Holy Monk-Martyr and Confessor Cynog of Powys

Saint Cynog of Powys

On the seventh of October, the Holy Orthodox Church also commemorates another of Wales’s great national saints, Cynog Ferthyr of Powys. The first of Brychan Brycheiniog’s formidable and holy brood of offspring, Saint Cynog also led the way in terms of the missionary work and the spiritual witness of his earthly brothers and sisters.

Saint Cynog was the by-blow of an illicit relationship between Brychan and Banhadlwedd, the daughter of Banadl King of Powys, whom he seduced and impregnated whilst being kept as Banadl’s hostage at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. He later carried her off with him as a mistress – Cynog was born to Banhadlwedd at Brychan’s court in Aberhonddu. When he was born, he was given a gold-inlaid iron torc (or neckband) by his father, wrought together from four quarter-circle pieces of malm and joined by the figure of a dog’s head, which he always thereafter wore on his head. Several miraculous tales are attributed to this torc. In Welsh poetry, Saint Cynog is said to have done battles with monsters and giants with this torc upon his head, and that it gave him exceptional strength. One smith was said to have handled Saint Cynog’s torc, and sought to disprove its sanctity by giving it a blow from his tools. However, for his impiety, a fragment of metal flew up and hit him in the eye, blinding him.

His maternal grandfather Banadl may have been excommunicated at one point by Saint Germain, and chased into Ireland. Cynog was offered a royal dominion there as Banadl’s heir, but refused. However, he often stood as regent for his father Brychan when the latter went off on military excursions or was elsewhere occupied.

As a youth, he had a fondness for hunting game – especially deer and fowl – and fishing. Perhaps out of hope that he would become less frivolous, he was given to a holy man and hermit named Saint Gastayn for his education, and from Saint Gastayn he learned the ways of Christ and of self-denial. Gastayn made such a great impression on the young Cynog that the latter left his father’s court in Brecon and built a hermitage about a mile off, and lived a life of service to the people around him. He travelled broadly both in Wales and in Cornwall, and about a dozen churches were dedicated to him throughout both countries, and even one in Saint-Malo in Brittany – though mostly in Powys, where his cultus was most firmly established.

He eventually settled down, not in his old eremitical cell, but atop a mountain in the Brecon Beacons called Y Fan Oleu, beneath a sheer rock just under the precipice. The hermits there had no water except that which they hauled up the mountain on foot from the stream below.

Saint Cynog undertook the work of fetching and carrying water joyfully and without complaint. But a couple of his fellow monks, who were envious and given to thoughts of akedia, thought the task was beneath them. They became resentful of the saint. When later a holy well appeared at the top of the hill, the two jealous monks took up axes and cut off Saint Cynog’s head, martyring him. Other sources say that Saint Cynog was cut down by pagan barbarians rather than by wicked monks. Saint Cynog’s body took up his head, walked with it to a bramble-bush nearby, and set it down beneath. At once he was recognised to have been a holy man, and various priests and folk from Brecon tried to move his relics into a church. However, these churches in which his relics were housed all blew or burned down. The only remedy was to take his relics back to the bramble-bush where his head lay, and build the church at Merthyr Cynog atop it. Saint Cynog is still recognised as a saint in Powys. Holy martyr Cynog, establisher of many churches, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Spurred on by their impiety,
God-hating barbarians sought to destroy thee, O holy Cynog,
But by death thou didst gain the victory.
Pray for us, that we too may triumph over evil
By faithfulness unto the end,
That we may be granted great mercy.

Church of St Cynog, Merthyr Cynog, Powys

Holy and Righteous Martyr-Princess Ósg‎ýð of Chich

Saint Ósg‎ýð of Chich

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate Saint Ósg‎ýð [Osgyth, or Osyth], a noblewoman of Mercia (and granddaughter of the infamous Penda) who married Sighere King of the East Saxons and founded a cloister at Chich – a village which nowadays takes her name.

Ósg‎ýð was born perhaps in the year 675, to a Mercian ealdorman named Friþwald of Chertsey, and his wife Wilburg (who is said to have been the daughter of the aforementioned Penda King). She was raised among nuns from an early age at the abbey of Saint Modwen in Burton, and having been exposed to the life of a bride of Christ desired it for herself. However, her kinfolk had other plans in mind for her. Wulfhere King of Mercia (husband of Saint Eormenhild), who had been at odds with the heathen Sighere of Essex, bade Friþwald marry his daughter to him in order to secure a peace in southeast England. Ósg‎ýð was none too happy with this arrangement, but went along with it.

Here the hagiographies diverge somewhat. Some hagiographical sources state that she and Sighere never consummated their marriage – but this appears rather unlikely, as historians and certain other hagiographers seem to agree that Saint Ósg‎ýð was the mother of Sighere’s son Saint Offa. In any event, the marriage of Sighere and Ósg‎ýð was short-lived. Sighere, who was fond of hunting game, set out with his whole war-band after a rare white stag one autumn, leaving Ósg‎ýð alone at home. The young woman sought counsel with two bishops, Acca of Dunwich and Bedwine of Elmham, who in her husband’s absence approved her request to become a nun. When Sighere returned, he reluctantly parted ways from his wife, and even granted to her a small plot of land at Chich on which to found a church and a cloister.

Some time afterward, a band of Danish raiders attacked the cloister and found Saint Ósgýð therein. The leader of the band, a heathen, attempted to get Ósgýð to renounce her faith with threats and with vain promises, but she refused to forsake Christ. In frustration, the Dane drew his sword and decapitated the abbess. At the spot where her head fell, a fountain of fresh water sprang forth, which was able to wondrously cure a vast range of illnesses. The hagiographic tradition has it that Ósgýð’s headless body rose and retrieved her own head, bearing it calmly to the door of the church and laying her blood-stained hands on the threshold. Her kinfolk came to claim her body, but by visions she assured them that she wished to rest with her relics in the monastery that her erstwhile husband had given to her. Holy Mother Ósgýð, righteous martyr and venerable abbess, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Clad in the splendid vesture of virginity,
Which thou didst embroider with thy manifold virtues,
Thou lookest down from the heights of heaven,
Regarding with pity the faithful
Who fervently have recourse to thee, O venerable mother Ósgýð,
For Christ, the Bestower of crowns,
Hath granted thee the grace of healing and intercession.

Vazov’s Under the Yoke

A scene from the 1952 film of Under the Yoke

I recently finished reading Vazov’s tragœdy of the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876, Under the Yoke (Под игото), but it wasn’t until I was almost done with it that I became informed that it was a fairly seminal piece of literature in British politics as much as in Bulgarian politics. The plight of the Bulgarian peasantry during and after the failed uprising prompted a great groundswell of sympathy for the Bulgarian people in Britain. As my gentle readers will be well aware, William Morris’s turn from romantic conservatism towards socialism was in fact prompted by the entire Eastern Question and the genuine, heartfelt and wholly-human pity he felt for the plight of the Bulgarian peasantry.

A quick aside here: Morris’s socialism was of a profoundly democratic variety. But if he lived today, I have no doubt whatsoever that for his purely anti-war and anti-imperial stands, Morris would be tarred as a ‘tankie’, a ‘Putinist’ or an ‘Assadist’ by much of the Europhile and Atlanticist ‘left’. The local anarchist circles in particular seem to have adopted the implicitly-chauvinist attitude exemplified by Morris’s rival in contemporary left circles, Henry Hyndman.

Turning back to Vazov, though. Under the Yoke was actually published in Britain before it reached native audiences in Bulgaria, and it had an undeniable impact. The sympathy and the pity that was roused in Morris’s noble breast for the Bulgarians can be felt in Ivan Vazov’s prose in every page, nearly every sentence. In terms of its sheer literary quality, it’s masterful, and suffers only from a few traces of turgidity. It deftly combines elements of satirical comedy with its overall tragœdian outlook. It explores the natures of heroism and cowardice – both moral and physical. It draws somewhat caricatured, yet vivid and poignant, images of the political trends in Vazov’s Bulgaria, in ways that remind one strongly of the writing of Nikolai Gogol – Taras Bulba in particular. It spends time to portray the inward lives and commitments of its protagonists – particularly Boicho Ognyanov and Doctor Sokolov, the two primary revolutionaries – in ways that show Vazov to have been a pupil also of Dostoevsky.

Yes – Vazov was incontrovertibly a literary Russophile. He himself is not coy about showing it, with Dostoevsky’s name being mentioned at several places in the text. But his work is quite original in that it explores the peculiarities of the Bulgarian situation in lights that can be unflattering. He muses deeply on what might have caused the rebellion to succeed or fail, what caused one village to take up arms against the Turks and another to surrender. He depicts the soaring hopes of the Bulgarian revolutionaries and the ordinary people that followed them. He also does not shy away from the grisly realities of defeat, meaning not only genocide and (not uncommonly) rape as weapons of war, but also the more pathetic realities of informing, favour-currying and backstabbing that were the means of self-preservation among a populace that had much to fear from Turkish repression.

But what struck me the most strongly about the text was Vazov’s tacit understanding of the folk-poetics of the desperate. Here he does not come off as necessarily a literary Russophile, but he does observe the folk tradition with the appreciative eye of one of his British near-contemporaries like GK Chesterton or JRR Tolkien.

Oppressed peoples have their own philosophy which reconciles them to life. An irredeemably ruined man often ends with a bullet in his brain or in a noose. People enslaved, no matter how hopelessly, never commit suicide; they eat, drink and beget children. They amuse themselves. Look at the folk-songs in which the people’s soul, life and outlook are so strikingly reflected. There, intertwined with black sorrow, long chains, dark donjons and festering wounds are pæans to roast lambs, ruby-red wines, burning brandy, joyful weddings, boisterous dances, green forests and shady bowers, from which whole oceans of song have sprung.

The historical events in which Vazov was intimately involved, and which he describes in Under the Yoke, may have inspired William Morris to become a radical socialist. But Vazov was not one himself. Although as we see, he placed himself very firmly on the side of the poor, the enslaved, the desperate – in short, on the side of the common people of Bulgaria – he seems to have seen socialism as an over-intellectualised and over-determined dogma for minds steeped in academic debate. Indeed, his attitude toward socialism can be seen in his portrayal of the character of Kandov, the Muscovite Russian who joins the Bulgarian revolt out of his high ideals. Kandov does not start out as a particularly likeable character – he is a naïf and a hothead; he is modelled very deliberately on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. But just as that character had, Kandov too has a salvific ‘arc’. Kandov falls in love with Ognyanov’s wife Rada, who is very much a full character in her own right, but who also may be taken to symbolise the Bulgarian spirit. And Kandov ultimately sacrifices himself in a hopeless struggle for Byala Cherkva against the Turks. For Vazov, the socialists might be naïve and possibly dangerous, but at least they are on the right side of the struggle.

He seems to have a very similar attitude toward the Orthodox Church. One of his revolutionaries, a semi-fictionalised version of Deacon Vikenti, is cajoled by Ognyanov into stealing a bag of money from his monastery with which to buy guns for the revolution. Vikenti is caught in the act by his father confessor, a priestmonk named Yerotei, who – when he hears what Vikenti was going to use the stolen money for – forgives his wayward deacon and gives the money to him freely. He reveals that the money was actually always going to be used for the education of Bulgarian children; and fighting for their freedom was a cause just as good. Deacon Vikenti takes the money and gives it to Ognyanov, but he is stricken with remorse and retires to another monastery to do penance. He reappears later in the fighting for Byala Cherkva and is killed. In this episode, and in others, we can see Vazov’s sympathy for the Orthodox Church, but it is a sympathy which takes the Orthodox Church’s openness to the national spirit, the spirit of revolt against the Ottomans, as primary.

Still, though Vazov’s attitude toward the Church seems somewhat pragmatic, we can see that he has pulled off a rather telling feat from a literary perspective. He has subverted our expectations and showed us that good in a character can be interesting and even surprising. Father Yerotei is the emblem of the ‘good’ Bulgarian priest. His total and conscious forgiveness of Vikenti – whom Father Yerotei knows is prepared to steal and even murder him to get his money – comes to the reader as a eucatastrophic twist. And then we discover the true origin and use of that money and we are treated to a fleeting glimpse of Orthodox sainthood in Yerotei’s martyrific spirit of all-giving. And yet – this is only a glimpse. Vazov is more concerned with Ognyanov than with Father Yerotei. He has not yet approached the problem of goodness in literature with the same power and thirst that Dostoevsky has.

I still feel as though I have not done a very great service to Under the Yoke. I have dwelt here mainly on the conscious similarities Vazov’s writing has to a most un-revolutionary author in another country. And yet it is a martial epic tragœdy – a revolutionary epic tragœdy. It dwells profoundly on the paired themes of revenge and forgiveness, honour and degradation, in such a way that even someone who is not particularly inclined to nationalism must be stirred, if he has a heart at all.

Ivan Vazov

Bashkir beekeepers: a lesson for Appalachia?

Appalachian beekeepers

In the middle of Appalachia, a collective is currently undertaking to transition out-of-work coal miners toward a much more œcologically-friendly and durable line of work – and one which may also be more lucrative: beekeeping. What I instantly noticed about this story is how similar it was to the story of the Bashkirs in Russia.

