“French museums bow to Chinese demands to rewrite history and erase peoples”

AWhen France wants to adopt a law to prevent foreign interference, nothing seems to stop the interference of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in two of our major museums: the Musée du quai Branly and the Musée Guimet. From now on, the terminology used in these institutions reflects Beijing’s wishes regarding the rewriting of history and the planned erasure of non-Han peoples who have been integrated or annexed by the PRC, to the point of losing their own ethnonym and that of their ancestral territory.

Thus, one can only be surprised by the removal, in the catalog of Tibetan objects at the Musée du quai Branly, of the name “Tibet” in favor of the Chinese name “Xizang Autonomous Region”. This modification is only the application of a law in force since 2023 in the PRC and clearly shows the desire that Tibet, occupied and colonized since 1950, must be erased from maps and consciences, in the present as in the past. At the Guimet Museum, “Himalayan world” replaced the toponym Tibet in the rooms dedicated to it.

Confucius Institute Relay

As a reminder, while the traditional leaders of the peoples of Tibet, East Turkestan (Xinjiang), and Mongolia continued to govern their peoples through allegiances to the Manchu emperors, the latter only ruled directly over China proper (Qing dynasty, 1644-1911). The People’s Republic of China’s claims to occupy these neighboring territories for the benefit of its own power alone have largely succeeded at the expense of the peoples of these territories. This is known to specialists, of course, but probably less so to those who admire the successes of contemporary China obtained at the cost of economic exploitation of these territories and merciless sinicization of these peoples, thanks to the establishment of a dictatorial regime and demographic domination by the Han.

The choice of our museums, as well as some of our university institutions that house the relays of Chinese propaganda that are the Confucius Institutes, is not to offend the Beijing regime and its exacerbated nationalist sensitivity. Any deviation from the grand narrative that the new “Xi Jinping Thought” (sic) is considered a provocation or attempt at separatism. Our institutions want to preserve at all costs their access to Chinese research fields, sources and archives, and benefit from the financial largesse and loans of museum objects dependent on the goodwill of the Chinese regime. So, we coax the threatening power that Xi Jinping’s China has become and we bow to its demands to rewrite history and erase peoples.

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