Criticism of Kevin Rudd’s approach to China has been all over the place since he became Prime Minister.

Early on, he was the Sinophile, toadying to Beijing at the expense of our traditional relationship with Japan. Later, he was too aggressive towards the Chinese, daring to lecture them in Beijing about human rights and, worse, doing it in Mandarin. Then he was letting too much Chinese investment flow into the economy. The Stern Hu affair then prompted criticism that he was too weak and unwilling to go to the rhetorical barricades for an innocent Chinese-Australian thrown into a Shanghai hellhole on trumped-up charges.

There’s something about China that makes politicians, journalists and commentators lose all capacity for balanced analysis.

Throughout it all, the Prime Minister appears to have been quite consistent: he wants a strong relationship with China, which is critical to our economic future, but is a far more ready to criticise China about human rights than his predecessor, even in the face of Beijing’s fury.

And thus, this week, even after the media began switching off the fate of Stern Hu in the wake of evidence that bribery had indeed occurred, Rudd and Stephen Smith, whose quietly-spoken manner is eminently suited to his job, were continuing to criticise the Chinese about their legal system.

Even after the Chinese reacted with the inevitable fury about this disgraceful intervention in their internal affairs, Rudd went back to have another crack at the Chinese yesterday.

Well, obviously there are always going to be bumps in the road in our relationship with China. We run completely different political systems, and they are completely different judicial systems as well. I would say to our friends in Beijing, however, that the responsible course of action is to ensure that your judicial process is transparent, that when people are brought before your courts, that those trials are held publicly. I believe that’s the responsible course of action for the future, and I would say that with great respect to our friends in Beijing. China is an emerging power, but I think the world is also watching the way in which China evolves its judicial system, including the importance of ensuring that all trials, particularly those of a criminal nature, are held in a public and transparent manner.

None of that is particularly new, and only a tyrannical and murderous regime might find something to object to in those remarks, but Rudd’s doggedness in politely insisting on his point about China is striking.  The complexity of China and its relations with the West is a particularly tired cliché, but Rudd appears to understand that Australia’s messages to Beijing can be complex as well without somehow endangering our long-term interests.