On the face of it, the Vaucluse and the People’s Republic of China have little in common. Yet it has welcomed some thirty Chinese delegations in the past five years, mainly from the central province of Hubei, which would dwarf the Vaucluse: it covers an area of nearly 200,000 square kilometers and has a population of more than 62 million. What they share are growing concentrations of industrialised agriculture and IT developments, offering scope for future cooperation and cultural exchanges.

Now Greater Avignon has played host to a more widely based Chinese delegation, eager to see how the French system of national, regional, inter-communal and local government operates. However, the Chinese struggled to understand how a recently decentralised system, the antipathy of their own highly centralised system run from the centre, could function effectively. They asked detailed questions about the interaction, parameters of responsibility and allocation of budgets between the various levels of government.

They were more comfortable with explanations of how France overcomes problems of integrating foreigners coherently into a democratic society, although immigration in China refers to the movement from the interior to the urban areas, rather than from abroad.