La Chine en eaux profondes

CHINA IN DEEP WATERS In just forty years China has experienced upheavals that other countries went through over a period of four hundred years. The diplomat and Chinese specialist Sylvie Berman guides us through the country's "deep waters". The Middle Kingdom is currently at the height of its power and its contradictions: soon to be the world's largest economy, while also a socialist market economy, an influential country but still with no true soft power. It no longer disguises its ambition. In the early stages of reform policies (1980-1982), Deng Xiaoping recommended using stepping stones to cross the river of change. Now President Xi Jinping claims that China is into deeper waters. Sylvie Bermann has first-hand knowledge of China from the tough years of rice fields filled with student-worker-peasant-soldiers to the advent of an "insolent" Shanghai, from conspicuously cautious policies to the remarkable freedoms in civil society, from calligraphy to the internet; and she describes two different Chinas: the ancient and the modern. Will the Chinese dream prove a nightmare for Westerners? She wonders. What is the price of this conquest? And is this Dragon a dove or a hawk? How should the West, including Europe, react as China changes the world? Sylvie Bermann is a diplomat. Her first posting was to the French Consul General in Hong Kong then the French embassy in China in the early 1980s, later serving as French ambassador (2011-2014). She had peerless first-hand experience of huge changes in the country. She is currently French ambassador in London.