I read a few months ago in some international news, perhaps the BBC's, that looted Chinese artefacts tend to be smuggled into HK. Once in HK, they can be 'legally' (according to HK law) sold onward.
In that light, as much as I would like to possess ancient Chinese artefacts, I do not think that I would want to collect any from unprovenanced sources, at least not until the smuggling will have been controlled and HK law will have changed to require provenance for the legal sale of all such antiquities ...
It is easy for a journalist to travel to HK & see ceramics in a window, and then realise that some of the material is looted and then write on the harm the HK market does to Chinese heritage.
I can also see cars moving on the road out the window and deduce that this is why the earth is warming up.
Well, yes & no. The situation looks bigger and more complex if you consider further.
I will still drive a car if the situation arises.
The Hong Kong antiques market, and the Western market, has been said by several well placed people, to have been in a decline for years now. I have seen some evidence of it in changes just over recent years. Wealthy collectors inside China, some who collect at scales that Westerners cannot consider, are driving the market in looted antiques upwards by their own demand. The Chinese government takes limited steps to protect its archaeological heritage, sometimes contradictory steps.
Consider the scale of construction/development and the economic priorities of the Chinese regime.
Rescue archaeology is impoverished in the path of massive build projects & archaeologists are not well paid. I have seen suggestions and heard allegations of sales from archaeological digs ...let alone artefacts coming from the looting of criminals. The very poor standards of recording by past archaeologists (in the Mao period) certainly makes the sale of uncatologued materials very likely let alone the more modern excavations which I am told have had material sold off.
The markets at Hong Kong cannot be said to be the driving force of destruction on the mainland. The HK market is a factor as part of the whole market factor but how great a factor I have to wonder. I also know that it will become less and less so with time. It is all very emotive to see the objects for sale in Hong Kong {especially when round-eyed devils can legally buy them}...but who has seen the more interesting artefact markets at places like Zhengzhou or Xian which are availible to mainland purchasers?
The market for antiquties in China is actively expanding and this is quite a paradox. Rather than being regulated it is being opened up. There is increasingly a wealthy class of profiteers who can purchase Chinese antiques both on mainland markets...and purchase even on foreign markets. The demand from Chinese collectors means sellers need not bother to send material to Hong Kong if they sell in Beijing {perhaps the journalist does not know this!}, and the effects of this can be seen in availibility and prices outside China.
The signifigance of the expansion of artefact markets in China itself means all the damage accusatons that get leveled at the Hong Kong markets or foreign auction houses should now also be blamed on the lack of protection of sites in China and the profiteering that occurs on the mainland. This is an expanding economy, and openly so. To be clear, if China was really sincere about protecting its heritage (which it is typically not, unless its heritage can be marketed somehow) then the import ban that the United States just agreed to (a new ban on import of Chinese antiques) would be followed through with similar logic about site destruction driven by Chinese collecting also. It really seems odd to ask other nations to stop the movement of Chinese objects at their borders, on the assumption that heritage is threatenend and sites are being looted to meet demand, when there is no control over sale of the same objects inside China. Sure, some random looters are executed by Chinese courts. The farmer who got a tiny payment to dig might be killed if somebody needs to be punished, but the city auctioneer who sells it to a rich factory owner for a huge profit is actually given increasing freedom. Asking foreigners to police their citizens & pass laws appeals to nationalism but not to common sense or intellectual details. If the issue is, as China claims, about protecting heritage sites from pillaging and clandestine looting then import restrictions are ineffective in the face of expanded unregulated trade inside China. Years ago I read an article where a Chinese businessmen declared artefacts & antiques as a more profitable investment that real estate.
It doesn't take much thought to deduce that tombs are still dynamited and objects stolen from archaeological sites for the same internal market, and that the permanent loss to science & history as a result of this loss of context is a result.
Whatever way you look at it, whether the current policy makes sense or not, it does seem that the Hong Kong markets are perhaps a little overblown as a cause of site destruction in China (consider the Three Gorges Dam). It also seems the Chinese governments concerns over American collectors are perhaps about nationalism rather than real conservation, or if we credit the CPC with more business savvy it could be about protecting its growing internal antiques market.
Here is a portion of an e-mail I recieved from a friend who is privy to finer details of the new US embargo of Chinese artefacts in particular.
The feeling about the contradictory behaviour of the Chinese government is one that I have felt for some time also, and why the actual embargos negotiated with far off-shore nationals make little sense.
".......As far as we can tell, the reason the Chinese asked for the embargo concerns the Chinese antiquities auction market. Up until a few years ago, it was illegal for Chinese nationals to own Chinese artifacts. This was changed, and many of the materials entering the Chinese buyer's market did so through the auction houses. Within a very few years the profits from the {internal} market increased from only a few million dollars to many hundreds of millions. Much of the material being auctioned in China is obtained in the exact same manner as is the material which is sold on the international market: it is not recovered through proper archaeological excavation and thus much of its history and provenance are lost. In fact, the Chinese government loosened the provenance requirements for materials on the Chinese antiquities market, making the potential looting situation significantly worse.
This loosening of requirements works in direct opposition of the goals of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. It is this convention upon which the entire embargo agreement is based.
It should be noted that the price which an artifact fetches on the Chinese market is roughly 10 times greater than the price it fetches on the American market.
As a result, the Chinese see potentially greater profits if they keep the items on their own auction circuit, rather than allowing them to be sold to the US. This, it appears, is the real reason for the requested, and now obtained, embargo agreement. It should also be noted that, as far as we have heard to date, the US is the only country with which China has requested an embargo. This appears linked to the fact that, while the US consumes only around 25% of all Chinese antiquities on the non-Chinese market, (including materials as recent as furniture from the early 20th century), we are the biggest single end consumer. If the situation remains that China has only requested an embargo of the US, then it becomes even more evident that the embargo is based on potential monetary profits, rather than on a desire to truly protect its cultural heritage. Were the latter to be the case then it would make sense for China {to seek} embargo agreements with all countries, rather than just one.
During our research into this type of agreement between countries, involving UNESCO guidelines, etc, we learned that the country of origin must take significant steps to protect their cultural heritage. The nature of the required steps is set forth fairly clearly, and includes protecting archaeological sites, and proper conservation of the artifacts, among many other things. From our experience with China, this is not being done to any significant degree. Whether they will increase their efforts over the next few years until they meet the requirements is yet to be seen. Should they fail to meet the requirements by 2014 then they may find themselves with a failed embargo agreement, as these agreements must be revisited and the situation reviewed every five years. Should China fail to uphold its end of protecting its cultural heritage then the agreement is supposed to become null and void, at which time a new agreement would have to be drafted and ratified...."
