Public Eye | Hong Kong’s Palace Museum: why we shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth
Michael Chugani argues Hongkongers should be grateful for the gift of Chinese relics from Beijing, set to be displayed at the West Kowloon Cultural District, after outcry over the lack of public consultation on the plans
Let’s imagine a situation. Suppose the Queen consented to the Crown Jewels being displayed at a purpose-built site at the West Kowloon Cultural District. Imagine former British governor Chris Patten quietly negotiated the loan as a goodwill gesture to the city Britain once ruled.
Or let’s imagine Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor won French approval for the Louvre’s famous items, including the Mona Lisa, to be showcased here. Would there be a furious backlash that the public was not consulted?
What other society would fume over a new museum that displays priceless relics at no cost whatsoever to the public? But we are a society at war with itself, trapped in a quest for an identity that departs from reality. We are unable to fully come to terms with being a part of China 20 years after it became a fact.
This is what we have become, a society so addicted to political confrontation that we even pick a fight with the bearer of a gift
Contempt for our communist rulers runs so deep in some of us that we even resist their gift of Chinese artefacts that predate communism by centuries. I can’t help thinking that if Patten instead of Lam had arranged the museum, there may not even have been a backlash.