Long way home

 

Cartoon by Gou Ben; Poem by Long Yuan

 

To return relics to their rightful place,
A number of obstacles must be faced.
Efforts to buy back the Zhanggong statue fell short,
So now the law is the last resort.
But it is hard to pursue the legal angle,
Because the web of interests is tangled.
Strengthening the research is also key,
That requires common effort from society.

---

 

The return of priceless relics that have been smuggled out of the country or looted by foreign powers  remains a touchy subject for the Chinese public.

Recently, China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage issued an update on the status of efforts to retrieve the sitting Buddha statue of Zhanggong Liuquan, which is believed to have been stolen from a village in East China’s Fujian Province in 1995. Negotiations to return the statue have stalled because the overseas holder is asking an exorbitant price, and now the government must resort to legal and diplomatic means to get it back, according to the administration.

In fact, a large number of Chinese relics have been lost and are now overseas. Returning these cultural treasures to China is a major public concern.

 

Looting, smuggling
A splendid ancient civilization with a history that spans millennia, China is rich in cultural heritage. Chinese cultural relics are the epitome of ancient Oriental civilization, which is why they are such hot commodities in the international cultural market. For more than a century, a large quantity of Chinese relics have been removed from the country, and now the number currently overseas is beyond count.
 

The greatest losses of Chinese relics occurred during three periods. The first period lasted from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, when China was invaded by a series of foreign powers. Invading armies plundered a number of cultural sites and returned to their home countries with the “spoils of war.” It was during this period that British and French troops ransacked the Old Summer Palace and looted its famous Zodiac animal statues.

The second period began when Japan invaded China in 1931 and lasted until the Japanese surrendered. Japan formed specialized brigades tasked with acquiring precious artifacts, said Huo Zhengxin, a professor from the School of International Law at China University of Political Science and Law.

The third period was a boom in smuggling that began in the 1980s and continues to this day. The potential for profit spawned vast criminal networks for trafficking stolen artifacts.
 

Once these artifacts have been sold to a third party, the task of getting them back requires unraveling a tangled mess of thorny political, financial and legal issues.

 

Legal framework
A series of multilateral treaties established a framework in international law for cultural property protection, the most notable of which are the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict; the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.
 

These treaties provide important legal instruments for repatriating cultural properties from abroad. In addition, in recent years, donation and repurchasing have been two other important ways to recover relics.

But Wang Fenghai, a professor at Central University of Finance and Economics who studies the issue, argued that buying relics back would push up the price, further fueling smuggling. It is best to recover the relics through legal means, he said, but this is easier said than done. He said two things have to be done to recover relics. First, the authenticity of a cultural property has to be verified and it must be established whether it was stolen or smuggled. Also, cultural properties must be properly categorized to avoid market speculation, which drives the increase in prices.

Even though relics are protected by international law, recovering them through the legal system continues to be a challenge due to flaws in the international conventions themselves as well as lingering problems in terms of legislation and enforcement in China.

Huo said the aforementioned international conventions do not cover all countries. There were 128 signatories to the 1970 UNESCO Convention, but fewer than 40 nations agreed to the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention.
 

When the 1970 UNESCO Convention was being drafted, there were serious disagreements between states that own cultural properties and states with potential markets for them. As a result, some of the clauses of the convention are overly vague. In addition, some of the provisions in the convention lack specific measures and effective surveillance mechanisms.
 

At the same time, the convention does not grant private owners the right to recover cultural property. Only a state entity is entitled to seek the recovery and return of any illegally exported or stolen cultural property imported into another country, and restitution requests must be made through diplomatic channels. These statutes, to some extent, increased the difficulty of fulfilling the obligation of the treaties.
 

China has established strict regulations on cross-border trafficking of relics, but problems of law enforcement still exist in China, which has become an increasingly important cultural property market. The government has yet to draft laws and regulations to restrict the influx of foreign cultural property. In addition, some of the conventions in this area do not apply to Hong Kong and Macao.

 

Strengthening retrieval research
Recovery of relics involves many dimensions of international law, including jurisdiction as well as variations in the application and effectiveness of laws from country to country, Wang said. Given the complicated nature of the issue, he said there is a need for specialists in this field, but there is a shortage of this kind of talent in China.
 

Researchers not only need to be familiar with relevant international conventions and bilateral or multilateral agreements between countries or regions but also they must be familiar with relevant laws and regulations in China and the counterpart countries, which requires a high level of foreign language skills, said scholars from the Research Center for Theory of Law at Jilin University.

A multidimensional job that requires multidisciplinary and cross-field study, cultural property protection is the common voice of many scholars.