The West is afraid

Global Times
October 22, 2009

“The West is afraid of China’s pursuit of national treasures,” reads the headline along the right-hand side of the front page of today’s Global Times.

The article is largely a round-up of western media responses to the news that a team made up of experts from the Old Summer Palace and Tsinghua University will visit museums around the globe to create a catalog of cultural relics taken out of the country.

Some of the treasures from the Palace were carried off when it was sacked by British and French troops in 1860, others were lost in fires, and many were probably looted by locals and circulated domestically. The catalog effort is meant to determine what cultural relics are still in existence and what others are probably lost forever, rather than an attempt to recover national treasures.

According to the Global Times, however, western museums are panicked by the thought that they could lose their Chinese collections:

A few museums in Europe were compelled to respond. An AFP article titled “British museums relaxed about Chinese relics’ search” claimed that two UK museums said on Tuesday that they had nothing to hide. British Museum spokesperson [Esme] Wilson said, “We understand it is about archiving and documentation. We would be happy to have any discussion with anyone who comes forward. But we have not been contacted by anyone at this point.” A spokesman for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum added that it had they had not yet received any requests regarding objects from the Summer Palace: “Should there be enquiries the museum would be happy to facilitate research.”

This nonchalance may just be a front. An article in The Times on the 20th reported that the British Museum may be very concerned that China may take advantage of this large-scale overseas search for relics to recover national treasures, because according the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit, Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (UNESCO 1970), it must return cultural relics to their original owners.

The article in question actually states that the Convention is non-retroactive, and that “signatories…can request items taken from them only after that date.”

It also turns out the “fear” proclaimed in the headline relies on a statement made back in February during the bronze head auction controversy:

French museums seldom voice an opinion about the international search for cultural relics, but their attitude is clear. In February of this year, at a Paris courtroom during a lawsuit over the Yuanmingyuan bronze animal heads, a Global Times reporter in the gallery personally heard the lawyer for Pierre Bergé, who was in possession of the heads, claim that the heads of major French museums were very nervous about the possible outcome of the lawsuit. They were afraid that if the decision were detrimental to the collection and auction of Yuanmingyuan artifacts, their collections would be in danger.

But that’s just the first half of the article. The far less sensationalistic second half goes on to discuss the difficulties that Yuanmingyuan catalogers face in their worldwide search.