You never know what you might find until you look hard enough.
And look they did.
With all the furore over wine and cheese, it largely went unnoticed last week that yet another Australian abattoir was banned from supplying meat to China, allegedly over contamination from a banned drug called chloramphenicol.
The discovery came despite rigorous testing in Australia during the past decade that has never found a single trace of the veterinary drug.
The finding, just 24 hours after the Morrison Government declared that it would veto agreements between Australian states and Beijing, is yet further evidence of the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Australia and its major trading partner.
So much for all those Free Trade Agreements that were being trumpeted just a year ago.
Earlier in the week, China began importing huge imports of Argentine barley, for beer and livestock feed, after recently slapping an 80 per cent tariff on Australia over claims it has been dumping the grain into China at below cost.
The same accusations have been levelled at our wine makers.
The action wasn't all one sided.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg last week canned a huge dairy purchase, Mengniu Dairy's $600 million takeover of the Dairy Farmers and Pura brands owned by Japanese giant Kirin.
The sale, he said, wasn't in the national interest.
And that's after ramping up scrutiny on foreign takeovers earlier this year, a move squarely aimed at China.
Coal repeatedly has attracted the scrutiny of Beijing and in recent months, import quotas have been suggested on Australian thermal coal for power generation, with state-owned generators directed to use local product instead.
Before the pandemic, China was openly encouraging tourists and students to travel and study elsewhere.
The question is, how far will Beijing go in its bid to express ire at Canberra? And could this threaten our lucrative iron ore trade?
For the time being, iron ore exports are likely to remain unimpeded. But the trade could end up becoming a strategic weapon in the event of a significant rise in regional tensions.
Iron fist, no velvet glove
This diplomatic unravelling hasn't been sudden.
While Beijing was incensed by the Morrison Government's support for an investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the origins of the dispute extend back a decade.
Australia has officially been on the nose with the Beijing leadership for several years, ever since former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called out China's attempted interference in the Australian parliament and Beijing's steady incursions into our universities.
Since then, we've been regularly snubbed at the annual Chinese gabfest at Hainan — the Boao Forum, China's answer to the Davos shindig in Switzerland.
But the falling out began over iron ore.
Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, Chinese companies, many of them state-controlled, purchased strategic mineral resources and engaged in takeover activity on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Our Foreign Investment Review Board largely rubber stamped them.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, as Rio Tinto was drowning in a sea of debt following its catastrophic decision to buy Alcan for $US38 billion, it inked a deal with a loss-making Chinese government-owned firm Chinalco, which had become its largest shareholder.
That deal, which would have given Beijing control of Australia's — and the world's — richest iron ore deposits, sparked panic in Canberra and outrage amongst investors, given it was struck at the absolute bottom of the stock and commodity market rout.
Before it could be consummated, BHP waded in with an iron ore merger proposal that had no chance of getting across the line with competition regulators in Europe or the US.
However, it gave Rio Tinto the perfect opportunity to ditch the deal and save some face.
Whatever went on behind the scenes, Beijing clearly suspected Canberra played a hand in scuppering the transaction.
The retribution was swift. Within weeks, Rio Tinto's entire Shanghai-based marketing team, led by Australian citizen Stern Hu, was arrested, tried in secret and jailed.
At one stage, the charges were changed from offering bribes to accepting bribes.
Faltering economy and social unrest
Like capitalism, democracy is not a perfect system. But it is the least-worst option.
For most of the past half century, Chinese citizens have been content to cede control to a totalitarian regime so long as it delivered on its promise of rising living standards. That now is becoming an increasingly difficult goal.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Beijing engineered a domestic boom that dragged the rest of the world with it, saving the capitalist west from itself.
But in the process, it piled on the debt as this graph from the Reserve Bank shows.
Since then, every time it has attempted to ratchet back the stimulus, growth has tanked and it's been forced to resume building infrastructure.
That's been great for Australia as China's appetite for minerals and energy has inflated commodity prices.
But the return from every extra yuan in stimulus is shrinking. It's becoming ever-more difficult to lift productivity by building roads to nowhere and empty cities.
Even before the COVID-19 crisis caused the economy to contract (it miraculously avoided recession), growth was shrinking as its trade war with the United States began to exact a toll and sluggish productivity growth weighed on the economy.
But infrastructure building is the biggest weapon in its stimulus arsenal to boost employment and placate the population.
This graph from the RBA late last year paints a picture of an economy facing serious headwinds.
The domestic slowdown has coincided with an attempt to whip up nationalist fervour.
On the propaganda front, Australia has been accused of being a lapdog at the beck and call of Washington.
But it also has seen a dramatic increase in regional aggression with China's claims and military expansion in the South China Sea and, more recently, the crackdown in Hong Kong.
Who holds the power in the iron ore trade?
While the Chinese Communist Party has ramped up the pressure on Australia, it has been careful to attack trade items it can secure elsewhere.
Wine can be sourced from Europe, barley from the Americas, meat from almost anywhere, coal from Indonesia or Russia.
What it can't readily replace is Australian iron ore, although it is in the process of trying with material from Brazil and West Africa.
That will be no easy task. Our three big miners, Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue between them produce around 800 million tonnes of the key steel-making ingredient, more than twice that of Brazil's Vale.
West Africa, meanwhile, has been presented its own difficulties.
China produces vast amounts of iron ore but its quality is low, which makes it an expensive and dirty ingredient in the steel-making process.
More than 80 per cent of our iron ore is exported to China, with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan making up for most of the rest.
And despite recent tensions, the trade has been surging as Beijing desperately attempts to lift the country out of the pandemic-induced slump.
Exports rose 8 per cent in June alone and when combined with surging prices, has seen total exports come in at more than $100 billion for the year.
While we are hugely dependent on the export income, it also means we hold the whip hand on a vital ingredient for China — at least for the next five or so years.
That potentially turns the trade into a strategic weapon that could be used as a handbrake on China's economic growth or, in more dire situations, any militaristic ambitions the country harbours.
It's a thought that must send shivers through the boardrooms of our big mining conglomerates.
However, despite the frosty diplomatic relationship, the flow of goods, students and tourists went largely unimpeded.
www.abc.net.au