History suggests China–Europe exchanges will outlast conflict and confrontation

Editor's note: The launch of the China-European Union Trade and Investment Consultation Mechanism and its inaugural meeting in late June mark a good start to solving trade issues between China and the EU. But where are China-EU trade relations heading? Can the two sides prevent today's disputes from hardening into a long-term confrontation? To explore these questions, China Daily reporter Zhang Zhouxiang spoke to Professor Li Xuetao at the School of History of Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Q: How do you view the current trade frictions between China and the EU?

Li: As a historian of global history, I prefer to see China-Europe relations through a much longer historical lens.

If we examine the relationship on the height of human civilization history, one conclusion becomes clear: throughout history, exchanges between Chinese and European civilizations have overwhelmingly outweighed their conflicts and confrontations.

Competition certainly exists, but it's more a product of a particular historical moment, arising when interests diverge. Civilizational exchange, by contrast, has a cumulative character and continuously reshapes how both sides understand the world. The longer the time horizon, the more significant the impact of those exchanges becomes, while the importance of temporary frictions gradually fades.

Seen from millennia of human history, we find that what has truly transformed both sides has not been war, but the circulation of knowledge, technology and ideas.

Joseph Needham's monumental (book series) Science and Civilisation in China has already traced this process in remarkable detail. Beginning with the Silk Road, Chinese silk, porcelain and papermaking spread across Eurasia and profoundly influenced Europe, while some historians even argue that the European bourgeois revolutions would have been unimaginable without the widespread military use of gunpowder — an invention that originated in China.

Later, during the modern era, Europe profoundly shaped China and East Asia in return, through the spread of modern science, the university system and industrial civilization. That's what I call a "shared history" — without China, Europe would not have become what it is today, while without Europe, China would not have become what it is today.

Q: But the world is more than China plus Europe. What about the rest?

Li: The same is true on a global scale. European colonial powers once conquered large parts of the world, yet what ultimately endured was not their military occupation, but the ideas and institutions they left behind. China, meanwhile, never sought to conquer the world militarily, yet many of its philosophical traditions and concepts continue to influence societies across the globe today.

In the end, what survives in civilization is not how much territory a country once controlled, nor how powerful its military happened to be at a particular moment. What endures is the knowledge, ideas and culture it contributes to humanity, and how much of that legacy continues to inspire future generations. In this aspect, both China and Europe have done well.

Q: Yet China and Europe are separated by tens of thousands of kilometers. In ancient times, people at either end of Eurasia hardly knew what those on the other side looked like. Can we still speak of a shared history?

Li: That is precisely one of the most important insights offered by global history. Now, the evidence increasingly suggests they were not isolated.

Take the violin as an example. Heinrich Geiger, a German scholar specializing in the archaeology of music, challenged a widespread assumption that the violin is a purely European invention.

According to his research, ancient civilizations around the world all had instruments that resembled the violin in one way or another. China had the pipa, the Middle East had instruments similar to today's oud, while Egypt and the Americas also developed stringed instruments, all of which were built on the same basic principle — a vibrating string producing sound, amplified by a hollow resonating chamber.

The bow used for bowed string instruments is believed to have first appeared around the eighth century in what is now Yutian, in China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Between the 10th and 12th centuries, merchants on the Iberian Peninsula carried the idea westward along the Silk Road to Spain and Portugal. By the 14th century, Italian craftsmen further refined the design, eventually giving rise to the modern violin.

See? Without centuries of continuous interaction among different civilizations, the violin as we know it today would never have come into being. Many inventions are products of long-term exchanges between civilizations.

The rise of global history as a field has made us increasingly aware that the development of human civilization has always been a process of integration, adaptation and shared creativity.

Q: You've emphasized the importance of viewing today's issues through a much longer historical lens. Does that mean the current trade friction is simply one phase in a much broader historical process? Have there been more serious crises in the past?

Li: Certainly. Think about the Cold War. The greatest lesson of the Cold War is not that disagreements existed. Disagreements are inevitable; the real danger was that meaningful dialogue became rare, with each side ending up speaking only to its own audience, never to be heard by the other side. Once channels of communication are cut off, misunderstandings inevitably deepen.

Today China and Europe face trade disputes, but whatever differences may arise, both sides should continue talking, continue meeting and continue preserving mechanisms for communication.

Many misunderstandings can be resolved surprisingly quickly when people sit down and speak face to face. If they stop seeing one another, stop talking and begin relying only on assumptions, suspicion will continue to grow, and misunderstandings will become even harder to overcome.

That is why I warmly welcome the establishment and continuation of the China-EU Trade and Investment Consultation Mechanism. More importantly, I hope China and Europe can avoid repeating the mistakes of history by ensuring that dialogue never comes to a halt.

Contact the writer at zhangzhouxiang@chinadaily.com.cn