Just as France seeks to pass a law to protect itself against foreign interference, there seems to be no stopping the People's Republic of China (PRC) from interfering in two of our great museums: The Musée du quai Branly and the Musée Guimet. The terminology used in these institutions now reflects Beijing's wishes to rewrite history and to erase the non-Han peoples who have been integrated or annexed by the PRC, to the point of losing their own ethnonym and that of their ancestral territory.

It is indeed surprising to see the removal of the name "Tibet" from the Musée du Quai Branly's catalog of Tibetan objects in favor of the Chinese name "Xizang Autonomous Region." This change is simply the application of a law in force since 2023 in the PRC and clearly demonstrates the desire that Tibet, occupied and colonized since 1950, should be erased from the maps and from people's consciousness, in the present as well as in the past. At the Musée Guimet, the toponym Tibet has been replaced by "Himalayan world" in the rooms dedicated to it.

Confucius Institutes relays

As a reminder, while the traditional rulers of Tibet, East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Mongolia continued to govern their peoples after swearing allegiance to the Manchu emperors, the latter only ruled directly over China proper (Qing dynasty, 1644-1911). The People's Republic of China's claims to occupy these neighboring territories for its own benefit have been largely successful at the expense of these territories' peoples. This is well known to specialists but probably less so to admirers of modern China's successes, achieved at the cost of economic exploitation of these territories and the relentless Sinicization of these peoples, thanks to the establishment of a dictatorial regime and the Han's demographic domination.

The choice of our museums, as well as some of our academic institutions housing the Chinese propaganda relays that are the Confucius Institutes, is to refrain from offending the Beijing regime and its exacerbated nationalist sensibilities. Any deviation from the grand narrative framed by the new "Xi Jinping thought" (sic) is deemed provocation or an attempt at separatism. Our institutions want to preserve their access to Chinese research fields, sources and archives at all costs, as well as benefit from the financial largesse and loans of museum objects that depend on the goodwill of the Chinese regime. As a result, they are coaxing the threatening power that Xi Jinping's China has become and are bowing to its demands to rewrite history and erase peoples.

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