When the President, Mrs McAleese, sets off for her State visit to China in early October she will be accompanied by a trade delegation of officials and business people that may well be 70-strong. It is a mission with enormous long-term potential for this country.
Booming two-way trade between the EU and China was worth €115 billion last year, and, after the US, China is now the EU's second -largest trading partner. Ireland has a €500 million-plus stake in that bilateral trade.
But a huge gulf of ignorance still yawns between the two ends of the Eurasian landmass and on Friday prospects for rapprochement were debated at the Euro-China Forum in Dublin, a welcome chance for this country, now home to some 65,000 Chinese, to engage more directly with one whose fate is likely more than any other to shape this century.
Prof Liu Ji, the executive president of the China Europe International Business School, spoke candidly at the forum of the reform process in China in deeply pragmatic language. "There are no empirical patterns or examples ready to hand," he said, insisting that Marxism was a tool that would allow China to "grope forward by trial and error" as it moved to replace the planned economy with a "market economic system". That work, he said, would necessarily require greater democratisation.
He spoke of important experiments in local democracy, new freedoms in the press and party, a new emphasis on the rule of law, and the increasing separation of enterprise management from overt political control. But, acknowledging the emergence of new social strains in China's 1.3 billion population, he cautioned that change would not come overnight and observers would say the rhetoric is not yet matched by the reality. As the SARS outbreak demonstrated, the party reverts to type all too easily. Yet many of its younger members will have been taught an intensely practical lesson - autocratic methods, in the long term, exact an enormous price in terms of the economic efficiency and development so precious to them.
Mr Brian Callanan of IBEC warned that Irish businesspeople are still being detered by multiple "invisible tarriffs", a far cry from the WTO-based regime which is supposed to prevail. They complain of the complex interface between business and government. And Prof Wang Jianmao, also from the Shanghai-based school, spoke of the absence of both trade union and shareholder rights as impediments to the smooth functioning of the economy. But China is getting there. And when it does, Ireland must be ready to ride the giant wave.