The Western museums preserved Chinese artifacts that otherwise would have been destroyed by the Chinese themselves. That fact does indeed legitimize the status quo. The artifacts must and will remain, excluding those pilfered by the criminals described in the article.

> That fact does indeed legitimize the status quo.

That does not logically follow from any point you've made. Preservation of something does not legitimize its theft.

What's your argument here?

If there were no Opium Wars, there would have been no Nine-Power Treaties, and thus the Qing would not have fallen, and thus Mao and the CPC would not have eventually gained control over China, and thus the Cultural Revolution and the Four-Olds Campaign would not have happened?

I am not making stories.

I am saying it's not legalized.

I'm sorry to say, this type of outburst really has no place in a civilized discussion.

I'm just going to leave this right here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing

The commenter was angry, but I understand his anger. I can see how even the slightest hint of it in sharing my personal experiences can trigger negative responses from other people, but it also helps for you and others to be sensitive to the trauma that many others (and our families) have lived through.

If I rob your house and take your furniture, and then later see you burning a chair on your lawn. Am I absolved of the theft in the first place if I kept your furniture nice and clean in my house?

You’re committing the depressingly common fallacy of scaling interpersonal ethics up to intercultural. Let me suggest that you give some thought to how your analogy fails in this regard.

Note that you do not address the claim that an immoral act (the destruction of Chinese art during the Cultural Revolution) does not absolve another one (the pillaging of Chinese art by Europeans decades/centuries earlier). If scaling interpersonal ethics up to the intercultural is a common fallacy (which it's not), then you have committed the depressingly common fallacy of Argument from Fallacy [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

If it is not a common fallacy, let me make an appeal to you:

If I go to your house and beat you up, you have every right to call the police on me and they should be able to throw me in jail, and keep an eye on me until I've reformed my ways. However, this doesn't mean you can go to my house and start stealing all my things: just like any other immoral act, as you point out, one crime doesn't absolve another. This should apply even if you're a policeman.

Accordingly, the USSR should not have seized Kaliningrad, Stettin, and Silesia. Don't you think those territories should be returned to Germany?

Both of you are lumping all Chinese people together as a monolith. Let's put it this way.

If you come to my house and beat me up and loot my stuff, and then burn most of my house down, but I survive, and then a mob of poor people came by and then destroyed other artifacts in my house, do the actions of the mob of poor people absolve you, the original looter?

Does it complicate or simplify things if you, the original looter, also sold opium to the mob of poor people?

And you're lumping Western people together in the exact same way.

Would you care to provide some nuance then?

No. If I burn my house down and you've kept my furniture, is your act of theft only harmful to me when I get it returned?

(And this assumes that art is like furniture. Hold my beer...)

I'm saying it would have likely been destroyed, just as early Christianity destroyed Roman statues. Just as Arabs preserved Roman texts.

Ridiculous, check out how the Chinese artworks is being treated in some western museums. They don't know how to protect the artworks since cultural ignorance(the material needs to be treated specially), some of the artworks are fking cut into pieces.

They knew how the materials worked, and we've pieced together how and why the various steps taken in the aim of conservation were taken.

Here's a 2014 paper on the history of the scroll, including a fairly detailed section on the conservation & restoration efforts since the piece arrived at the British Museum.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291523444/download

so then argue this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admonitions_Scroll if the thieves know that, how did they dismantle this Chinese painting and remount it with the Japanese painting mounting method?

Because the wooden backing of the Japanese method was used across the board for conservation of most asian silk scrolls because it lends itself very well to conservation and preservation of the piece while also allowing display in museums.

The trade off between this method and keeping the scroll in unmounted silk form was between having a more stable backing for the scroll itself to aid in preservation at the cost of removing the scroll's ability to be bent.

The concern for this scroll specifically was that this scroll was unevenly decayed, had numerous repairs in the past and constant continuing repairs would be needed to mitigate wear and tear - frayed silk ends were already an issue. The standard method of dealing with this issue is remounting, and evidence indicated this scroll had been remounted numerous times in it's history.

The museum decided to affix the scroll and apply a form of sealant, after remounting the edge silk sections (which they literally brought experts over from asia to do). This was done to remove the need to repaint and splice sections in (which was the traditional method of maintaining the piece, but which obviously changes it over time) and mitigate future damage to the piece.

TLDR: just read the link I posted.

Can you give a specific example of this?

Admonitions Scroll was cut by the British Museum, then someone said the European thieves protected the artworks by stealing. LOL

Where did you get the idea that the museum cut it? All information I could find points to the first scenes being lost at a far earlier date.

[1]In 1914–1915 the scroll was dismantled, and remounted on two long stretchers, one containing the nine scenes of the original painting, and one containing all the other sections, except for the Zou Yigui painting, which was mounted separately as an album leaf. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admonitions_Scroll

Even if that were the case, I’d argue that it has fared much better in London than it would have in China - most likely it would have been “harmonized” in the 1960s.

so the thieves just argue with "if.., would" and ignore the facts? lol

This needs to be upvoted!