Pope Francis has sent a powerful and clear message to Xi Jinping’s China. A message of friendship. He urges the Chinese people to be calm, to have faith in their great history, without beating themselves up about past tragedies He repeats to them that the world looks to China’s wisdom and civilization. The Bishop of Rome is hopeful that relations between the People’s Republic of China and the rest of the international community will contribute to the building of a peaceful future. But what happened at Yalta must not be repeated, the powerful must not carve the world up like a cake, sharing the pieces among themselves.
Pope Francis’ message to the leadership and people of China was published in the form of an interview, by Asia Times, an Israeli-US owned English language daily based in Hong Kong, that is keenly read by all Asian chancelleries and diplomatic missions. The man asking Pope Francis the questions is the scholar and analyst Francesco Sisci, who lives and works in Beijing. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Center for European Studies at the China Renmin University. Sisci states the specific “mission” of the interview in the introduction. He points out that he did not intentionally mean to question the Pope on the crucial issue of relations between the People’s Republic of China, the Catholic Church and the Holy See, or ask strictly political questions. He was interested instead in picking the Pope’s brain on the “fundamental questions” affecting the Chinese in their daily lives: the disintegration of traditional family bonds, the difficulty in understanding and being understood by the rest of the world, the sense of guilt they felt for events that took place in the past – the Cultural Revolution for example – as well as more recent choices such as the one-child policy which is being scrapped.
Right at the very start of the interview, the Bishop of Rome declares his great “admiration” for China, its people and civilization: “For me, China has always been a reference point of greatness. A great country. But more than a country, a great culture, with an inexhaustible wisdom.” Francis compared his admiration for China to the admiration felt by Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who was welcomed by the Chinese as a wise bestower of science and wisdom at the start of the 17th century. “Ricci’s experience,” the Pope explains, “teaches us that it is necessary to enter into dialogue with China, because it is an accumulation of wisdom and history. It is a land blessed with many things. And the Catholic Church, one of whose duties is to respect all civilizations, before this civilization, I would say, has the duty to respect it with a capital “R”,” the Pope added in the only brief comment he made about China’s relationship with the ecclesial community. Bergoglio also mentions another friend of China, the Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione and he describes the excitement he felt when he was about to enter Chinese airspace on the flight from Seoul to Rome in August 2014. He goes on to address the delicate issue of the fears triggered by the rise in China’s economic and geopolitical influence: “Fear is not a good counsellor,” Francis emphasises, as if trying to exorcise the devastating prophesies about future conflicts between China and other global superpowers. Pope Francis said “we must not fear challenges of any kind, since everyone, male and female, has within them the capacity to find ways of co-existing, of respect and mutual admiration”. The way the Jesuit Pope sees it, China’s culture, wisdom and technical knowledge “cannot remain enclosed within a country; they tend to expand, to spread, to communicate”. But this should be seen as an asset to be embraced, not as a danger.
What happened in Yalta must not be repeated
Self-defence mechanisms and aggressive stances may unleash new wars, Pope Francis recognises. He places his faith in a China that can make an increasingly important contribution to the consolidation of peace balances. “The Western world, the Eastern world and China all have the capacity to maintain the balance of peace and the strength to do so. We must find the way, always through dialogue; there is no other way.” The shared responsibility the Pope speaks of does not involve carving out areas of influence in order to fulfil interests that are based on power balances: “This,” Pope Francis underlined, illustrating his point with a very eloquent historical reference, “is what happened in Yalta and we saw the results”. The aim at Yalta was to “carve up the cake”. But “carving up the cake, as in Yalta, means dividing humanity and culture into small pieces. And culture and humanity cannot be carved into small pieces,” Francis stresses using pressing images. On the contrary, taking on shared responsibility means that “the cake stays whole, walking together. The cake belongs to everyone, it is humanity, culture … Everyone has an influence to bear on the common good of all.” The perspective suggested by Francis is multipolar, not bipolar.
Everyone should be reconciled with their own history and path. Without being masochistic. But, as the interviewer points out in one of the more intense moments of his conversation with the Pope, past wounds, a collective sense of guilt and traumatic experiences – from the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution to the demographic disaster caused by the one-child policy, which was recently repudiated – weigh heavily on China’s present and future. Francis does not rub salt in the wound by dwelling on the disgraces of history and the wrong paths the Celestial Empire took in the past. He recognises that with the demographic policy China has implemented in recent decades, “the pyramid [has been] inverted”: “a child has to bear the burden of his father, mother, grandfather and grandmother”. “And this is exhausting, demanding, disorientating. It is not the natural way.” Francis underlines that the population aging that threatens China is already a reality elsewhere. Compared to an arthritic “Grandmother Europe” , with countries such as Italy experiencing a population growth rate of zero (“in Rome, if you walk around, you will see very few children,” Francis says by the by), as far as the Pope can see, China does not seem to be undermined by this yet. “I believe that the Chinese people are moving forward and this is their greatness,” Francis adds. “It walks, like all populations, through lights and shadows.” It is walking, on the move, like “the water of a river” that “is pure because it flows ahead; still water becomes stagnant”. Only if they continue walking will the Chinese people recognise the wrong paths taken in the past. According to Francis, it is imperative not to be crushed by a sense of guilt to the point of disdaining one’s own history. The Bishop of Rome advises this: “do not be bitter, but be at peace with your own path, even if you have made mistakes. I cannot say my history was bad, that I hate my history.” “Every people must be reconciled with its history as its own path, with its successes and its mistakes. And this reconciliation with one’s own history brings much maturity,” avoiding sadistic or masochistic tendencies: “It is healthy for a person to have mercy towards himself, not to be sadistic or masochistic. That is wrong. And I would say the same for a people: it is healthy for a population to be merciful towards itself,” Pope Francis says, in answer to a question Sisci puts to him referring also to the Holy Year of Mercy.
The message Francis tries to get across to China’s leaders and people in the interview, is self-mercy . Self-destructive recriminations must be avoided. Being generous with oneself may help resolve the serious emergencies of the present and deal with the dangerous enigmas of the future. Francis suggests that it is not by conforming to imported models that problems are resolved and a people get back on their feet following times of crisis, but by cordially rediscovering one’s own history and ancient wisdom. And this applies to China too. China, according to the Pope historically has the resources to free itself from its afflictions. “Reality must be accepted from wherever it comes”. With “healthy realism”. The “tension between the present problem and this past of ancient richness … brings fruitfulness”. “I believe,” Francis says, “ that the great richness of China today lies in looking to the future from a present that is sustained by the memory of its cultural past”. This richness can re-emerge, facilitating the present, through “dialogue with today’s world”. “To dialogue does not mean that I surrender myself”. When engaging in relations with different countries, it is important to avoid the danger of “hidden agendas, namely, cultural colonisations”.
In tune with the rest of the conversation and having been invited to do so by the interviewer, Francis ends his geopolitical interview by conveying his wishes to President Xi Jinping for the approaching Chinese New Year. He greets China’s leader and its people, expressing his hope that “they never lose their historical awareness of being a great people, with a great history of wisdom, and that they have much to offer to the world. The world looks to this great wisdom of yours. In this New Year, with this awareness, may you continue to go forward in order to help and cooperate with everyone in caring for our common home and our common peoples.”
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