This article is the preface to the forthcoming edition of Five Centuries of Co-Frequency Resonance between Spain and China.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Spain, and one day in the middle of the year, in a very bookish living room, I had dinner with Deng Xiaoxian of the Shanghai International Cultural Exchange Association, and Maria and Miguel from Spain. During the dinner, Deng Xiaoxian hoped that on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, Maria and his wife could write a book reflecting the 50-year history of friendly exchanges between China and Spain, so as to commemorate the celebratory day of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Of course I agree, and I know that this Spanish couple has both the passion and the ability. Two years ago, I was awarded a major national social science project, and as the chief expert, I invited two Spanish friends to join me and serve as the leaders of one of the sub-projects. Therefore, with the approval of the Ministry of Chemical Industry and the Ministry of Chemistry and the Ministry of Chemistry of the People's Republic of China, when I planned to establish the National Research Base for Foreign Cultural Exchange, I also formally invited the two of them to serve as the special experts of the base.
Maria: When I met her, she was the general representative of the Spanish Association of Authors and Writers in the Asia-Pacific region, and I was the president of the Shanghai International Arts Festival in China at the time. Miguel, Maria's husband, was an elegant sociologist with strong research and writing skills. Therefore, Deng Xiaoxian had this motion, and I actively echoed it, and tried my best to urge them to write this book. The couple has lived in Shanghai for 20 years, making Shanghai their home, and even during the lockdown in Shanghai, they still stayed with Shanghai. So it was of special significance that they came to write this book. It's just that it took less than half a year from the motion to the publication of the book, which is too hasty, and the time given to them is only three months, and it is almost the same to find information, not to mention writing. But they promised, and immediately canceled the trip they were about to go on the road. For three months, they searched for materials, conceived ideas, wrote day and night, and asked Spanish teachers from Shanghai Wai Chinese University to translate the manuscript.
One day, I received their manuscript in Spanish and a translation into Chinese. The Chinese translation alone has more than 130 pages, not only focusing on the 50 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Spain, but also on the 500 years of exchanges between the two countries. I read it for almost two days. I was very excited, I thought that this book was just a work of order, a work of the right time, and it would be very good to be able to write it as a kind of commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Spain. But I didn't expect that this is a professional work on Sino-Western exchanges with considerable academic value, and there has never been such a monograph in this field before.
The book expounds the history of exchanges and the origin of friendly development between China and the West in almost all aspects from history, literature, navigation, politics, economy, diplomacy, customs, finance, art, etc. There are some very valuable insights and interesting discoveries. For example, during the Qing Dynasty, the national circulation of ** mainly came from Spain, so that it later became Spain** almost the only hard currency in the field of Chinese circulation;Frannco is world-famous, and the Spanish girl's signature dress in that exciting dance beat is the shawl, but it is precisely the big Chinese shawl that is popular in Europe. Benito Pérez Galdos, one of Spain's most famous writers of the nineteenth century, said in his book Fortuna and Jacinta: The Story of Two Married Women: "Spanish women should be grateful to the Chinese, because it is this beautiful and unique shawl that makes them shine." "In 19th-century Spain, women wore Chinese dresses and shawls on important occasions, because they would be glamorous and luxurious, and they would be the envy of everyone.
The most interesting example of this is from the Spanish literary giant Cervantes, who wrote a message to his patron, Count Remos of Naples, in 1615 when the second part of Don Quixote was published
Now there are people who pretend to call Don Quixote second, full of swagger, very disgusting", "In order to eliminate this scourge, I am urged from all sides to take out my Don Quixote." There is no one more anxious than the Great Emperor of China. A month earlier, he had written me a letter in Chinese and personally sent someone to bring me a copy of Don Quixote, rather begging me to bring him a copy of Don Quixote, because he wanted to establish a Castilian language school and intended to use The Tales of Don Quixote as a textbook. ”
The book also mentions that China is in.
Ten. In the 6th and 17th centuries, the national economy was the largest in the world and was sought after by European countries ......
In short, the book cites classics, the information is detailed, the sources are clear, and there is no lack of surprises. When this book is published, I think it will definitely be worthy of being put on my shelf.
Spain is a country with maritime civilization in the Age of Discovery, while China has both maritime civilization, inland civilization and grassland civilization, but generally speaking, it is a country with land civilization, and land civilization mainly includes agricultural civilization and nomadic civilization. Although we have a vast and long sea area, civilization began in the Central Plains of the Yellow River Valley, and the long-term political and cultural centers are in this area. Moreover, the Qing Dynasty has always pursued a policy of seclusion and self-control, and has repeatedly issued "sea relocation orders" to block the sea area, so that the development of maritime civilization cannot be achieved. Zheng He went to the West earlier than Columbus, and we invested far more manpower, material and financial resources than him, but we just wanted to understand the outside world, and we had no ambition ......to expandTherefore, China needs to explore and develop its own marine civilization genes, and needs to accept the stimulation and agitation of marine civilization, which is passionate, open, progressive, active, and adventurous, and China's steady and restrained land civilization should be grafted with the elements of marine civilization.
The 500-year exchanges between China and Spain are a dialogue between two civilizations and an exchange between two cultures. Five centuries of co-frequency resonance show that different civilizations and cultures are not necessarily in conflict of sabre-rattling, but can be dialogued, exchanged, complementary, and resonant at the same frequency. Just as Samuel Huntington, a famous American scholar and professor at Harvard University who put forward the "clash of civilizations" theory, finally admitted in the preface to the revised Chinese edition of "The Clash of Civilizations and the Reconstruction of World Order" (republished 42 times by Xinhua Publishing House in May 2020): "In the coming years, there will not be a single universal culture in the world, but many different cultures and civilizations will coexist with each other", and "for the first time in human history, global politics has become multipolar and multicultural."
Miguel and Maria's book "Five Centuries of Co-frequency Resonance between Spain and China" will be published before we say goodbye to 2023, and they attribute the 500-year history of Sino-Western exchanges to the history of the same frequency resonance of the two countries, which is a very interesting and wise statement. Despite the ups and downs of the past 500 years, there have been regime changes, ideological conflicts, economic entanglements, and differences in people's customs, but under the principle of mutual benefit and reciprocity, the two countries have gone through five centuries of resonance at the same frequency and resonance in forging the thoroughfare of a community with a shared future for mankind.
November 10, 2023
Author: Chen Shenglai.
Text: Chen ShenglaiEditor: Qian YutongEditor: Shu Ming.
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