Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

It is one of those magical summer evenings in Bordeaux, France, pleasantly warm but with a light breeze, and the party is just getting into full swing at Château d'Yquem, home of the legendary sweet white wine. Most of the top château proprietors have come to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Bordeaux system of classifying wines. Chi Chung Chan is here too. An editor for the Chinese edition of Elle, she is a woman on a mission: to convey to the Chinese public, especially ambitious young women, some of the wonders of life in the West. Chi, 38, who calls herself Chantal, was born in Taiwan, lived in Hong Kong and recently moved to Shanghai, a place she calls "bubble city." A self-taught gourmet and oenophile, she has very particular tastes, and doesn't hesitate to express them. She doesn't like Dom Pérignon champagne or its equally expensive competitor Cristal. She doesn't like Cheval Blanc, one of the most precious Bordeaux wines. In fact, she's not all that crazy about Bordeaux in general.

Chi takes her place at the table of honor, next to the president of drinks firm Moët Hennessy, which owns several of the most prestigious names. Some other Bordeaux grandees are at the table, too. Unfazed, she sits down, picks up one of the glasses arrayed in an arc in front of her plate, takes a deep sniff, and immediately screws up her nostrils. "Really, I prefer Burgundy," she says. In Bordeaux, given its historical rivalry with Burgundy, that's about the biggest insult you can make. But, collectively, the table pretends not to hear. While Chi is no mainlander, she is a gateway to China. That's the place French vintners hope will be the next huge market for their wine, and a recommendation from Chantal is worth gold.

"East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," wrote Rudyard Kipling, and in many ways he couldn't have been more wrong. East and West aren't just meeting these days; they are flirting, dancing and dating one another. Travel has never been easier, border hassles are on the wane and language barriers are being leapt. And all this has accelerated in the past decade, as China and India have made their dramatic entry onto the world economic stage. For the West, there are massive new markets to sell into and a prime opportunity to lower costs by shifting production eastwards. For the East, globalization has become the superhighway from poverty to affluence, and the biggest question is how fast you can hurtle down it before running out of gas. Millions are on the move. Some Chinese are trekking to Africa to build roads, airports and oil platforms; others flock to American universities or make use of relaxed travel restrictions to visit the Champs Elysées and have their photograph taken by the Eiffel Tower. (In some French schools, Chinese is the second foreign language taught after English.) Passing by in the other direction are hordes of Western tourists and business executives who are making China the world's biggest recipient of foreign investment. Indian Ayurvedic teas now share shelf space with muesli and vitamin pills in the health section of European supermarkets, pashminas have become the new global accessory, and in the race to become the world's favorite food, sushi and Thai cuisine are locked in a contest for second place and in some areas are starting to close the gap with pizza.

Yet Kipling may have had a point after all. As East and West rush to embrace, there are misunderstandings aplenty, cultural and political tensions galore—and some nasty head-on collisions. Snubbing Bordeaux grandees is the least of them. Western workers fearful for their jobs curse the low costs and high output offered by China and India. When the Chinese state-owned oil company CNOOC tried to acquire America's Unocal in 2005, it quickly banged into the limits of Western rhetoric about the primacy of open markets and withdrew. Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal struggled for months against similar obstacles before he acquired Europe's Arcelor earlier this year. In the East, all those Hollywood movies and French fashion accessories, not to mention the talk about democracy and human rights, cause official anguish about political subversion and the loss of identity. "We should be soberly aware that against the backdrop of economic globalization, we must safeguard our cultural traditions, cultural interests and cultural security," reads a recent editorial in the People's Daily, the official publication of China's ruling Communist Party. Not since the time of that most celebrated traveler of the Silk Road, Marco Polo, seven centuries ago, has the relationship between East and West, in all its promise and prejudice, been higher in the world's consciousness. It has become nothing less than our zeitgeist.

Roller-Coaster Ride
If history has taught us anything, it's that Eastern and Western perceptions of one another are thoroughly unstable, an uneasy blend of fascination, fear and greed that lends itself to exaggeration. That all started with Polo (1254-1324), who left a detailed, and still controversial, account of his journeys and the years he spent in the service of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Polo's Description of the World is the world's first best-selling travelogue. He set off to the Orient from his native Venice with his father and uncle in 1271. For them it was a return journey; they had already been to what is now Beijing, where the Great Khan had given them a letter to the Pope, and asked them to return with learned men who could teach his people about Christianity. The route, as described by Marco Polo, took them through the Caucasus, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Pamirs and along the Silk Road to Cathay, as he called China. Hardship and danger were balanced by wonder, especially once he arrived at Kublai's court, where he claimed to have become a court favorite who was sent off on diplomatic missions. He dictated his book, years later, long after his return to Italy, while in jail in Genoa in 1298. Some of the descriptions—from the miracle oil that cures skin trouble in the Caucasus to the giant griffin birds who pick up elephants and drop them into the Arabian Sea—earned him a reputation even in his day as a fairytale spinner rather than a credible witness.

But it all marked the beginning of a Western fascination with the Orient, especially China. Over the centuries, the West's view has seesawed between enchantment with its exoticism, admiration of its technical prowess and awe at its size and potential commercial possibilities—to revulsion at its autocratic ways, most recently during the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. The 19th century paranoia over "yellow peril" finds an echo in today's anxiety about outsourcing.

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