In Chinese history, foreign visitors to the imperial court were often treated as “barbarians” who were expected to pay tribute to the emperor. There are echoes of this in the way that modern China’s leaders engage with the rest of the world, as I discovered in November 2013, as part of a small group of visitors received by President Xi Jinping in Beijing. There were plenty of eminent people in the group, including former prime ministers such as Gordon Brown of Britain, and Mario Monti of Italy, as well a smattering of western billionaires. Yet the foreign grandees were treated a bit like a class of schoolchildren.
First, we were ushered into the echoing central area of the Great Hall of the People; then we were lined up on benches for a photo with the president. After a little while, Xi swept into the room and shook a few hands (“I touched him,” gasped Francis Fukuyama, the famous academic, in mock awe) — before posing for the photo.
A few minutes later, the president’s discourse began. Seated at the centre of a banqueting room, with a giant mural of the Great Wall of China behind him, chandeliers above him, and a semi-circle of former western leaders arranged in front of him, Xi began his remarks by reminding his visitors that “China is an ancient civilisation with over 5,000 years of history”. It was, in some respects, a boilerplate remark. Yet China’s awareness of its thousands of years of history is fundamental to the country’s understanding of itself. It also inevitably means that China, in some ways, sees the US as an upstart nation — a country that has been in existence for fewer than 250 years, a shorter lifespan than most Chinese dynasties.