Some Reflections on China and Europe

Europe and China diverged in economic terms mostly beginning in the Renaissance, if the recently coined "great divide" expression holds. Whether to accept this view is disputable. This paper recalls the necessity to grasp how so-called "East" and "West" contemplate each other. The present study focuses mostly on only one of the two directions, the one least studied, in line with the perspective of this volume, that is to say how Europe was and is regarded from the outside, from a comparative perspective of the history of economic thought. However, even this is too vast and we must be content to introduce some key factors that explain the role of economic ideas in making a certain idea of Europe prevail in China, while China itself has had its own framework since ancient times. This is the story of ideas and of practice: how to adopt/adapt ideas to a very plastic way of thinking, quite foreign to our Western views. This paper focuses mostly on two epochs: the very ancient and contemporary time periods.