I was just lurking in a seminar among Indian academics and writers led by Ashish Alexander and Vishal Mangalwadi on the relationship between Indian literature and Christianity. I didn't say anything, because it would have been off-topic. But a line by Ashish (quoting someone else) caught my ear:
"The country has become the deity, and the deity has become the country."
Ashish was not referring to American conservatives, of whom a similar criticism is often offered, but to the Hindutva movement in India, which has been gaining ground for decades, now, and is associated with oppression of "religious minorities," including Christians.
But it struck me as an excellent description of modern China as well. (And Japan, in a more cultural sense.) The CCP has made "patriotism," the first of its twelve "core socialist values," the heart and soul of their appeal, and is trying to fuse "love of country" with "love of party," making themselves gods, or God, in effect.
So what do you get when China and India, the world's two largest countries, face off across the Himalayas? (As they have been doing for some time, with some fatalities from physical melees. The Chinese may have designs on parts of Arunachal Pradesh, in the Northeast.)
You get a reprise of the contest between Islam and Christendom in the Middle Ages, perhaps.
Both cultures were "essentialized" precisely because of that conflict. Read the Song of Roland for a feel of how Christianity copied from Islam in the 11th Century.
Minority religious cultures got caught in the squeeze on both sides, as Rodney Stark shows. It was precisely on their way to the Crusades, that Emico and his sacreligious band attacked the Jews of Germany. Stark shows that similar pogroms occurred on the Muslim side, as well.
So Christians in both China and India may suffer more from any struggle between the two. If tensions rise, the natural impulse will be to suppress heretics within one's own nation, to stand united against the "Other."
That is another of the dangers that greets us in the 21st Century.