Bristling at new nationalist bark will only bait China
The lesson Australia should learn from the 20th-century rise of nationalism in Asia is that whipping up an anti-Beijing frenzy will just worsen the sensitive, snarling sense of grievance.
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Alarm bells rang in the late 19th century as Australia approached federation.
In 1893, the liberal intellectual Charles Pearson, in his book
National Life and Character, tried to explain the modernising forces that were then reshaping the world.
A former education minister in colonial Victoria, Pearson was interested primarily in how Western nations would respond to the inevitable rise of countries such as China, India and Brazil as they underwent modernisation, grew in numbers and searched for more land to settle. He was trying to make sense of a new world arising from the ashes of the old.
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