The year of Chinese Dream

In architecture, design, fashion and the arts, a renewed Chinese aesthetic is gradually imposing itself. From tea to calligraphy, the Chinese flavors and forms are being revitalized. The opening-up of the Middle Kingdom is not the dilution of China into a Western-centered order, but a reaffirmation of "Chineseness" and, therefore, entry into a multi-polar world.

"Civilizational China" aims to re-invent Chinese classical culture, but it is also the reinterpretation of traditional notions. While quantitative growth is transforming the life of the Chinese people, harmony has become the imperative to take into account the environmental factor, the call to maintain the equilibrium between material development and sustainability.

Progress, peace and harmony are the principles that substantiate "modern China", "global China" and "civilizational China".

But it is in reference to Taiwan that the year 2013 might have been highly significant. While Xi met senior Taiwan official Siew Wan-chang at the APEC gathering, he explicitly signaled to the island and to the world that the next decade might also mark the end of the Chinese political divide.

If Deng's political genius was at the source of Hong Kong's "one country, two systems", Xi is ideally positioned to design a framework that would take into account the specificities of the Taiwan question. After spending 17 years in Fujian, culturally a mirror of Taiwan, Xi has gained unique insights into Taiwan's economic and political dynamics.

He certainly had many occasions to reflect on the historic Chinese Dream of unity and to meditate in the opening of Luo Guanzhong's immortal novel The Three Kingdoms: "The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide."

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

(China Daily 12/14/2013 page5)