A historical relationship that could change the world
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between France and China. Former French President Charles De Gaulle’s decision to establish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China in 1964 was a sign of friendship and trust whose origins go back several centuries.
De Gaulle said that it was not “out of the question that China could become again, in the next century, what it was for many centuries, the greatest power in the universe”. This shows De Gaulle was a greater visionary than many who govern the Western countries, especially the United States, today. Many of today’s Western leaders are constantly saber-rattling against the “systemic rival” that they assume China to be.
Another key milestone in France-China relations was that the seeds of the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921 were sown in France among the young Chinese people who visited France between 1919 and 1920, as part of a work-study movement, in search of ideas that would enable their country to become a great modern nation after having been devastated by the Opium Wars launched by the West in the 19th century. In total, about 1,600 Chinese students visited France. Among them was a core group of men and women, notably Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, who would after some years lead their country. As a result, China would transform, a hundred years later, into a global power again.
Let us go back even further, to the 17th century. It was then, as part of an exciting collaboration between King Louis XIV, his minister of the economy, Jean Baptiste Colbert, and the great German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, that France and China found themselves at the heart of a great civilizational project between Europe and China.
In a Europe ravaged by war and plagued by the demons of religious fanaticism, Leibniz, a contemporary and collaborator of Colbert, struggled to create the conditions for peace through development across Eurasia.
What was Leibniz’s grand design? To forge an alliance between Europe and China, at the time the most advanced civilizations at the two extremes of the Eurasian continent, in order to enable them to develop everything in between.
Leibniz also pointed out that Peter the Great of Russia was in favor of the project. Fortunately for Leibniz, both Peter the Great and Chinese Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) were open to Europe, and both showed a great zeal for bringing knowledge of European science and morals to their countries.
As for Leibniz’s relationship with Kangxi, it was not direct but through the Jesuit missionaries who had been working in China for a century and had succeeded, thanks to their scientific knowledge, in gaining the ear of the Chinese emperors, in particular Kangxi who was in power at the time. Leibniz was in correspondence with the Jesuits, and even inspired six French Jesuit mathematicians to go on a mission to China in 1685 to work with Kangxi.
Five of those six Jesuit mathematicians landed in China in 1688. Their enterprise was both a scientific expedition and an evangelization mission, and they carried with them a scientific culture closer to that of the Paris Academie Royale des Sciences than to the tradition of Jesuit colleges, on which their China confreres had previously relied. That puts the Franco-Chinese partnership close to 350 years ago.
Today, as yesterday, international cooperation for peace, science and development between France and China can contribute to a new, more just world economic order.