Some of my Australian friends bemoan that nationalism doesn't really seem to have legs in Australian politics. I have my suspicions as to why that's the case.
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Before European settlement, Australia was home to hundreds of linguistically distinct, mutually unintelligible stone age tribes, with a fair bit of overlapping territorial boundaries due to seasonal nomadic wanderings. They put up little resistance to European invasion.
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After being colonised by the English, Australia was a collection of colonies of the British Empire which then federated and became a Commonwealth vassal state, which gradually transitioned to being a vassal state of the ascendant (albeit undeclared) American Empire.
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It is now in a similar process of transitioning from being an American vassal state, to a Chinese vassal state. This greatly perturbs my nationalist friends, as it will place us under the dominion of people who are neither kin, nor feel any great sentiment for us.
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And while this is a rather unsettling prospect, I do have to wonder what our options realistically are. We are still within China's sphere of influence and if we are to resist that, they possess a great many unpleasant things to bring to bear against us.
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And in my mind, I consider it a questionable proposition that we could withstand China's onslaught, if we were to attempt to stand against it, as an independent and sovereign nation. Because we would almost certainly be alone. As alone as Rhodesia was.
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And I suspect that many, high and low alike, have done the math, seen the dismal probability of any kind of acceptable outcome from attempting to be an independent nation and decided their best chances lie in trying to get the best out of going with the flow of big power shifts.
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Thinking on this a little more, it might seem like I'm all doom and gloom here. I do believe there is some hope. I'm personally of the belief that the most plausible good outcome lies in Christianising the Chinese.
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The big problems with the Chinese right now are their low trust, highly ethnocentric nature, combined with the ruthless Machiavellian tendencies engendered by the legalism that has been the dominant Chinese ideology for over a millennia. Christianity can fix all that.
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While I'm aware Christianity enjoys a poor reputation in China right now (due in large part to the heretical Taping rebellion) it's still catching on among some sections of the Chinese population in a way that's benign enough to avoid the hammer of the state crushing it.
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The thing is, if the Chinese pragmatism and ruthlessness is tempered with Christian compassion, it could create a society that's high performance, practical and high enough in trust to be relatively pleasant to live in.
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And frankly, I fancy the chances of survival and success in evangelisation over warfare.
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End of conversation
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Closest we got
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