China Hunts for Art Treasures in U.S. Museums

By ANDREW JACOBS


December 17, 2009
New York Times

China’s “treasure hunting team” descended on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week, and James C.Y. Watt, the patrician head of Asian art, braced for a confrontation.

For the past two weeks, the delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions, seeking to reclaim items once ensconced at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was one of the world’s most richly appointed imperial residences until British and French troops plundered it in 1860.

With a crew from China’s national broadcaster filming the visit, the Chinese fired off questions about the provenance of objects on display, and when it came to a collection of jade pieces, they requested documentation to show that the pieces had been acquired legally.

But then, with no eureka discovery, the tension faded. The Chinese pronounced themselves satisfied, smiled for a group photo, and drove away.

“That wasn’t so bad after all,” Mr. Watt said.

Emboldened by newfound wealth, China has been on a noisy campaign to reclaim relics that disappeared during its so-called century of humiliation, the period between 1842 and 1945 when foreign powers subjugated China through military incursions and onerous treaties.

But the quest, fueled by national pride, has been quixotic, provoking fear at institutions overseas but in the end amounting to little more than a public relations show aimed at audiences back home.

At its core, such mixed signals are an outgrowth of China’s evolving self-identity. Is it a developing country with fresh memories of its victimization by imperial powers? Or is it the world’s biggest exporter, eager to ensure good relations with the outside world to protect its trade-dependent economy?

“China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids,” said Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese studies at Duke University. “It has suddenly become big, but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.”

Recounted in Chinese textbooks and in countless television dramas, the destruction of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan as it is called in Chinese, remains a crucial event epitomizing China’s fall from greatness. Begun in the early 18th century and expanded over the course of 150 years, the palace was a wonderland of artificial hills and lakes, and so many ornate wooden structures that it took 3,000 troops three days to burn them down.

“The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,” said Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer and a driving force in the movement to regain stolen antiquities. “It reminds people what may come when we are too weak.”

Stoked by populist sentiment but carefully managed by the Communist Party, the drive to reclaim lost cultural property has so far been halting. While officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest that they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to bring home looted objects — not unlike Italy, Greece and Egypt, which have sought, with some success, to recover antiquities in European and American museums.

“The ideal scenario would be for the holders of these relics to donate them back to China,” said Chen Mingjie, the director of the palace museum, whose grounds include a shabby exhibition hall and an evocative pile of stone ruins that are instantly recognizable to any Chinese elementary school student.

The Communist Party has long used the narrative of foreign subjugation as a binding force, one that has become especially useful in recent years as the credo of market economics overruns the last remnants of its Marxist ideology.

But arousing nationalist sentiment, Chinese officials have learned, is a double-edged sword. In 2005, officials allowed public ire against Japan, over territorial disputes and textbooks that glossed over Japanese wartime atrocities, to boil over into violent street protests. After some of the anti-Japanese slogans began morphing into demands for action by Chinese leaders, the authorities clamped down.

The delegation traveling to United States museums appears to have been caught up in a political maelstrom. The relics quest intensified this year after Christie’s in Paris auctioned a pair of bronze animal heads that had been part of a fountain on the palace grounds; the sale was met with outrage in China. In the end, a Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids — $18 million for each head — then refusing to pay.

The United States scouting tour — visits to England, France and Japan will come early next year — quickly turned into a spectacle sponsored by a Chinese liquor company. As for the eight-member delegation, a closer look revealed that most either were employed by the Chinese media or were from the palace museum’s propaganda department.

“These days even building a toilet at Yuanmingyuan would be front-page news in People’s Daily,” said Liu Yang, a researcher who joined the trip.

But the 20-day spin through a dozen institutions has not been especially fruitful. Wu Jiabi, an archaeologist and the leader of the delegation, said that meaningful contacts were made but acknowledged that the group had not discovered illicit relics.

The visit has had its share of mishaps. Not all the museums on the itinerary were prepared for the delegation. One stop, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., was scrapped after the group realized the museum was in the Midwest, not in the Northeast.

The art experts whom the group met along the way offered consistent advice: the lion’s share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. “The best thing would be to look through the catalogs of Sotheby’s and Christie’s,” said Mr. Watt of the Metropolitan Museum.

Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archaeological sites across the country. A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been plowed under for development.

What’s more, said Wu Zuolai, a professor at the China Academy of Art, the obsession with Yuanmingyuan ignores the plunder of older sites that are more artistically significant.

“Chinese history did not start with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “This treasure hunting trip is just a political show. The media portray it as patriotic, but it’s just spreading hate.”

Like many of the curators the delegation met last week, Keith Wilson, who oversees the Chinese art collection at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, both part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said that he was unsure what delegation members were really after. “They took a million miles of video, but in the end, I really felt they were not controlling their own destiny,” he said.

Mr. Liu, the researcher who was part of the delegation, seemed to admit as much, complaining that politics had upstaged scholarship. Even if he stumbled upon a palace relic, he said, he would be reluctant to take it back to an institution whose unheated exhibition space resembled little more than a military barracks. “To be honest, if you leave a thermos in our office, it gets broken,” he said.

“Maybe it’s better these things stay where they are.”

Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

Fishing in troubled waters

An article by the editor or the Washington Post's Outlook section that displays not only arrogance but, if one is feeling generous, ignorance for one who should know better:



In China, Following General Tso's Imperial Recipe

By John Pomfret
Washington Post
Saturday, July 11, 2009 4:32 PM

Most Americans have never heard of Gen. Zuo Zongtang, but when they hit the local Chinese takeout and order a greasy carton of General Tso's chicken, they're invoking his name. By 1878, Zuo, or Tso, marching west from his base in Shaanxi province with 120,000 troops, had extended China's imperial reach deep into Central Asia. The boundaries set by Zuo's campaign in a region called Xinjiang, or the New Territories, have remained essentially untouched to this day.

Chinese like to point out that Zuo's victories in Xinjiang occurred just two years after Gen. George Armstrong Custer died at the Battle of Little Bighorn trying to corral members of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes back into their reservations. They compare their treatment of China's minorities such as the Tibetans or the Uighurs -- who speak a Turkic language, read Arabic script and are culturally if not altogether religiously Muslim -- and the white man's handling of Native Americans. See, I've been told countless times by Chinese friends, it's not just the white man's burden to bring civilization to the "natives," it's the yellow man's burden, too.

The violence last week in Xinjiang between Uighurs and Han Chinese underscores two nettlesome issues for China. First, despite its world-beating economic growth rate, its maglev trains in Shanghai and its postmodern Olympic Village in Beijing, China is still an empire in the throes of becoming a country. And second, if this empire really is going to "rule the world" someday, as a recent book predicts, is its treatment of Xinjiang a harbinger of how it plans to deal with us? And are the violent reactions to China's power something that will erupt not just on China's streets but around the world?

Continuing the policies of the Qing Dynasty, China's Communist leaders have always treated Xinjiang more like an imperial outpost than a province. In 1949, Chairman Mao dispatched one of his most trusted generals to tame it. Wang Zhen then became its first governor, and its economy remains dominated by a state farm system established by the People's Liberation Army. Millions of Han Chinese were initially forced and then encouraged to populate Xinjiang in a scheme to dilute its Uighur majority. In 1949, Han were 6 percent of Xinjiang's population; in 2000, the year of the last census, they made up 40 percent.

A program to develop China's west launched in the early years of this century has had the air of an imperial edict to settle savage lands -- and extract all the available oil, gas and minerals while you're at it. Chinese scholars invoked America's concept of Manifest Destiny and its Wild West when writing about the plan. Others saw a parallel to Israel's Jewish settlements in the West Bank; even the irrigation technology Han settlers use is designed by Israeli engineers.

Xinjiang isn't the only place where, for better or worse, China seems more empire than nation-state. There's Tibet, of course, which has been under military occupation since the 1950s and erupts spasmodically in anti-Chinese violence, most recently last year. And there is Hong Kong. The city passed from British to Chinese control in 1997, but it remains a colony -- except its overlords are no longer in Whitehall, they're in Beijing. Meanwhile, the deal China is offering Taiwan, the final piece in China's decades-old imperial dream to unite the motherland, parallels the one in place for the old British colony.

As for Manifest Destiny, the Han commonly view Uighurs in stereotypical terms. Landing at Kashgar's airport once, I asked a Han cabbie whether his wife was Uighur, knowing full well that mixed marriages are as common there as they were in the segregated American South. The guy practically veered into an oncoming truck and then proceeded to regale me with anecdotes about the wanton sexuality of Uighur girls. "But we're civilizing them!" he assured me.

As China rises, what will be the face of its civilizing mission to the rest of the world? And how will the world respond? Will we chafe at China's power like the Uighurs did in Xinjiang? They countered violently, wantonly killing Han Chinese, burning cars and ransacking stores. And if that happens, will the face of Beijing's reaction mirror those chilling photographs of grim-faced Han men armed with big sticks, prowling the streets of Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi?

Earlier this year, an American chief executive mused that he'd rather be China's President Hu Jintao, who cancelled his participation in the G-8 summit to deal with the Xinjiang crisis, than President Obama. But Hu has got the tougher job. Leading an empire in the 21st century is no joke, especially if that empire is the People's Republic of China.



John Pomfret is the editor of The Washington Post's Outlook section and the author of "Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China."