Monday, March 2, 1644. In early autumn, the East Bank Prairie was full of high clouds and clouds, and Duncan, who was already close to his age, walked on the west bank of the Chuy River with about 20 intern students.

They departed from Port Merlin to study the terrain along the Chouy River and to build settlements for Far Eastern settlers. At present, there are only a few dozen scattered Samogitians grazing along the Chuy River, who live scattered in this rich area and raise a large number of East Bank bighorn goats, which are now in their fourth generation. In addition to the goats, each household also has two horses in foster care from the government, and according to the agreement between the two parties, they can use this as a basis for each pony to receive a considerable reward from the government.

At the same time, these men, because they were scattered over a wide area of grazing, were the natural sentinels of the government, and if they found a pirate or an enemy landing from the sea, they could quickly report to the port of Merlin, which was only seven or eight kilometers away, and ask for a militia to come and defend them.

With the gradual arrival of immigrants from the East, the people of the East Coast are also carrying out a lot of infrastructure construction to undertake their arrival. Duncan, who has only been in office for a year as the deputy director of the General Bureau of Construction of the Ministry of Communications, personally went to the Chuey River area east of Port Merlin to select a site for resettlement housing. According to the plan of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, 1,000 resettlement houses will be built on this side of the Chuyi River in the first phase - just like the Meilin Harbor side, after the continuous population comes over in the future, the second and third phases of resettlement houses will continue to be expanded here, and castles, farmland, water canals, military barracks and other facilities will be built to thoroughly develop this area and serve as the eastern barrier of Merlin Harbor, the choke point of transportation.

The more than 20 students behind Duncan are all students from vocational schools under the General Administration of Communications and Construction. I studied architectural design. These students are in their early twenties. There are all kinds of nationalities. When he was a teenager, he entered the school of the East Coast people. Their backgrounds are very ordinary, basically from civilian families, but one thing in common is that they are relatively smart, otherwise they would not be selected to study in vocational schools.

After years of education from the East Coasters, these teenagers are very satisfied with their current status and life. In Europe, if there were no accidents, they would have been farmers all their lives, and if they were unlucky, they would have to work as soldiers or sailors to make ends meet. But on the East Coast. They are given the learning opportunities they have always dreamed of, which gives them the skills necessary to maintain a decent life. Moreover, the East Coast society as a whole, although it has its own bad things in one way or another, is much better than that of Europe on the whole. There is an air of exuberance in society as a whole, where everyone lives and works in peace and contentment, without domineering aristocrats, extortionate tax collectors, or stinking streets. People will not look down on you because of your low background, as long as you have the ability, you can stand out, and no one will put any obstacles on the surface for you.

As the teachers say, this country is a common cause. If the interests of the country are damaged, everyone's personal interests will also be lost. Think of the Dutch, the British, and the Spaniards. They are corrupt, greedy, extravagant, and always covet the rich East Bank, and do not want to destroy and annex the East Bank all the time, so that everyone can become their serfs again. This made everyone gradually realize that they were different from those in Europe, who did not know self-respect and self-love, did not understand the East Coast qualities of "loyalty, dedication, bravery, and self-confidence", and they were rude and rude but with innate arrogance, which was prohibitive.

Their political system was rotten, and it was difficult for commoners without aristocratic blood or poor people to enter the ruling class. On the East Coast, however, there is nothing more enjoyable than having a career in which people have been involved in the construction of the country and have become admired technicians and engineers. Those so-called people of my own race in Europe, they only have some blood similarities with me, but we are not the same kind of people after all, they are them, and I am a "citizen" of the East Coast Republic of China.

These students are the product of a typical political-nationalist education. They were knowledgeable, cultured, idealistic, and almost martyrdom-like about breaking the old order and creating a new world in the Old World, so the biggest factor that contributed to their identification with the East Coast Republic was the new political system of the East Coast.

In fact, there have always been multiple understandings of nationalism throughout history. That is, in the early pre-agricultural society, human beings gradually formed different settlements due to factors such as geography and living environment, which were the early forms of the nation. However, this is at best a primitive nationalism, and the culmination of nationalism will not be until the rapid development of industrial civilization. In the agrarian feudal society before the development of industrial civilization, human beings' sense of national identity was relatively weak, and even the national consciousness was relatively vague, which was very typical in Western Europe.

