Zhang Chengliang / China Daily

The redistribution of global power is altering the relations between the great powers and prompting them to reconsider their diplomatic priorities. While in the aftermath of World War II, the future of Europe was proactively shaped by the US, China is now in a position to have an unprecedented impact on European integration.

In this rapidly changing context, the leaders of the European Union and China should rethink the significance of the trans-Eurasian links and open a new chapter in the relations between two of the world's most ancient civilizations.

The degree as well as the means of the Chinese action in Europe compatible with the internal constraints of the world's largest developing country and congenial with the Chinese traditional principles of foreign policy will have to be seriously discussed by Beijing's policymakers.

In parallel, the realization and just evaluation of China's new ability to influence will occupy more and more space in the European public debates and stand as an issue in political campaigns.

With a mutual trade in goods and services which already reached 432 billion euros ($546 billion) in 2010, the EU and China form the second-largest economic relationship in the world. This level of economic interdependence has been achieved in a very short period of time despite a great wall of mistrust separating two societies which have been evolving largely independently for millennia.

And, as the speed of quantitative change exceeds the pace of qualitative transformation, time will certainly be needed to reduce the gap between trade and trust.

Obviously, it is the Chinese people's belief in the Chinese renaissance which conditions its success; and, similarly, the Europeans' faith in the renewal of Europe will determine its outcome, but while self-confidence remains the most powerful internal force, mutual reassurance has the advantage to strengthen it, and it is in that perspective that both sides should not overlook what mutual trust can bring to the two poles of civilization and, beyond, to the world.

The Chinese renaissance should be seen by Europe as a source of synergies. At the operational level, it is time for European policymakers to build mechanisms to facilitate Chinese investment within the EU - China will invest abroad more than $1 trillion by 2020; to grant China market economy status - which will be, in any case, accorded to Beijing under the World Trade Organization rules from Dec 11, 2016; to lift an inopportune and counterproductive arms embargo, to systematically consult China on security issues - the Middle East, nuclear proliferation - and to implement ambitious Sino-European cooperation in third countries - from Africa to Central Asia.

For decades, the West questioned the Chinese political system and its capacity to bring socio-economic progress to the Chinese people, but, in a striking reversal, while the 2008 financial crisis exposed Western hubris, Chinese analysts are now trying to assess the nature and the significance of the "Occupy Wall Street" or the "Indignants" protests.

In 2011, the Chinese media, academia and think tanks especially expressed serious concerns about the viability of the European project and the effectiveness of the EU's leadership.

Mutual trust will develop as Europe makes the effort to better understand the specificities of China's governance and as China appreciates the complexity of the interaction between the EU and its 27 members.

The history of the European construction has been a series of collective decisions taken in the face of crises, and, when immediately after World War II, Western Europe had to find the path toward reconciliation and to cope with the Cold War's challenges, it entered the first moment of its political integration. By an agreement on two fundamental treaties - the Paris and Rome treaties - which led to the creation of the European Community, France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux began a political experiment without any precedent, the peaceful integration of independent and sovereign nation-states.

In this initial step of the European integration where Monnet, Schuman, Adenauer, Spaak or De Gasperi, the founding fathers of Europe, demonstrated remarkable vision and courage, the US was the main external support of the European renewal.

At a time of devastation, despair and emptiness, "Stunde null" - Zero Hour - as the Germans call it, the Marshall Plan contributed to Europe's economic recovery and encouraged better coordination among European policies - the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, predecessor of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was created in 1948 to manage the Marshall Plan.

At the birth of the European Community, the young People's Republic of China was busy with its First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957) and the Korean War illustrated the conflict in relations between the West and Maoist China.

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the second crisis which forced the redesign of modern Europe. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty which established the European Union and provided the legal framework for the monetary union was Western Europe's answer to the changes in Moscow and to the German reunification.

Since Jan 1, 2002, when the euro went into circulation, it has been adopted by 17 members of the EU, it is the second largest reserve currency in the world as well as the second most traded, and continental Europe shaped a global system in which genuine financial multipolarity could be a reality.

With the euro debt crisis, Europe is arguably at its third main turning point since the end of World War II. However, as it did previously confronting the most serious challenges, the continent will not de-Europeanize but, on the contrary, will deepen its union by more transfer of sovereignty to its supranational authorities in the field of budgetary and fiscal policies.

In that sense, for the European federalists the euro crisis is an opportunity and Brussels will subordinate the discussions on the enlargement to the existential imperatives of a more cohesive first circle of the EU, the euro zone.

At least two new elements characterize the current stage of the European construction, internally, the relative weight of Germany - both an effect of the reunification and of the positive impact of the euro on the German economy; and externally, the China factor.

If the Chinese leadership resolutely opts for a strategic and targeted policy to support the present and future role of the euro in the world, if it encourages the Chinese companies to invest and to create jobs within the EU - as companies like Huawei are already doing - it will become a significant contributor to the success of the European project.

The Chinese defense of the euro is also an instrument to consolidate multipolarity and to pave the way to the internationalization of the renminbi, in other words, to enter a world where the US dollar will have lost its absolute preeminence.

Germany's central position within Europe and the new role of Beijing in European affairs reinforce each other. In 2010 Berlin and Beijing issued a joint communiqu on "comprehensively promoting the strategic partnership between China and Germany", officially elevating their relations to a strategic level.

Already 5 percent of German exports go to the Chinese market and while in 2010, Sino-German trade reached 130 billion euros (increasing by 35 percent from a year earlier and representing 30 percent of the total EU-China trade) it will be over 200 billion euros within the next five years.

In a eurosceptic posture, David Cameron has already stated that the United Kingdom will not back the efforts of the EU countries which aim to transfer more power to Brussels, and consequently, while the eurozone will evolve toward more integration, the distance between London and the EU's inner circle will increase.

In these conditions, the "special relationship" between the US and the UK, which has been in the past a limiting factor in Sino-European synergy will lose, to a certain extent, its capacity to affect the relations between the EU and China.

In the context of the Cold War, US assistance to Western Europe was also an instrument to contain the former USSR and the spread of what was perceived as an antagonistic ideology; in the 21st century, the role of China as a catalyst for European integration should not be seen as a way to contain the US, but as a long-term strategic action to create the conditions for equilibrium in a multipolar and globalized world system.

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