This will be the Year of the Rat, after all

pointy wrinkly nose towards an actor.

Horrible as that all was, there were dark laughs in it. There is nothing remotely funny about what happens in the Netflix series Unbelievable.

This is where hunches and feelings about what a person has to say have truly tragic consequences.

The series dramatises the true story of an assault on Washington teenager ‘Maria’ whose police evidence ends up being doubted because aspects of her demeanour seemed ‘‘off’’ to her foster parents who then shared misgivings with the police.

From that point on, the whole thing could not have gone more wrong, ending in her prosecution for making a false statement.

Fortunately a different detective in a different town picked up the trail at a later point in the rapist’s cruelties and tracked him down.

Sure enough a computer file held unmistakable evidence of the assault on Maria along with many other assaults on many other victims. Had Maria been believed, the others might not have been harmed.

It’s a compelling, compassionate telling of a tragedy with a very clear message: cleave to the evidence wherever you can, hunches about reading people can be dead wrong.

This is a lesson I am trying to apply to my reading of contemporary geopolitics.

I took to Twitter this week to offer the view that it was darkly hilarious to have grown up through the Cold War and the Domino Theory surrounded by conservative commie haters only to end up watching Republicans running a franchise outlet for Moscow and the National Party taking its talking points from the Chinese Communist Party.

But do I have solid evidence to support this assertion? Or are these just hunches formed from wondering about an MP in our Parliament who was, before that, inside China’s military intelligence for more than a decade, and watching Simon Bridges in China lavishing praise on the Communist Party, and reading that Todd McClay used the Chinese government’s terminology of ‘vocational training centres’ to characterise forced indoctrination camps, and wondering: would we not prefer them to be a bit more independent?

There is an argument that we’re being taken advantage of; that China sees us as a soft underbelly to Five Eyes intelligence, and that this is all part of what the Financial Times calls making the world safe for Chinese autocracy, by boosting influence and control of global narratives.

What I’ve presented here is more hunch than evidence, but I happily endorse the rising drumbeat of voices suggesting we ask more questions about influence.

We wouldn’t want to wake up one day to find decisions being made for us that are not in our interests.

Unless of course you’re into waking up to find something gnawing your face.

There is an argument that China sees us as a soft underbelly to Five Eyes intelligence.