Beijing has accused Taiwan of seeking to sever the priceless Chinese cultural treasures held in the National Palace Museum in Taipei from their national roots.
China’s state media has denounced as “exceedingly dangerous” a planned revision of the charter of the museum, which is home to the most precious artefacts from Beijing's fabled imperial Forbidden City, accusing Taiwan of pursuing a policy of “de-Sinification”.
The angry denunciation reflects the deep suspicions that still underlie relations across the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing bristles at any move by Taiwan that seems to challenge its position that the democratic and autonomous island is an inseparable part of the Chinese nation.
While cross-strait tensions have eased over the past two years amid the plummeting political influence of Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan’s independence-minded president, Beijing remains convinced that he and his ruling party are pursuing a policy of “creeping independence”.
“Taiwanese administrative authorities . . . are trying to dilute and blur the reality that Taipei’s Palace [Museum] comes from the Beijing palace, and to sever the blood ties between Taiwanese and Chinese culture,” the overseas edition of the People’s Daily newspaper said.
“These ‘de-Sinification’ measures of the Taiwanese authorities not only twist and trample on museum and artefact research, but are also politically exceedingly dangerous,” the Communist party paper said.
The Chinese complaints centre on Taiwanese plans to revise the charter of the museum, the repository of Forbidden City treasures brought to the island by Kuomintang forces defeated on the mainland by Mao Zedong’s Communists in the late 1940s. Taiwan’s cabinet recently submitted to parliament a draft amendment of the museum’s charter which no longer states at the top that the artefacts in it come from Beijing’s Forbidden City.
The museum said this was merely a technical change in administrative law. “That the artefacts in the National Palace Museum come from the Forbidden City in Beijing . . . is a historical fact which we have never tried to hide or deny,” it said.
The Chinese criticism comes as the Taipei Palace Museum completes a $21m (€16bn, £11bn) expansion and renovation meant to cement its status as one of the world’s most important museums. However, the museum’s shift away from its traditional role of simply showcasing Chinese artistic excellence – and particularly its embrace of expressions of a distinctively Taiwanese identity – is seen as deeply subversive in Beijing.
Chinese scholars routinely reject claims that Taiwan’s culture has been influenced by the island’s indigenous Polynesian inhabitants, its extended Japanese rule and its very different history of European colonial contacts.
“If you strip out such Chinese things as language, characters, personal and place names, literature, history and customs, what would be left of Taiwanese island culture?” the People’s Daily said dismissively.
It called for vigilance against any further efforts to excise Taiwan’s Chinese roots. “When slanders pass from mouth to mouth, people will believe there is a tiger in the market place. When evil people incite the crowd, the buzz of mosquitoes turns to thunder,” it said.
