Amid increasing signs of a Sino-Vatican rapprochement, Beijing should ensure this goes far beyond the foreign policy arena. It could open a window of opportunity for a historic compromise between Western culture and that of China, a window that has been beyond reach since the Enlightenment.
Some 400 years ago, the Vatican was a pioneer in China-West relations and cultural understanding. Since a liberal democratic ideology had yet to obtain a sacred position in Europe, it was not relevant at the time to debate whether the Chinese way of governance was legitimate or not. Unfortunately, this is a leading problem of relations between China and the West today.
The only genuine attempt at understanding China was made by Jesuit missionaries at the beginning of the 17th century. Faced with political and military stalemate in Europe as a result of civil wars, the Catholic Church tried desperately to reassert control over territories outside Europe to strengthen what it perceived to be Christian orthodoxy.
Having learned the cultures, customs, languages, religious orientations and thought patterns of their host societies, the Jesuits realised they could restructure Christian theology to bring its basic tenets into local cultures and politics.
Under a policy of accommodation, they launched a major incursion into the non-Christian world, resulting in a process of cultural accommodation between the two worlds.
From the outset, the project had no pretensions and no serious attempt was made to downgrade another culture by delegitimising its existing political system, given that the Jesuits viewed the prevailing political system in Europe to be utterly corrupt and illegitimate. Moreover, there was among the Jesuits no sense of Western cultural superiority.
Sadly, their efforts ended with the virtual demise of their organisation. The so-called Chinese Rites Controversy, launched by other Christian missionaries in China to discredit the Jesuit approach, proved to be a game-changing moment in the West's relationship with China. This helped pave the way for the Western rejection of the legitimacy of the Chinese state.
An ethnocentric orthodoxy emerged in late 18th-century Europe. Traditional Christian dichotomies, such as good versus evil, were transformed into new concepts like "progress" versus "backwardness" , "civilisation" vs "barbarism", or "democracy vs "oriental despotism". These conceptual opposites justified Western domination of the non-Western world.
Yet, this orthodoxy deliberately obscured the much less significant position of the West 400 years ago.
Today, with the rapid rise of China's physical power, the time to restart cultural dialogue with the West on an equal footing may have arrived. But whether China can turn its power into a positive cultural project remains a challenge.
The leadership is painfully aware that the grand project of cultural restoration has yet to achieve a breakthrough so that the genuine cultural dialogue broken off in the 18th century can resume.
It is remarkable that today's Vatican, under the helm of a Jesuit for the first time in its history, seems to have decided to restart the traditional accommodationist approach. The Chinese have responded with enthusiasm. How to reintroduce a global cultural equilibrium is at the top of the leadership's agenda.
But Beijing must realise that any cultural dialogue via the Vatican also requires a great effort by China to revive its best traditional values; we need to bring back the intellectual spirit that saw interaction with the Jesuits four centuries ago.
However, interaction with the West is faltering on populism. For Beijing's propaganda machine, dialogue depends solely on Western recognition of its declining leadership role in the world. Thus, the strategy is to reject Western values in their entirety before serious dialogue begins.
But this is a non-starter, for the true Confucian spirit is open-minded, welcoming any new ideas and friends from afar. Historically, ideological debate has been a normal state of affairs in Chinese intellectual tradition.
The recent anti-Western ideological campaign, including the strengthening of the "Great Firewall" and ideological cleansing of universities, is both stupid and unworkable. It undermines President Xi Jinping's cultural restoration project, which is ultimately predicated upon international recognition.
Paradoxically, Chinese leaders today are behaving like the Protestant bigots who attacked the Jesuit approach some 400 years ago.
Chinese propagandists - mostly academic charlatans - justify this campaign by making absurd claims that the Chinese "model" is superior. This is an appalling distortion of Chinese values. To the world community, this does not demonstrate self-confidence, only a sense of insecurity.
Lanxin Xiang is a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva