FRANCE'S FASCINATION with China's culture dates to at least the 17th century when, under King Louis XIV, French merchants started weaving their own silks with patterns of pagodas, pavilions and Chinese figures reposing on rocks - often stereotypical images of an exotic land as it appeared from afar. Today, despite extensive media coverage, modern communications and business dealings, in western countries such as France, China largely remains a pastiche of distant images that confuse as much as they enthral.
But over the next year, France will have an opportunity to see Chinese culture literally on its doorstep: in its finest museums, concert halls, cinematheques and department stores, on its most famous boulevard, and even in the Palace of Versailles. The Year of China, an undertaking which officially started early last month and lasts into next summer throughout France, is being heralded as the largest showcase of Chinese culture ever presented outside the mainland and as an opportunity for French people to see China in a more modern light.
'There are two categories of stereotypes of China, and what we've learned [in preparing the event] is perhaps to depart from these stereotypes,' says Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of the France-China Years project. 'The first stereotype is a traditional, hierarchical China that we see in old films about other epochs: the Middle Kingdom, remaining very closed, of poor peasants and workers, and mandarins. The second is a China of Mao, without compromise, in which everyone wears overalls and travels on bicycles,' says Angremy, a prolific novelist and a diplomat who spent three years in Hong Kong and then Beijing during the 1960s in the latter capacity. 'We want to show another China - a China of magnificent, traditional culture, and an extraordinary China of novelty in all domains.'
The Year of China is the brainchild of French President Jacques Chirac, who proposed the idea to China's then head of state Jiang Zemin four years ago to mark the 40th anniversary of Sino-French diplomatic relations. Under French president Charles de Gaulle, France was the first major western power to recognise the People's Republic of China, in January 1964. Jiang not only accepted the proposal but also agreed on a reciprocal Year of France in China beginning next autumn.
The Year of China fits with what has now become a French institution. For more than a decade, France has each year been putting one country's culture in the spotlight. These culture fests are a product of France's national policy and almost missionary zeal to stem the deleterious effects of globalisation - what many critics around the world often refer to as a kind of mass-produced, mass-marketed McCulture.
'Globalisation brings hope, but also fear,' says Alain Lombard, Commissioner General of France for the twinned cultural years project. 'In particular, France supports cultural diversity, to keep the good aspects of globalisation but to avoid the negative ones.'