Grandeur and centrality lift global renaissance

Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to France while the two countries commemorate the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic relations is an invitation to put the bilateral relationship into perspective.

From the majestic but distant relations between the Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722) and King Louis XIV (1638-1715), to the collaboration between Zuo Zongtang (1812-85) and Prosper Giquel (1835-86), or the action in the field of education by Li Shizeng (1881-1973) and his supporters Edouart Herriot (1872-1957) or Alphonse Aulard (1849-1928), Chinese Francophiles have always responded to the call of French Sinophiles. The world has changed significantly in the past five decades but the mutations have not radically affected the relevance of Gaullism, which is, in its highest expression, the effort to act according to permanent realities. De Gaulle thought and acted under the light of la grandeur, a notion which is at the heart of France's national character. The relative weight of the French power varies, and it has certainly been diminishing by comparison with the Chinese reemergence, but the self-perception of the singular role it has to play is constant.

The imperatives of liberte, egalite et fraternite, have been both a product and a generator of this passion for grandeur, only the exalted aspiration of a nation in movement could proclaim such revolutionary principles but they were at the same time the source of a powerful collective energy.

In the Chinese context, centrality - zhong - mirrors the French grandeur. If a sense of grandeur inspired the French monarchs, emperors and presidents, the "Middle Country" envisioned for itself centrality under Heaven. Versailles and the Forbidden City, the Place of La Concorde and Tiananmen Square are obvious architectural illustrations of the correspondence between the "Grande Nation" and the "Middle Country".

China which has been through the millennia a prodigious process of synthesis, unifying one-fifth of mankind, will go on to apply her harmonizing force at a global level. Animated by a conscious effort of radiation or rayonnement, France aims to federate around what she conceives and enunciates as an enlightening project, by contrast, China's impact is by gravitation, the "Middle Country" coheres around its demographic mass and the continuity of its civilization.

Having the highest self-image, the Chinese and the French are, taken collectively, especially sensitive to the variations of fortune and, when the inevitable vicissitudes of history reduce the grandeur or the centrality to a mere nostalgic representation, the sentiment of loss can be for them more acute than for other political bodies.

Beyond the contingent parameters of Sino-French relations, transient administrations or politico-economic conditions, Paris and Beijing, concerned by the destiny of mankind, will always find it necessary to articulate an explicit grandeur and an implicit centrality.

In the 21st century they have to coordinate the China Dream of renaissance and what the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius names in reference to his country puissance d'influence, or influential power.

Ironically, the gap between France's representation of herself and the weight of her relative power is widening and, therefore, contrasts with the Chinese centrality which is increasingly effective, but the global evolution won't erase the rich French heritage nor the French contribution to the making of Europe, and, more generally, it is precisely in the middle of the most challenging circumstances that the idea of grandeur can re-energize the country.

The synergies between centrality and grandeur are more than the affirmation of two separate political identities, they are impulsions for the new humanism of a global renaissance, connections between East and West as much as North and South, they are concrete universalism.

More than two millennia ago, Confucian humanism elevated the Chinese world, in the 18th century the "Encyclopedists", Diderot (1713-84), D'Alembert (1717-83) or Condorcet (1743-94), enlightened an entire continent, in a world of unprecedented interdependence the Sino-French intellectual interactions have already contributed to the making of a global civilization.

When a grand master of the Chinese traditional painting, Fan Zeng, resurrects Charles De Gaulle in an ink portrait, grandeur and centrality have already cross-fertilized, the human quest for solidarity and progress has ceased to be French or Chinese, it has simply become universal.

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai, Beijing & Accra, and founder of the Euro-China Forum.