同时，我们也要看到，中欧关系发展空间还很大，潜力还远远没有发挥出来。为了把中欧关系推向前进，中方需要加深对欧洲的了解，欧方也需要加深对中国的了解。历史是现实的根源，任何一个国家的今天都来自昨天。只有了解一个国家从哪里来，才能弄懂这个国家今天怎么会是这样而不是那样，也才能搞清楚这个国家未来会往哪里去和不会往哪里去。

Having said that, we should not forget that there is still greater room for the growth of China-EU relations and the potential is yet to be fully tapped. To move our relationship forward, China needs to know more about Europe, and Europe needs to know more about China. For any country in the world, the past always holds the key to the present and the present is always rooted in the past. Only when we know where a country has come from, could we possibly understand why the country is what it is today, and only then could we realize in which direction it is heading.

借此机会，我想给大家谈谈中国是一个什么样的国家，希望有助于大家观察中国、研究中国、认识中国。介绍中国是一个很大的课题，我选择中国几个最显著的特点来讲讲。

So let me use this opportunity to describe to you what a country China is. I hope it will be helpful to you as you try to observe, understand and study China. Of course, a thorough account of the country would be too big a topic for today, so I will just focus on the following few features of China.

第一，中国是有着悠久文明的国家。在世界几大古代文明中，中华文明是没有中断、延续发展至今的文明，已经有5000多年历史了。我们的祖先在几千年前创造的文字至今仍在使用。2000多年前，中国就出现了诸子百家的盛况，老子、孔子、墨子等思想家上究天文、下穷地理，广泛探讨人与人、人与社会、人与自然关系的真谛，提出了博大精深的思想体系。他们提出的很多理念，如孝悌忠信、礼义廉耻、仁者爱人、与人为善、天人合一、道法自然、自强不息等，至今仍然深深影响着中国人的生活。中国人看待世界、看待社会、看待人生，有自己独特的价值体系。中国人独特而悠久的精神世界，让中国人具有很强的民族自信心，也培育了以爱国主义为核心的民族精神。

First, China has a time-honored civilization. Of the world’s ancient civilizations, the Chinese civilization has continued uninterrupted to this day. In fact, it has spanned over 5,000 years. The Chinese characters, invented by our ancestors several millennia ago, are still used today. Over 2,000 years ago, there was an era of great intellectual accomplishments in China, which is referred to as “the period of one hundred masters and schools of thought”. Great thinkers such as Laozi, Confucius and Mozi, to name just a few, explored a wide range of topics from the universe to the Earth, and from man’s relations with nature to relations amongst human beings and to that between the individual and society. The extensive and profound schools of thought they established covered many important ideas, such as the moral injunction of fidelity to one’s parents and brothers and to the monarch and friends, the sense of propriety, justice, integrity and honor, the emphasis on benevolence and kindness towards fellow human beings and the belief that man should be in harmony with nature, follow nature’s course and unremittingly pursue self-renewal. These values and teachings still carry a profound impact on Chinese people’s way of life today, underpinning the unique value system in the Chinese outlook of the world, of society and of life itself. And this unique and time-honored intellectual legacy has instilled a strong sense of national confidence in the Chinese people and nurtured a national spirit with patriotism at the very core.