Australia Rudd's China halo slips over Rio arrests

By Rob Taylor

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a former Beijing diplomat and fluent Mandarin speaker, appears to be losing his China halo.

Rudd, arrived home from Europe on Monday to a blizzard of newspaper criticism for not using his so-called "special relationship" with China's leadership to massage the release of a Chinese-Australian sales executive from global miner Rio Tinto

"Where, precisely, are Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's fluent Mandarin and diplomatic finesse when we need them?" said an editorial in the Herald Sun, Australia's biggest selling newspaper, echoing other newspapers across the country.

Rudd has forged a close relationship with China's leadership, phoning Premier Wen Jiabao in September 2008 to discuss the unfolding financial crisis and addressing President Hu Jintao in Mandarin at a 2007 regional leaders' conference.

During his 2007 election race, Rudd promised deeper Australian engagement with Asia, and especially China, built on his tenure as first secretary to the Beijing embassy in the 1980s. He promised also to retool Australia as the most "Asia-literate" Western country through better education.

"It was highly effective in defining Rudd politically," said journalist Glen Milne in The Australian. "It now threatens to become a manifest weakness. What we are now witnessing is the harvest of Rudd's mismanagement of the China relationship."

Rudd's image as a China expert has been dented by recent political wrangling over a failed 12.1 billion pound investment by Chinese metals firm Chinalco in Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto, and now the arrest of Chinese-Australian Stern Hu, Rio's top iron ore salesman in China.

It is a rare slip in otherwise sure-footed policy carrying Rudd's standing in opinion surveys to record levels ahead of elections due late next year. Uncomfortably, it comes also in an area supposed to be his strength: foreign policy.