[Both articles are behind a paywall; RM*’s editors may be able to get pdf’s]
Ancient Tang tablet
In 1945, following Japan’s surrender to the Allies, supreme commander General Douglas MacArthur ordered the country to return looted cultural treasures to their rightful nations across Asia. However, the directive was limited: it applied only to items seized after the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident, ignoring earlier plunder during the first Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.
The bureaucratic process was also complex, requiring detailed records of each theft – documentation that many war-ravaged nations could not provide. By the late 1940s, China had compiled a list of more than 150,000 books and 2,000 artefacts – a figure researchers
later deemed to be an underestimate.
For 80 years, except for a trickle of relics handed over to the defeated Kuomintang in Taiwan in the 1950s, the vast majority of China’s stolen heritage remained in Japan, with some 2 million Chinese items scattered across various museums.
But this could soon change. Chinese and Japanese researchers and civic groups have been demanding that Japan return a Tang dynasty (618-907) stele, or stone tablet, held in Tokyo’s Imperial Palace for over a century…
Huo Zhengxin, China’s leading expert on cultural repatriation – Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn
Void left by the USA
In January 2026, as the United States was withdrawing from a raft of heritage and science bodies around the world, China
was testing a new international model for cultural repatriation. The effort was spearheaded by Chinese researchers and Japanese activists who came together in a lecture hall in Shanghai University to call for the return of a 1,300-year-old national treasure, the Tang Honglu Well Stele.
The case reflects China’s efforts to become not just a petitioner but an ambitious rules maker in global heritage restitution through a sophisticated, multipronged combination of domestic legislation, bilateral agreements, law enforcement cooperation and Global South alliances.
By the end of 2023, China had signed similar bilateral agreements with 26 nations. Currently, it is leading former colonies to strenghtentheir restitution policies.
Yet, analysts caution, China’s ambitions may be hindered by oversimplified nationalist narratives, geopolitical tensions and the limitations of non-binding international conventions.