However, after the bourgeois revolution in England, the national consciousness of most British people began to awaken, and a unified English nation began to take shape. As a neighbor of the British, France, the Hundred Years War gave them national enlightenment, and the king swept away the princes, the country flourished, the French people's pride increased day by day, and their national consciousness began to gradually take shape, and in the period of the Revolution, after the tempering of blood and fire, the French nation with self-respect and civic consciousness began to stand tall among the nations of the world.

It can be seen from the awakening of the national consciousness of the British and the French that they all formed an independent nation after experiencing major social changes, political system innovation, and cultural enlightenment, and everything they experienced also gave them their own unique national characteristics. This is, in fact, a typical form of political nationalism.

Today, Duncan's group of students, they identify with the various systems of the East Coast, with this country as their common cause, and with the pride and honor that this country can bring them, in a sense, this is also an awakening of national consciousness. After years of rapid development of the country and the uninterrupted indoctrination of the East Coast doctrine, they have been convinced that their country's system is the most advanced system in the world, and that this country is the common country of all people, and as long as everyone is "loyal, dedicated, brave and self-confident", the new East Coast nation will eventually stand tall among the nations of the world.

It is difficult or even impossible to assimilate tens of thousands of 17th-century natives to form a new nation with a new culture brought in by 500 travelers. Later generations believed that assimilation could succeed in several factors: first, a similar cultural background, second, a common language, third, literacy, and fourth, the assimilation of an individual without idiosyncrasies. These four conditions may not be too much of a problem for Europeans with a prevalent Protestant background in North America, but they are a big problem for people on the East Coast.

Whether it is a European or an Oriental, the cultural background is very different from the Crossing Crowd, among which the Oriental may be better, but the Europeans are very different in language, customs and religious background, and it is extremely difficult to transform them into East Coast people who meet the standards of the Crossing Crowd, and it is even impossible for adults to be transformed. Therefore, the main work of the Crossing Masses at present is to try to create a society with a common cultural background, and to try to erase the national identity of people from different regions through coercive means, so that everyone can try to converge as much as possible. In this way, it can provide a fairly good environment for the new generation born on the east coast, so as to gradually complete assimilation and integration.

It's not impossible if you don't do this mandatory work, but it may take hundreds of years to blend naturally. Because human inertia is strong, for some people, even if everyone around them speaks another language, he will still stubbornly speak his own language and communicate in a small circle. Even if your culture is more advanced than his, and he admires you very much, it does not mean that he will take the initiative to learn your so-called strong culture, which is not mandatory and will often take a long time to integrate with the people around him.

And this is absolutely impossible for the East Coast people who are strong enemies, because what they lack is time. Unless you're sheltered in a powerful kingdom like the British North American colonies, you'll have plenty of time to slowly integrate. But assuming that the North American colonies gained independence from Britain in the 17th century, it would not be alarmist to say that your country would fall apart in a few years at the instigation of foreign enemies if you continued to slowly integrate in such a scattered sand.

At present, the students of these architectural vocational schools came to the East Coast when they were seven or eight years old, and their own cultural background is very weak, coupled with the long-term relationship with the Crossing Public, their cultural background is already highly similar to the Crossing Public. Coupled with a common language and relatively rich knowledge, they can be regarded as real East Coast people!

As for the so-called 35,000 "East Coast" people who are "proficient in listening and speaking Chinese," "can write common characters," and "support the government," most of them are actually imaginary, and they may identify with the country on the East Coast, because this country can give them dignity and safeguard their interests, but this does not mean that they are proud of this country from the bottom of their hearts. On the contrary, due to religious inequality, repressive control, and cultural chauvinism, they also have a considerable degree of dissatisfaction with the government, and consciously or unconsciously resist assimilation, but their dissatisfaction has not accumulated to the extent that it needs to explode, and they themselves are also full of internal contradictions, so they are temporarily suppressed. (To be continued......)