Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the People’s Bank of China in Beijing

Beijing, 11 June 2025

It is a pleasure to be back here in Beijing.

Some years ago, I spoke about how a changing world was creating a new global map of economic relations.^[1]

Maps have always reflected the society in which they are produced. But in rare instances, they can also capture historical moments when two societies meet at the crossroads.

This was evident in the late 1500s during the Ming Dynasty, when Matteo Ricci, a European Jesuit, travelled to China. There Ricci went on to work with Chinese scholars to create a hybrid map that integrated European geographical knowledge with Chinese cartographic tradition.^[2]

The result of this cooperation – called the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, or “Map of Ten Thousand Countries” – was historically unprecedented. And the encounter came to symbolise China’s openness to the world.

In the modern era, we saw a similar moment when China entered the…