HASWhile France wants to adopt a law aimed at preventing foreign interference, nothing seems to stop that 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 desires in terms of rewriting history and of programmedly erasing non-Han peoples who have been integrated or annexed by the PRC, to the point of losing today their own ethnonym and that of their ancestral territory.
It is therefore surprising that the name “Tibet” has been removed from the catalogue of Tibetan objects at the Musée du Quai Branly in favour of the Chinese name “Xizang Autonomous Region”. This change is nothing more than the implementation of a law in force since 2023 in the People’s Republic of China and clearly shows the desire to erase Tibet, occupied and colonised since 1950, from maps and consciences, both in the present and in the past. At the Guimet Museum, “Himalayan World” replaced the toponym Tibet in the rooms dedicated to it.
Confucius Institutes take over
As a reminder, while the traditional leaders of the peoples of Tibet, East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Mongolia continued to govern their peoples within the framework of loyalty to the Manchu emperors, the latter ruled directly only over China proper (Qing dynasty, 1644-1911). The claims of the People’s Republic of China to occupy, for the benefit of its exclusive power, these territories neighbouring its own have largely succeeded at the expense of the inhabitants of these territories. This is of course known to specialists, but probably less so to those who admire the successes of contemporary China obtained at the cost of the economic exploitation of these territories and the ruthless 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 frames the news. “Xi Jinping Thought” (sic) is considered provocation or an attempt at separatism. Our institutions want to preserve at all costs their access to Chinese research fields, sources and archives, and to benefit from the financial generosity and loans of museum objects that depend on the good will of the Chinese regime. We therefore persuade the threatening power that Xi Jinping’s China has become and bow our heads to its demands to rewrite history and erase peoples.
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