The Bashkirs, who were one of the subject peoples of the Kazan Khanate (one of the fragments of the Altyn Orda – in turn one of the branches of the Mongol Empire), also found themselves having to adjust to changing œconomic conditions as a result of political shifts. Where before, it was a good model to engage in large-scale nomadic-pastoralist herding of sheep and cattle, the Bashkirs soon found that – as land grew scarcer and it became more dangerous and less profitable to herd livestock – herding bees in the mountains was a much better option. In addition, thanks to the multigenerational nature of the Bashkir project of beekeeping (the very ethnonym ‘Bashkir’ – from Qypchaq башлыҡ ‘head’, ‘boss’ + ҡорт ‘bee’ – may in fact refer to that method of subsistence), Bashkir honey is a highly-prised and sought-after delicacy, renowned for its medicinal qualities.

The Bashkirs, and their neighbours the Tatars, had a similar difficulty to the white folks in Appalachia when it came to adapting their martial cultural dictates to an industrialising society. They also developed a coöperativist consciousness as a result of a deeply-held suspicion of the élites (something which the residents of Appalachia also possess in spades) combined with their complex interactions with the Russian zemstvo apparatus and with their adaptable, traditional-but-not-fundamentalist Hanafî Sunnî form of Islâm. Interestingly, that same development in Appalachia is proceeding in reverse: it is a producers’ coöperative that is encouraging the working-class folks of West Virginia to take up beekeeping as a means of supporting themselves, rather than the beekeeping survival strategy producing a coöperative consciousness.

A serendipitous correlation? Probably. I doubt many West Virginians know or care that much about a non-white minority group on another continent, even ones engaged in the same trade. Even so, the parallels are fascinating to me, and I think if a few people got to know of them, the experience of the Bashkirs with their own coöperative movement working in the same sector of the œconomy, could be particularly instructive to our new West Virginia beekeepers. It might also be interesting to see if the same form of coöperative consciousness forms or deepens an explicitly-political connexion as it did for the Bashkirs in the early 20^th century.

Bashkir beekeeper, collecting honey the traditional way

Righteous Fragan, Prince of Cornwall

A dolmen at Ploufragen

The third of October is the feast-day of Saint Fragan, the fortunate second husband (following the Welsh hagiographical tradition here, as well as Baring-Gould) of Saint Gwen ‘the Three-Breasted’, and father of four of her saintly children: Saints Gwyddnog, Iago, Gwenolau and Creirwy. Some sources have him as being of Scottish origin, but it is more likely that Fragan was a nephew of King Cadwy of Dumnonia and a son of Prince Selyf of Cornwall. He was thus probably also a brother of Saint Cybi.

Fragan [also Fragan, Frégant or Bracan] was born in Cornwall and inherited the kingdom after his father’s death. He married the widowed Breton princess Gwen, and fathered the twins Gwyddnog and Iago by her. However, a plague broke out in Devon in 507 – perhaps an ancillary effect of the repeated Saxon incursions into that territory – and Fragan took Gwen, his infant children and as many refugees as he could from his own territory of Cornwall, put them onto ships in the English Channel and fled with them into Gwen’s homeland of Brittany.

Fragan’s ship landed on the then heavily-wooded Côtes-d’Armor. Upon learning that the country was peaceful and free of disease, he decided to settle his refugee family there. Searching up along the coast, he managed to find a small plot of arable land (a plou) surrounded on all sides by woods and brakes, and watered by the stream Gouet, up which they steered their craft to find the place. It was evening by the time they landed, and Fragan took Gwen and their two infant children up into the woods, made a campfire and settled down for the night with the sheep and oxen they had brought. The following morning Fragan rose early and sought out a more suitable permanent dwelling-place. He found it – a ring of cairns surrounding dolmens which had once belonged perhaps to the Gauls. Fragan and Gwen’s party threw up a rough earthen embankment and staked it, and began building houses. Thus Saint Fragan founded the village of Ploufragan on the Côtes-d’Armor, which still bears his name. There he and Gwen had two more children: a son, Gwenolau; and a daughter, Creirwy. Saints Fragan and Gwen sent their children to the Île-de-Bréhat, to be educated by Saint Beuzeg, the hermit living on the island.

