CHINA IS IN the midst of a patriotic campaign to attack foreigners for theft or destruction of its art treasures as the Communist Party reinvents itself as the guardian of the mainland's heritage, to the astonishment of many familiar with its past record.
The mainland media are busy highlighting anniversaries including the 1860 ransacking of the Yuanmingyuan (Old Summer Palace) by French and British forces, the looting which followed the entry into Beijing of foreign forces in 1900 to relieve the siege of their embassies by Boxer rebels, and the centenary of the Dunhuang caves, from where foreign explorers carried off many relics.
The press has also aired demands for the return of a million Chinese relics said to be in foreign museums and collections, amid attacks on foreign auction houses. Hong Kong's role as the main exit port for Chinese relics has come under attack after the state-owned China Poly Group, a former commercial arm of the People's Liberation Army, bought four relics taken from the Yuanmingyuan at a Hong Kong auction in May.
Many of the main dealers in Chinese art are now also busy currying favour by helping the Chinese Government identify recently stolen relics and returning pieces exhibited in showrooms across the world. Yet foreign dealers and museum curators say they feel outraged by this latest twist in the Communist Party's attitudes to the past.
'It is the grossest hypocrisy,' says one American expert, 'but no one dares say so in public.' After 1979, the Communist Party organised what one dealer called 'the world's biggest garage sale' of looted Chinese relics, when foreign dealers from around the world were invited to bid for a vast depository of antiques. Every area on the mainland had warehouses filled with antiques forcibly taken from individuals during a series of political campaigns. These started in the 1950s as private ownership of property was abolished, first in the countryside and later in the cities.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution no family dared keep anything from the 'old society' of pre-1949. Furniture and books were burned on the street. If they were valuable, clothing and carpets were sold to foreign dealers at Guangzhou's Canton Fair. Gold and silver jewellery was melted down for foreign exchange while vast amounts of copper and bronze objects were melted down for scrap metal.