Should foreigners get free admission to Chinese museums?

Who pays?

Culture reporter Zhou Wenhan recently returned from Europe and is currently writing a series of pieces for The Beijing News applying some of what he saw on his trip to cultural institutions in China.

Last week, Zhou suggested ways that the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City could display some of the 1.5 million objects in its collection to the public, and in another article urged museums to open their facilities to the surrounding community.

Today, Zhou takes aim at ticket prices. Museums in China have been experimenting with free admission policies, but Zhou wonders whether foreign visitors should be able to enjoy public collections on the tax-payers’ dime:

I’ll freely admit that this suggestion, which may seem a little retaliatory, was provoked by my own personal experience: in Rome, I visited twenty museums whose ticket prices totaled more than 200 euros. I joked to a friend that when I was mugged at knife-point in Spain, it had been open theft, so compared to that, here in Italy I’d been subject to civilized theft by Romans wielding cultural artifacts, and I’d seen an old man from Brazil complaining to the ticket-seller at the Capitoline Museums* that the rules only gave free admission to EU seniors 65 and over, a policy Brazilian, American, and Chinese seniors were unable to enjoy.

Taking the topic to China, these days, most state-funded museums have implemented free-admission policies, which can be justified for Chinese citizens because it is their taxes that provide for these public agencies. But foreign tourists also benefit from free admission, which equates to a free ride for them because they do not pay the taxes that support China’s public finances. But whether to give foreigners free admission, and what benefits and problems are involved, is I think a an issue worthy of discussion.

I think that the pittance accumulated by requiring foreign tourists to buy tickets won’t affect China’s GDP, and for some museums it may be more like trying to quench a fire by sprinkling a few drops of water, so for this reason I think that tickets shouldn’t be used to squeeze foreign tourists. But tickets are an important weapon in negotiations: China’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture should use them in consultation with foreign countries to strive to protect the cultural interests of the country’s citizens when they go overseas. If European museums give free admission to Chinese tourists, then Chinese museums can give free admission to Europeans, or if European museums give free admission to Chinese tourists over the age of 65, then China can implement an equivalent policy.

I’ve seen some countries implement a tiered system. Some museums in India and Nepal, for example, give incentives to citizens of countries in the SAARC* or even treat them the same as nationals. Similarly, if China has agreements with regional groups or individual countries, it can implement mutual preferential treatment or free admission. Like mutual preferential tariffs, this extension of cultural interests ought to involve reciprocity.

Notes

1. 罗马首都博物馆
2. 南亚条约: Originally rendered literally as “South Asian Treaty,” but changed in response to a reader comment. SAARC in Chinese is 南亚区域合作联盟.