This plou was a beachhead for several trickles of migration across the Channel, not only by Britons fleeing Saxon incursions and plague, but also for Irish and Scottish migrants. Soon Fragan found his little plou to be overstressed. His wife, Saint Gwen Teirbron, also exerted some of her own political influence in getting their claim to the land recognised. She appealed to her father, the King of Brittany, who not only gave her husband rights to Ploufragan but also rights in her own name to another farmstead far further up the coast, which would become Plouguin. There is some evidence that Fragan was working in close concert with his friend Prince Riwal Mawr, who had previously set up in Brittany.

Fragan and Riwal seemed to have a friendly rivalry as well, though. One story has it that Riwal boasted to Fragan that he owned a far swifter horse than he, to which Fragan took objection. A race was held between Riwal’s steed and Fragan’s, but the jockey for Fragan’s horse was thrown headlong and broke his neck, nearly killing him. Fragan’s son Saint Gwenolau was looking on, however, and rushed to the jockey’s side, laying on his hands and healing him. Riwal, who had been watching the whole time, was stricken with awe at this wonder. He became a humbler man, and gave generously to the Church – in particular to his cousin, Saint Briog.

Fragan himself worked a wonder of a different sort. A folk tradition in Léon has it that a huge swarm of pirate ships appeared, a thousand masts between them such that they resembled a forest, off the coast of Guisseny. The commander of the British immigrants raised a cry, ‘Mil guern!’ (that is, ‘A thousand masts!’). Afterwards a cross would be righted on the spot, the Cross of Milguern. But one who answered the cry was Fragan, who took a band of Cornish and Welsh refugees and attacked the pirate camp. Despite the pirates having greater numbers, Fragan’s warriors cut them to pieces, overran their camp and burned their ships, saving Léon from their plunder.

We do not know much about Fragan’s later life, but it is known that his wife Gwen outlived him and became an anchoress in Dorset, where she was martyred. His fatherly holiness is attested more through the acts of his saintly children. Righteous Fragan, royal refugee and loving husband and father, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

O noble exiles Fragan and Gwen
Who fled to Brittany in troubled times:
You established churches to God’s praise and glory;
Your children brought joy and gladness to the Breton people.
We praise you, glorious Saints.

Venerable Máel Dub, Hermit of Malmesbury

Malmesbury Abbey

The second of October in the Holy Orthodox Church is the feast day of Saint Máel Dub, one of the great Celtic hermits who tutored the English nation in the ways of Christ. A tutor to the scholarly Saint Aldhelm, Máel Dub combined eremitical, missionary and scholarly pursuits into a single vocation. He founded Malmesbury as a centre of learning, and it would later, under his pupil Aldhelm’s guidance, become a centre of Benedictine spiritual and social witness.

What is known about Máel Dub is that he was born and raised somewhere in Ireland and established his hermitage in Malmesbury in his adulthood. He lived in Wessex for some while as a hermit, but, lacking means to support himself there, took students and began to teach them in exchange for the necessities of life. Máel Dub taught several illustrious students, among whom are the aforementioned Aldhelm, and also Bishop Daniel of Winchester, an intimate friend of Saint Boniface who was one of Saint Bede’s primary sources for his History of the English Church and People.

Not much is known about Saint Máel Dub’s life, except what is told about him in Bede’s History and the witness of his students at Malmesbury. But if Saint Aldhelm’s life is any indication, we can begin to understand the kind of holiness that was taught and lived by Máel Dub. Aldhelm was a scholar. He was also friendly and approachable by common and armly folk: so too we may justly imagine Máel Dub to have been. Likewise, Aldhelm practised the radical hospitality and ferocious generosity of the early Benedictines. Although Máel Dub was not Benedictine himself, belonging instead to the Celtic eremitical tradition, we may consider that Aldhelm’s predisposition to such hospitality was engendered by his having been tutored by this saint.

It seems to me therefore meet and appropriate to commemorate this teacher of saints, whose own holiness is shown not in his own glory but in the achievements of his pupils like Aldhelm and Daniel. No teacher in whatever age could ask for better witness. Holy Máel Dub, hermit and tutor of holy monks, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Two cheers for the People’s Republic

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, on the first of October 1949 in the wake of a brutal civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. The mainstream American press, politicians and chattering class have been, rather predictably, unfairly critical of the festivities.

As someone who has lived the eighth part of his life in mainland China (namely in Beijing, Baotou and Luoyang), who fell in love with the Chinese inland and who married one of its daughters, my take on this Chinese anniversary is somewhat different. Even though I have one foot in the big red circle, my loyalty is in fact to the third China and I don’t, in fact, approve of the entirety of the legacy of the People’s Republic – neither that of Mao, nor that of the subsequent post-ideological state. I detest and abhor, with an unbridled passion, the One Child Policy and what it needlessly did to the country.

