
In the age of aggressive ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, warm words from Chinese officials about the U.S. are a rarity. Yet Huang Ping, China’s consul general in New York, was unusually effusive after hosting a ceremony last month to celebrate the return of two 7th-century stone carvings to his country, writing on Twitter that the move would “bring positive energy into China-US relations.”
Whether the return of the carvings depicting Zoroastrian demons — that had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are thought to be worth around $3.5 million — can do much to help repair the fractious bilateral relationship is debatable. Their repatriation is, though, the latest sign of success China is achieving in bringing thousands of treasures from around the world back home — an initiative driven both by a desire to reclaim important historical items and to project China’s cultural and economic power.
“It’s about showing the current strength, economic and political, of China today, as compared to its past,” says Alexander Herman, the director of the U.K.-based Institute of Art and Law, an educational organization focused on legal aspects of cultural heritage issues.

Herman says the countless treasures plundered from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops during the Second Opium War in 1860 are the “most infamous example” of stolen objects, and still represent a “sore spot in Chinese history.” The ancient carvings returned by the U.S. this month are themselves alleged to have been sawed from a Chinese tomb and spirited out of the country in the early 1990s, before ending up in the hands of a New York collector named Shelby White.
In a statement, a spokesperson for White’s foundation said that White and her late husband, the financier Leon Levy, had always bought items for their collection at public auctions, and had always returned items found to have been “wrongfully taken.”
How much future collaboration there will be between the U.S. and China on antiquity repatriations is currently in question: The main bilateral agreement between the two countries governing cultural heritage is currently up for renewal. On June 5th, the State Department will hold a public hearing to discuss renewing import restrictions on Chinese archeological objects from the Paleolithic period to the Tang Dynasty, measures that are meant to stem the flow of stolen Chinese art into the United States.
There are people here in the U.S. who will say: why should we help Xi Jinping? They will pull out all the stops.
Robert Murowchick, an archeology lecturer at Boston University
The MoU, originally put in place in 2009, has already been re-upped twice, but experts such as Robert E. Murowchick, an archeology lecturer at Boston University, say that its further renewal is “not a done deal” given the current geopolitical backdrop. “There are people here in the U.S. who will say: why should we help Xi Jinping? They will pull out all the stops,” he says.
For Murowchick, the chance to find a bright spot for the bilateral relationship in the world of art is a key reason why the two countries should work on renewing the current arrangements.

“This should not have anything to do with the political relationship between two countries,” he says. “This kind of cultural collaboration turns into one of the few avenues of discussion [between the U.S. and China].”
Others, though, object to cooperating further with China. Kate Fitz Gibbon, the executive director of the Committee for Cultural Policy, a think tank established to strengthen the voice of museums and collectors in discussions about arts policy, opposes the renewal of the MoU, arguing that China does not fulfill the agreement’s preconditions. For example, she says that China is not doing enough to protect its antiquities at home due to its actions “destroying cultural heritage in Xinjiang and Tibet.” The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Over the past two decades, China has initiated a multi-pronged campaign to repatriate its ancient art, spearheaded by the State Administration of Culture Heritage, a government department. It has sent teams of experts to museums across the world to take inventory of Chinese art overseas, and has set up a webpage to publicize the notable pieces it seeks to have returned to China. Wealthy Chinese people have sometimes helped by buying art overseas and repatriating it — in 2007, for example, the now-deceased Macau casino tycoon Stanley Ho bought a bronze horse head from a Taiwanese collector which had been in the Old Summer Palace for $8 million dollars, and donated it to China.

When the National Museum of China in Beijing held an exhibit made up of returned objects in 2019, the museum claimed in the catalog that China has brought back over 150,000 objects over the past 70 years, explaining that this effort is part of the “journey of the Chinese nation standing up, getting rich and becoming strong.” That same year, the National Museum also displayed an exhibit of 796 objects returned from Italy.
China is not alone in its efforts: many other countries are now calling on museums and collectors to return art that was previously looted, particularly during years of colonial occupation. Beijing has emerged as a vocal ally of nations making such efforts. On a 2019 visit to Greece, Xi Jinping expressed support for its longtime campaign to have the so-called ‘Elgin Marbles’ — a series of sculptures taken from the Parthenon in Athens in the nineteenth century — returned from the British Museum in London. The Chinese government also provided $34 million in funding for a museum in Dakar, Senegal — the Museum of Black Civilizations — which opened in 2018 and is meant to showcase African art returned from abroad.
The close association between the Chinese auction houses and the government…facilitates the return of ancient art to China.
Peter Tompa, a lawyer and former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee
“The whole discussion has changed,” says Marc Balcells Magrans, an art crime expert at the law and political science department of Spain’s Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. “This comes from a criminal industry but also colonialism — most of the time the art came from the global south to the global north. Many countries are raising their voices and asking for repatriation.”
China’s significant economic strength sets its effort apart from those of smaller countries like Greece and Cambodia seeking major repatriations. “They can mobilize the funding and the personnel to survey the international collections,” says Boston University’s Murowchick. “Most countries don’t have the resources to do this.”
China has also been able to mobilize support from major auction houses such as Poly Auction, which is 60 percent state-owned, according to WireScreen, and whose parent company, China Poly Group, got its start selling weapons to the Chinese military. Poly operates a museum in Beijing which displays repatriated pieces of art. China Guardian Auctions, another huge Chinese auction house which has helped repatriate Chinese objects, has some state ownership and two of the top shareholders are Wang Yannan, the daughter of the former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, and her husband.
“The close association between the Chinese auction houses and the government… facilitates the return of ancient art to China,” says Peter K. Tompa, a lawyer who works on cultural heritage issues and is the former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee.
Official repatriations of artworks tend to involve extensive red tape, and have become something of a cottage industry for those involved. Matthew Bogdanos, the assistant district attorney in Manhattan who oversaw the recent case of the stone carvings loaned to the Met, has become a central figure in this legal process: the former Marine has been involved in returning thousands of objects to countries all around the world.

“Museums on the whole are really trying to do their best to return what doesn’t belong to them, but it is very complicated,” says Sally Yerkovich, the chair of the International Council of Museums Ethics Committee. “It fits into the increasing awareness on the part of museums that they are part of a global picture, and they have a responsibility to a diverse set of communities, including the countries where the objects come from.”
Despite the bureaucratic difficulties involved, Holly Cusack-McVeigh, an associate professor of anthropology and museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, says that work on repatriations provides an opportunity for important academic collaboration. In 2019, she spent a week alongside a large delegation from Beijing cataloging and examining 361 Chinese objects which had allegedly been stolen by an amateur archeologist based in Indiana.
“They [the Chinese delegation] clearly were very keen to share their knowledge and help us better understand the significance of the pieces,” she remembers. “It was clear, we were doing the work for the same reasons.”

Katrina Northrop is a journalist based in Washington D.C. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Providence Journal, and SupChina. @NorthropKatrina