Xi makes it China's dream year

More than any other leader, the Chinese president has had the most influence on the world stage

In October, the shutdown of the US federal government forced President Obama to cancel a series of trips abroad. In his absence, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bali, China's President Xi Jinping was de facto the most powerful man in the room, the US pivot to Asia ironically reduced to a mere rhetorical posture.

It is indeed Xi who most influenced the year 2013. On the global chessboard, the constant movement in China contrasted with the lack of leadership in the European Union and political paralysis in the United States. The West lost the advantage of the initiative; it simply reacted to China's new moves and rapid actions.

Within 12 months, China's top leader introduced a powerful narrative to express the Chinese zeitgeist, the Chinese dream. He managed to reconnect with Deng Xiaoping's spirit of reform and, from Sunnylands to Bali, he occupied, without departing from his natural modesty, the center of the world's political stage.

At the age of 40, when Xi became the secretary of the Fuzhou Party Committee in the province of Fujian - one of the 16 leadership positions he held before becoming China's president - he requested his aides to hang on the walls of the office four Chinese characters ma shang jiu ban (take immediate action). Twenty years later, he has taken a management style characterized by swiftness and effectiveness to the government's Zhongnanhai headquarters in Beijing.

Xi's Chinese dream is a dynamic synthesis that can be presented as a triptych of the interrelated visions of "modern China", "global China" and "civilizational China".

"Modern China" summarizes the achievements since the republic of Sun Yat-sen and the quest for even greater socio-economic advancement. The People's Republic took hundreds of millions out of poverty, liberated Chinese women - "women hold up half the sky" proclaimed Mao Zedong - and extended life expectancy (41 years in 1950, 76 now), but Deng's reform and opening-up remains the catalyst for improvement across Chinese society.

As the core of the PRC's fifth generation of leaders, Xi has a double task. He needs to maintain a certain level of continuity with the work of his predecessors - Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao - but he has also to introduce a new momentum in rapidly evolving internal and external contexts.

At the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress in November, in a direct reference to the historic 1978 third plenary session of the 11th congress, Xi reaffirmed Deng's spirit of reformism with the notion of "comprehensive deepening of reforms".

It was Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun (1913-2002), who pushed for Deng's idea of special economic zones. Moreover, Xi Jinping's tenure in Xiamen, one of those zones, from 1985 to 1988 put him in a situation to especially appreciate Deng's visionary strategy.

As stated in the plenum's communique, Xi is taking China on a new course: "In the face of new circumstances and new tasks reform must be comprehensively deepened from a new historic starting point." The choice to clearly allow market forces to play a decisive role in resource allocation immediately won the support of enlightened reformists.

The abolition of the laojiao system, or re-education through labor, the adjustment in the family-planning policy, the constitution of a leading group to conduct a wide range of economic and financial reforms, and the establishment of a national security committee form a series of well-calculated decisions which perfect the way China is governed.

"Modern China" is interconnected with "global China", the most significant factor of change for the world. Chinese goods, technology, businessmen and women, students, tourists, capital and culture are reaching every corner of the globe through countless 21st century Silk Roads.

In an upgraded version of the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907), China, the Middle Kingdom, is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, but it also projects itself globally with the awareness that interdependence and cooperation characterize the 21st century. In the Chinese dream, peace is to "global China" what progress is to "modern China", a conceptual reference and a project.

The expansion of "global China" is not accompanied by any missionary spirit. Its horizon is not hegemony or even global leadership but the return to the Middle Kingdom's ethos of centrality.

The announcement of an air defense identification zone which covers the Diaoyu Islands should be interpreted for what it is, a defensive mechanism already used by the US and Japan, and certainly not an offensive operation. It is obviously a masterstroke altering the Asian geopolitical status quo, since it invites the world to gradually recognize China's mapping of the East China Sea. The US administration has already asked US commercial airlines to abide by Beijing's new policy.

"Global China" is not only the increasing Chinese presence abroad, from stations in Antarctica to the Northern Sea route of the Arctic, but it is also an age of space travel and discovery. The Xi Jinping decade started with the launch of the Chang'e-3 and its moon rover, another significant step in the Chinese exploration of deep space.

The contrast is striking between the West's attempts to preserve the status quo and China's making of a new world. The former believes that the post-2008 financial crisis period can be a copy of the pre-crisis situation; the latter anticipates a future which will increasingly conform with its interests and intentions. As never before, globalization rhymes with Sinicization.

Distinct from the American dream, the Chinese dream cannot be a narrative of pure newness. It is the imagining of a better future with the memory of 4,000 years of history, a movement of renaissance expressed in the vision of "civilizational China".

In architecture, design, fashion and the arts, a renewed Chinese aesthetic is gradually imposing itself. From tea to calligraphy, the Chinese flavors and forms are been revitalized. The opening up of the Middle Kingdom is not the dilution of China into a Western-centered order, but a reaffirmation of Chineseness and, therefore, entry into a multipolar world.

"Civilizational China" aims to reinvent Chinese classical culture, but it is also the reinterpretation of traditional notions. While quantitative growth is transforming the life of the Chinese people, harmony has become the imperative to take into account the environmental factor, the call to maintain the equilibrium between material development and sustainability.

Progress, peace and harmony are the principles that substantiate "modern China", "global China" and "civilizational China".

But it is in reference to Taiwan that the year 2013 might have been highly significant. While Xi met senior Taiwanese envoy Vincent Siew at the APEC gathering, he explicitly signaled to the island and to the world that the next decade might also mark the end of the Chinese political divide.

If Deng Xiaoping's political genius was at the source of Hong Kong's "One Country, Two Systems", Xi Jinping is ideally positioned to design a framework that would take into account the specificities of the Taiwan question. After 17 years spent in Fujian, culturally a mirror of Taiwan, Xi has gained unique insights into Taiwanese economic and political dynamics.

He certainly had many occasions to reflect about the historic China dream of unity and to meditate on the opening of Luo Guanzhong's immortal novel The Three Kingdoms: "The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide."

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, Beijing and Accra; and founder of the Euro-China Forum. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.