The Catholic Church must respect “with a capital R” China’s rich traditional culture and “age-old” wisdom, Pope Francis has said. Dialogue between China and the rest of the world, including the Church, is necessary because it is the only way to achieve peace, he said. “Dialogue does not mean that we end up with a compromise, half the cake for you and the other half for me. No, dialogue means: ‘Look, we have got to this point, I may or may not agree, but let us walk together.’ This is what it means to build,” he said in a lengthy interview with Asia Times. The interview took place at the Vatican with Francesco Sisci, an Italian correspondent and academic based in China. The Pope also gave his “best wishes and greetings to President Xi Jinping and to all the Chinese people” for Chinese New Year. He said: “I wish to express my hope that they never lose their historical awareness of being a great people, with a great history of wisdom, and that they have much to offer to the world.” The Pope said he had admired China ever since he was a boy and saw it as “a reference point of greatness” and as a country and culture “with inexhaustible wisdom”. In fact, he said he became “very emotional, something that does not usually happen to me,” when he was told he was about to fly over Chinese airspace in 2014, and he sent a papal greeting to Mr Xi on the way to South Korea. When asked about the one-child policy introduced in China in 1980, the Pope said its impact was not “natural”. “The problem for China of not having children must be very painful ... A child has to bear the burden of his father, mother, grandfather and grandmother ... It is not the natural way,” he said.