Clearing up the KMT’s assets
New Party Chairman Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明) said that if the issues surrounding the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) ill-gotten party assets are to be cleared up once and for all, the gold and the cultural relics at the National Palace Museum that the KMT brought from China should be returned to the KMT or to China.
A report by the central bank governor to then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) on June 7, 1950, said that the gold transported to Taiwan since 1949 and stored in the treasury came to 3.755 million taels (about 141 tonnes), but by the end of June, 1950, 3.312 million taels had been spent and only 542,000 taels remained.
Furthermore, because US assistance had ended and because of the expenses of keeping a large army of 600,000 — in 1949 and 1950 when the Chinese Civil War was still raging — the gold in the central bank was fast disappearing. The largest cost was military expenses and on average almost 180,000 taels of gold had to be allocated every month, which meant that all the gold would be spent by September 1950.
As for the cultural relics in the museum, they did not belong to the KMT to begin with. If they really must be returned to China, then the KMT officials who took the relics were thieves, and they should be promptly arrested and deported to China for trial.
Furthermore, when negotiating the return of these cultural relics to China, Beijing should also be asked to reimburse Taiwan for the money spent on the management, storage and human resources required to keep and maintain the relics for several decades.
Chen Kuo-hsiung
Taichung
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