Full disclosure: my ideological loyalties as far as China is concerned are dual. The first belongs to the ‘institutional Confucian’ project inaugurated by Bu Shang 卜商 and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒; continuing through Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 委員 and Kang Youwei 康有爲; up to the constitutional project of Jiang Qing 蔣慶. The second, to the vein of leftist, illiberal-democratic thought inaugurated by Qu Yuan 屈原; blended with Marxism and social Gospel Christianity and continued by Wen Yiduo 聞一多, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 and Jimmy Yen 晏陽初; and currently represented in the work of Wang Hui 汪暉 and Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍. These two strands share a great deal of overlap over multiple concerns and at multiple points in Chinese history, from Dong Zhongshu himself all the way down to Wang Hui. To my mind, these two strands taken together represent the true humane (in the Ru 儒 sense of ren 仁) strain of Chinese thought and action.

But I’m familiar enough with the rough, often horrifically-violent history of modern China to understand that the creation of modern China – forged as it was in the fires of European colonialism and militarism – could have been nothing other than it was, regardless of who won the Civil War. Modernisation was always conditional, and always laced with tragœdy. In context: the last great famine was an enormous calamity, yes, but it must be juxtaposed with the long history of gruesome famines which routinely claimed tens of millions of lives, from the late Qing dynasty all the way through the Republican period.

This is the basis for one of my ‘two cheers’ for the People’s Republic. The cost was high, but what was gained was a country where a famine every decade was no longer the expectation. The People’s Republic did indeed deliver hundreds of millions of human beings from lives of hunger, desperation, debt and permanent destitution. This is something that even presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – a fairly harsh critic of China’s human rights record – has acknowledged publicly. This is a world-historic accomplishment that is not to be dismissed.

The other of my ‘two cheers’ may sound a bit backhanded and even, dare I say it, dialectical. The process of modernisation under the People’s Republic has managed to demonstrate conclusively that unidirectional developmentalist theories of social and œconomic progress are profoundly lacking in explanatory power. China’s rise was not useful only for itself: in ‘standing up’, it delivered a profound practical blow to the idea of the Washington Consensus and the idea of capitalist convergence. Another Asia – and thus another world – was shown to be possible. China has successfully resisted not only the guns of American imperialism (and this is no mean feat, even today!) but also its ideas. In a very real sense, this opening up of new horizons of material œconomic possibility – the delivery of prosperity by administering hard Keynesianism through a politically-illiberal state with a foreign policy of creative inaction – was precisely what allowed China’s neighbour Bhutan to begin articulating spiritual measures of well-being. The Belt and Road Initiative, which builds on the historical Silk Road, is undoubtedly contributing to a great spiritual awakening of Asia, and possibly the openness of the southern stretch of the great continent to another Saint Thomas.

The beginnings of just such a ‘China model’ have also made some necessary internal critiques possible. China has been at the forefront of reforestation policies and innovative green architecture. Practical distributism and slow food movements are also taking root in the concrete cracks. The Chinese left is now talking in very real terms about food sovereignty: there are hints that it is becoming open to the idea of the axiomodern.

Again, I want to emphasise that China’s development is not all sunshine and peonies. The bureaucratic managerialism and the stultifying falsity of ‘official’ discourse are both distinctively unattractive features of this picture; as are the naked embrace of GDP growth at all costs, the reliance of coal and the construction of really ugly concrete buildings. A lot of that development is, in fact, fairly stark in terms of how it uproots and deprives whole bodies of people. The unevenness of China’s development in the reform-and-opening period was a feature, not a bug: and it’s one against which China’s homegrown left has fought tooth and nail since the 1980s. (Not that we would know anything about that, given how selectively Chinese history is narrated in Anglophone media – the notion that the poor benighted Chinese people know less of the truth than we do about the fourth of June would be laughable if it weren’t so insidious.) But even in its failures and wrongs, China has done human beings the advantage of exposing some of the major contradictions in ‘democratic’ capitalism’s narration of itself.

Again, my problematising of certain aspects of Chinese history should not be read as a full endorsement of the government (I’ve had too many encounters with that government to endorse it fully!); still less should it be read as full censure. Thanks to the party of government, China is heading in a direction that may not be the ‘right’ one, but at the very least it is her own, and by example it provides its neighbours with some semblance of an ability to chart their own paths. The People’s Republic of China does therefore indeed deserve these two cheers on her seventieth anniversary. 乾杯！