coronavirus management by the People's Republic of China," the German interior ministry wrote in a letter obtained by Reuters.

"The federal government has not complied with these requests."

China has lost face from the coronavirus crisis and is showing itself to be a bully in attempted reputational rescue.