Past Treasures Can Strengthen Present Ties

of China’s cultural artifacts took a new look— as gifts. This approach is facilitated by Chinese institutions and patriotic entrepreneurs. These individuals and institutions have become private art collectors, buying Chinese artifacts housed abroad and donating them to Chinese museums.

For instance, Stanley Ho, the billionaire with businesses in Hong Kong and Macao who passed away in May, bought two of the 12 missing zodiac animal heads that once adorned the famous water clock zodiac fountain at Yuanmingyuan. Ho gifted the boar and horse heads to the Poly Art Museum and National Museum of China, respectively. China Poly Group Corp., a state-owned enterprise, bought three more missing zodiac heads—the monkey, ox and tiger—in 2000. After a failed auction at Christie’s in Paris in 2009, French billionaire François-henri Pinault returned the rabbit and rat bronze heads to China in 2013.

Many African institutions cannot utilize this largely successful approach because of existing economic dilemmas. Nations like Libya and Angola, with their infrastructure deficit, cannot allocate funds for the purchase of their cultural relics.

So, there exist opportunities to strengthen China-africa cultural relations. One step can be the establishment of an international institution. This body can boost knowledge, technology and resource exchanges between countries that share common cultural heritage repatriation challenges.

Sharing resources and technical know-how can facilitate the creation of an online inventory of all member states’ movable and immovable cultural artifact collections conserved in museums at home and abroad. Another step is the redirection of funds to support public programs, business enterprises and organizations capable of improving China-africa cultural exchanges. This will improve people-to-people relations and peaceful coexistence, essential ingredients for successful partnerships in trade, investment and education.