From the bloody airport and metro terrorist attacks in Brussels in March to a truck driver plowing through shoppers in a Christmas market in Berlin in December, 2016 was a year of sorrow and anger for Europe as the European Union suffered more deadly attacks following the bloody incidents in Paris in 2015.
Brussels' tiny Schumann Square, around which European Union institutions and embassies are nestled, may not be as famous as Beijing's Tiananmen Square, New York City's Times Square or Moscow's Red Square.
I am thrilled by the avalanche of comments, re-posts and likes that I received within hours of the publication of my article on China Daily's weibo account on actor Jin Dong and his presence in the Belgian city of Antwerp to film Mr Right, a new TV drama.
The latest skirmish is over Brussel's eagerness to centralize the approval process for European companies' takeovers by foreign enterprises amid an explosion of Chinese investment in the EU.
After US President Donald Trump said he would pull out of the Paris agreement on climate change, French President Emmanuel Macron replied that he was on a mission to "make our planet great again", a play on Trump's catchphrase, "Make America Great Again".
A comparison of the outcome documents from the G20 summit in Hamburg that concluded on Saturday and those produced at the Washington gathering, the first such meeting between the leaders of the 20 major economies held two months after the fall of financial giant Lehman Brothers in 2008, leads to both encouraging and worrisome observations.
As the host of the G20 summit, a platform where global issues are discussed, Germany needs support to ensure the success of the event. And Xi, who hosted G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou in September last year, is expected to provide that support.
Hopefully, EU leaders will realize the immediate need to make European cities safer so as to attract more investments and tourists.
With Prime Minister Theresa May setting a Global Britain blueprint, the negotiation teams are scheduled to complete the talks in early 2019.
With the EU completing 60 years (the Treaty of Rome was signed on March 25, 1957), reflections and timely actions are both essential, and in many cases urgent.
In the dynamically evolving multilateral world, such conditions equally apply to the West itself. The United States' withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement has highlighted the necessity of such a call.
And this is the right time for the EU to seize the "historic momentum" to turn words into action, because its member states are eager to engage China in European policies on various fronts.
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