Scandals, Cover-Ups Plague Forbidden City

By Helena Zhu
August 12, 2011

Chinese officials embarrassed under public scrutiny.

From an embarrassing theft by a lone burglar to an awkward attempt at concealing a broken antique, Beijing’s 600-year-old Forbidden City has been plagued with a slew of scandals recently, putting the nation’s most esteemed cultural icon under a harsh public spotlight.

It all began with what seemed like an isolated, but nevertheless shocking incident when a 27-year-old out-of-towner, on the night of May 8, slipped into the heart of the Forbidden City, known as the Palace Museum, despite the supposedly impenetrable alarm and camera systems. He snatched jewelry boxes and purses worth millions of dollars, climbed over a 33-foot-high wall, and escaped a security guard.

The museum’s embarrassed government-appointed officials were put in a difficult position: they had to explain to the Chinese public that the 1,600 antitheft alarms and 3,700 closed-circuit television cameras had apparently failed to prevent the straightforward theft. Further, they had to explain that the stolen objects were not even fully insured, since the museum had never believed it was possible for a thief to break in.

Dissatisfied netizens and bloggers, followed by the official press, responded by uncovering a string of other management blunders; these were met with more temporizing.

Perhaps the most serious allegations were sparked from a July 30 microblog post claiming that a precious Song Dynasty porcelain plate broke into six pieces on July 4, when a laboratory researcher crushed it while examining it with a device. Even though the Palace Museum confirmed the news the next day, the Chinese public was outraged by how museum officials had kept the news from the public for nearly a month.

With all the scrutiny the museum was under, it was no surprise when a China Youth Daily article dug up records of an illegal auctioning of five pieces of the museum’s ancient calligraphy six years ago; yet another allegation denied by museum officials.

While museums are strictly prohibited from selling any of their collections under China’s cultural protection laws, the Palace Museum got around it by saying that it had never bought the calligraphy works because the funds used were not offered and approved by superior departments, according to the Global Times, an English language tabloid under the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, People’s Daily.

But the denial did little to save the museum from its image crisis; the Chinese business magazine Caixin followed up with reports about the museum’s utter failure to control pests, and its ticketing scams.

The magazine said that termites initially found feasting in parts of the palace’s nearly 1,000 buildings in 2006 were rediscovered recently, prompting some experts to conclude that not only did the museum’s five years of pest controls fail, but the insects could eat the Forbidden City to the ground if they are not checked soon.

Caixin also reported that the museum paid 100,000 yuan (US$15,520) to a blackmailer to cover up a scandal in which security guards and tour guides were said to have embezzled the museum’s entrance ticket income, an incident also earnestly denied by officials.

Museum guards allowed visitors to enter the museum without buying tickets, while tour guides would later collect the ticket money from the visitors; they’d then split the lucre with the guards instead of turning it to the Ministry of Finance.

The scam was said to be widespread, but it is unknown how much money was embezzled, the magazine said, citing an insider.

Museums in China function as units of the sprawling national bureaucracy, Chen Youhong, an assistant professor of public management at People’s University, told Caixin. Each curator is answerable only to the government official above him or her, instead of museum patrons or the general public.

Source: The Epoch Times.
Link: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/scandals-cover-ups-plague-forbidden-city-60306.html.