During the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) National Congress on Sunday, Chen Li-hsu (陳麗旭), a delegate from Tainan, said that the National Palace Museum collection belongs to the party, as it had brought the collection when the Republic of China (ROC) government and Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War.
The idea is laughable — although there is little humor to it.
Underneath lie stubborn, dangerous assumptions about the KMT and its relationship with the ROC, as well as what the party seems to feel it is entitled to.
The collection belongs to the nation, under the wardenship of the government. The government is responsible only for the museum’s operations.
With democratization, the nation belongs to Taiwanese, not a political party.
When the KMT fled to Taiwan, it was inextricably linked to the ROC, as it had been in China. In Taiwan, it governed as the KMT-ROC party-state complex, but it remained, in essence, an exiled regime.
As a party-state, the KMT indulged itself in appropriation — theft — of national assets.
Democratization ended the party-state model and brought a change to the KMT’s relationship to the state, the nation and national assets, although, apparently, not its sense of entitlement.
The implication behind Chen’s statement is that national and party assets can be treated equally.
This idea is indefensible.
Artifacts are part of the national heritage and belong to the state, unless they are in private hands. The fact that the collection is conserved, stored and researched within the precincts of the National Palace Museum is a clue it belongs to the nation.
If the question was which individual had a legitimate claim to the collection, that would go back to the Qing Dynasty emperor Qianlong (乾隆). The collection in the form that fell into the hands of ROC representatives at the fall of the Qing Dynasty was, in large part, amassed by Qianlong and passed on to his dynastic successors when he died.
Unlike the KMT’s theft of Taiwanese assets to consolidate its position here as a newly exiled regime, in moving the cream of the imperial collection stored in Nanjing to Taiwan in the waning days of the Chinese Civil War, the party was legitimately saving national, historic treasures from the destruction of war, just as the ROC government did when it removed most of the collection from Beijing in 1933 ahead of the advancing Japanese forces.
If it were determined that moving the collection across the Taiwan Strait was stealing national heritage, then a case could be made that it does not belong to the ROC or the KMT as the now-defunct representatives of China, but to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the internationally recognized official representative of China.
However, the Qing Dynasty was Manchu, not Han Chinese, so the collection should be returned, according to that rather stretched argument, to neither the CCP nor the KMT, but the descendants of the Manchu dynasty.
This would deliver it into the hands of former National Security Council secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰), who is reportedly a descendant of the last Qing emperor, Puyi (溥儀).
Yet that argument would be as tenuous as Chen’s.
Behind Chen’s suggestion is the lingering, implicit assumption that the KMT still represents the ROC.
In an attempt to defend Chen’s comment, former KMT chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said that of course the collection belonged to the ROC and Chen was simply trying to identify the party with the ROC.
Case closed.
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