How to coexist with a China growing in economic power and more active in world affairs? David Gosset, Director of the Academia Sinica Europaea, China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, and founder of the Euro-China Forum, provides his analysis based on his long-term engagement with this fast-changing nation. Following are excerpts of an article published by Gosset on Asia Times Online:

The Quattrocento refers to the 15th-century Italian Renaissance; ershiyi shiji--21st century in Mandarin--can be used as a reference to the current Chinese renaissance and the way it is changing our world.

Arguably the most significant process of our time, China's renaissance is composed of three interrelated elements: economic reemergence, socio-political transformation and intellectual reinterpretation of the Chinese tradition.

After the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October, and before the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, not one single day goes by without news, debates and comments on China; confronting such a profusion, one risks taking short-term variations or trivial fluctuations for long-term tendencies and losing any sense of pattern.

One question can help us focus on what really matters: Are Westerners ready to adjust to the effects of the Chinese renaissance? In other words, is the West prepared for a century with Chinese characteristics, is it ready for the ershiyi shiji?

Understanding the China factor

Fourteen years after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), writer Lu Xun was asking in his essays: "When are we going to stop bringing new bricks to the Great Wall?" A defensive construction built and consolidated through the centuries to protect the empire from the invasions of nomads, the Great Wall could also be seen as the symbol of an immured Chinese mind. In 1949, China fully recovered its sovereignty; in 1978, Beijing adopted the opening-up policy-today, the Great Wall is a tourist attraction.

In a process of unprecedented magnitude, one fifth of mankind, different from the West, is entering the world stage. While Western scientific and economic modernity will continue to have influence on China-Beijing's overall strategic goal is modernization-the Chinese world will have considerable quantitative and qualitative impacts on the global village.

To look at China without passion requires constant intellectual vigilance. One has to avoid the idealizations of the Sinophile or the demonizations of the Sinophobe.

True, the People's Republic of China is a developing country that is, as such, facing considerable challenges. If one focuses exclusively on what has yet to be done to catch up with the developed world or on the various visible signs of Westernization within China, the idea of serious Chinese influence on the global village can appear illusory.

However, if one considers the scope of post-imperial China's metamorphosis (the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century was followed by at least 300 years of disorder in Western Europe), the speed of its transformation since 1978, while keeping in mind the Chinese empire's past cultural, economic and political centrality in Asia, the question of the Sinicization of the world makes sense.

The presupposition of the "China threat" leitmotiv is precisely China's capacity to influence on a massive scale our world system, but it also assumes that this impact will be negative. Between two extremes, "China fever" and "China threat," the analyst should stay rationally within the limits of what can be called the "China factor": China's opening-up means, to a certain extent, Sinicization of the world, a process that has to be integrated and explained and not adored or condemned a priori.

Modernization does not mean cultural alienation

But how could the global citizen be in any way Sinicized if tomorrow's China is radically Westernized?

Looking at the young people in Dalian, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Chongqing, it seems that Westernization is China's future. It gives Chinese students "face" to speak some English-more "face" if it is American English. On campus they practice sports popular in the West, and after graduation they would opt preferably for a career in a joint venture where the corporate culture is supposed to be Western--and the pay higher.

But it is necessary to put these trends into historical perspective. In China, snapshots can be misleading. One has to integrate different "clocks" and be attentive, behind shorter developments or even ephemeral fashions, to very slow movements, what Fernand Braudel called the longue durée.

Past interactions between China and what was foreign to it show the unique resilience of Chinese civilization. It has the ability to change without losing itself; it could even be defined by this singular capacity of renewal.