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The Institutional Black Hole Behind the “Swap-Out Incident” at the Nanjing Museum
This is Jersey’s News Commentary Channel.
When cultural relics go missing, must they have been stolen? You’re mistaken.
In China’s cultural heritage system, relics do not disappear through theft—they disappear through swap-outs.
No locks need to be forced.
No black market is required.
Only three things are needed: a closed system, trust vested in power, and accountability that does not penetrate.
Under the CCP system, museums are not independent legal entities; they are part of the administrative apparatus. The museum director is the leader, experts are “subordinates,” and appraisal, custody, auditing, and accountability all sit within the same chain of power.
Take a provincial museum like the Nanjing Museum. An important painting or calligraphy piece in its collection typically has the following characteristics: extremely valuable, but not on long-term display; normally kept deep in storage; accessed only for specific purposes such as research, appraisal, or pre-exhibition review. Such access requires internal approval—this creates a critical window.
Suppose that in the 1990s or the early 2000s, a painting was taken out of storage during an “internal research access.” Those involved might include an in-house expert familiar with the work, a director with approval authority, and a staff member responsible for custody and handover.
If someone had already completed a high-quality replica in advance, all that was needed was a brief operation without external oversight: the original is taken away, and the replica is put back. What happens next? Storage records show no anomaly, because “the catalog number, dimensions, and mounting format all match.”
Subsequent checks merely confirm whether “the item is still there.” A new generation of museum staff can only judge authenticity based on old archives. The most critical question is: who will re-authenticate it?
In a power system built on personal relationships, re-authentication means negating previous experts, negating management, and negating the institution’s entire historical credibility. Therefore, the safest choice is always not to authenticate—or to maintain the original conclusion. This operating logic is what we call an institutional black hole.
This is why many swap-out cases are exposed only decades later, triggered by sheer coincidence. Works including the Jiangnan Spring series donated by Pang Xunqin to the Nanjing Museum decades ago were only brought to light recently—after the Jiangnan Spring series appeared on the Beijing auction market and sold for 88 million yuan—shocking Pang’s descendants. Subsequent verification revealed that among the donated Jiangnan Spring series and related works, at least five genuine pieces are missing, triggering nationwide outrage.
Within such an institutional arrangement, swap-outs are not high-risk acts; they are low-risk arbitrage. Seen this way, the Nanjing Museum “swap-out incident” is by no means an isolated case. Some media have pointed out that in the vast majority of Chinese museums, most supposed “authentic” works may in fact be replicas produced through swap-outs.
In China, insider theft has become routine. Genuine works are either resold or sitting in the homes of top local leaders. This means that China’s museum collections have been comprehensively breached—and that the institutional foundation of China’s public trust has essentially collapsed.
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