Pan-blue lawmakers yesterday withheld their approval of an amendment proposed by the government which would legally sever the connection between the National Palace Museum and two museums in China where most of its possessions were previously held.
The legislature's Organic Laws and Statutes Committee, along with the Education and Culture Committee, held a preliminary review of the amendment to the Organic Statute of the National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院組織條例) yesterday.
The amendment must be moved out of committee to a four-month cross-party negotiation period before it can be put on the agenda for a second and third reading.
But some articles, which were seen by pan-blue lawmakers as part of the government's recent de-sinicization efforts, were put on hold until further deliberation.
"Why propose the amendment now when the government is going full-speed on its name-change campaign? Could it be that even the National Palace Museum is also on the government's `de-sinicization' list?" asked Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安), referring to the government's recent moves to drop words such as "China" and "Chunghwa" from the names of several state-owned enterprises as well as remove images of late dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
The government sent the amendment to the legislature on Jan. 19, but National Palace Museum Director Lin Mun-lee (林曼麗) said it had nothing to do with the name-change campaign.
"We brought up the amendment because the current one is outdated. It was enacted more than 20 years ago. We need to revise the parts that no longer reflect the realities of the times," she said.
The statute stipulates that the purpose of the National Palace Museum is to preserve cultural and historical relics as well as works of art initially stored at the National Palace Museum in Beijing and the Central Museum in Nanjing.
It also says the museum should collect ancient Chinese cultural and historical relics, conduct research and share its knowledge.
Under the amendment, the parts mentioning "initially placed in the National Beiping Palace Museum and Central Museum" were taken off and the "Chinese" ancient cultural or historical relics was replaced with cultural or historic relics "at home and abroad."
"We introduced the changes because we wanted to make the National Palace Museum a place embracing localization and internationalization and to diversify its development," Lin said.
"It would be an unfortunate if the development of the museum was distorted by the dispute over the name-change campaign," she said.
Other articles of the amendment are to reorganize the personnel management system at the museum, which the government said would streamline its operation.
But KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (
"Unless the National Palace Museum has difficulties conducting exchanges with foreign museums under the current statute, I don't see why we need to revise it," Lai said.
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