China in the Santiago's Road (Camino de Santiago)

The Chinese friends of the Camino de Santiago, coordinated on this occasion by the “Intercultural Center for the Experience of the Camino. Beijing ”(BCC), have held their annual assembly these days. On January 30, 2021 at 6:00 p.m. from China (11am from Spain), different people related to the Jacobean culture or touched by the experience of the Camino de Santiago, participated as speakers, guests or listeners throughout the two hours that the assembly lasted.

A video available at this link (https://youtu.be/wi7m4fz2ts8) offers the most relevant parts of the event, after an edit that solves some of the technical problems that the recording showed. On the reproduction page, the different parts of the assembly appear under the video as an index of contents. Representatives of the Xunta de Galicia, the Cervantes Institute in Beijing, the Buen Camino publishing house, the Association of Friends of the Ways of Santiago de Madrid, the Comillas Pontifical University or the friends of the Chinese Way are expressing their points of view. on the experience of the Compostela route or the recently inaugurated Holy Year and exceptionally prolonged until the end of 2022 with the intention of alleviating the ravages of COVID-19.

The promotion of the Camino de Santiago in China, in reality, is only one side of the coin in the East-West cultural dialogue. China also has cultural routes steeped in history that can be inspired by what Europe has been doing over the last forty years in terms of recovering this experiential heritage where it exists. The aspiration of the promoters of these initiatives is to be able to explore the global potential of both the Camino de Santiago and the Chinese cultural routes.

In a world traumatized by the growing disaffection between the two great superpowers during the Trump era, these types of initiatives can remind us - in line with the vocation of the Chinese Chair - that, both in the East and in the West, there are still many veneres of humanity, capable of offering the taste of the old and the new with a scope hitherto unthinkable.

There are eloquent indications that the incipient Chinese middle class, from young students who want to open up to the different, to retired people with free time, to professionals with a certain economic stability and desire to cultivate, will find a growing attraction in this mode of leisure where what is consumed is culture on a multipolar spectrum.

When it is consumed, culture becomes an experience that leaves its mark, for this reason, in a certain way, it abstracts from the laws of the market and other ideological impositions, to seduce with its own logic: that of minds that communicate through the concreteness of a gastronomic delicatessen, of a work of art, of the signage that underpins a path, of a sustainable rural or urban setting, of indecipherable languages ​​that do not veil what is valuable to ordinary mortals.

The rise of China is unsettling to a pro-Western mindset, both in the East and in the West. If the analysis of this inexorable forging of a new global order only observes the distribution and renegotiation of powers, it will also be inexorable to come to the conclusion that the world must move towards a bipolar scheme of relatively hermetic blocks. Given this, cultural routes of global reach, from the cliffs of Finisterre to the walls of Xi’an, have the potential to create worlds of meaning pregnant with intercultural friendship and admiration for what is valuable to the other. Walking together is still possible.

For more information, please contact: elcamino_chinese@sina.com