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.
Worse, Beijing's very public snub has forced Mr Rudd and his foreign minister to trawl Chinese media for details as to why Mr Hu, an Australian citizen, was jailed.