As Copenhagen illustrated, what China doesn't want doesn't happen, and to hell with the mere President of the United States. This is the Chinese Century. Will that be so bad? China still makes things, builds things, mines things. She still puts the jobs, heat and light of her people first.
She is emerging from the gangster capitalism that always follows Communism by returning to her own culture, which is firmly centred on the family and the local community, reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, has barely started an external war in five thousand years, and is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical Christianity.
And she takes Africa seriously, even going there to secure the food supply necessary for her to give up the extremely anti-Confucian one child policy.
So a very warm welcome indeed to the Chinese Century. We, too, need to get back to making things, building things and mining things. To prioritising jobs, heat and light. To the family and the local community. To tradition and ritual. To moral rather than physical force. To the Golden Rule. To Agrarianism and Distributism. To a pronounced aversion to war. To the classical Christianity that completes and transcends Confucianism, in no way destroying it. To a very Classical and Patristic openness to, and interest in, Africa. And to the glorious celebration of the fact that the very last thing wrong with the world is that it has people in it.
Once the Catholic Church in China normalises relations with the Vatican (which is both inevitable and imminent, in my view), it will no doubt exert a profound influence upon church liturgy, scholarship and ecclesiology--all for the better, I believe, given China's commitment to intellectual discipline and its essentially conservative, reverent, and tradition-bound cultural orientation. It may even usher in a new Counter-Reformation.
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