The recent sale at a modest auction house in West London of an eighteenth-century Chinese vase for a world record price for porcelain of £43 million (£51.6 million including buyer’s premium) is symbolic of the current booming inter­national market for Chinese artefacts. This has been fuelled by Chinese buyers and reflects the rise of wealthy collectors, signifying China’s resurgence as an economic, industrial and trading superpower, asserting itself as an influential player both regionally and globally.

Two years after the spectacle of Beijing hosting the Olympic Games, it was Shanghai’s turn in summer 2010 to stride onto the international stage with its equally ambitious World Expo. Seen by a record 73 million visitors, the Expo’s theme of Better City, Better Life presented new visions from architects, designers, planners and artists, both internationally and from China itself. The British pavilion, built from thousands of fibre-optic ‘seed-rods’, made a dynamic impression on Chinese visitors, supporting British strengths in engineering, design, architecture and the arts.

Immediately after the Expo closed, its conference centre hosted the 22nd General Conference of the International Council of Museums (7th to 12th November), on the theme of ‘Museums for Social Harmony’, which was attended by over 4,000 delegates from 127 countries, over half of whom were from mainland China. Strong contributions were made to ICOM’s triennial event – devoted to international museum exchange – by dele­gations from East Asian countries, as well as from Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. A typically collaborative symposium, From silk road to container ship: artefacts, environment and cultural transfer, was organised by ICOM’s international committees for museums dedicated to the fine and decorative arts. It attracted papers on the themes of the export trade, chinoiserie, cultural imperialism and recent museum expansion in the West and in China. The significance of the conference for ICOM-China cannot be underestimated as it was an opportunity for Chinese museums and personnel to participate with the inter­national museum community and to demonstrate their rapidly expanding museum-building programme and inter­national reach. Chinese museums are increasingly impressive in terms of buildings, collections, programmes and scholarship, and do not lack public funding. The contemporary art scene in Shanghai and Beijing is especially lively, as is demonstrated by the vigorous Shanghai Biennale and spearheaded by the courageous work of Ai Weiwei, whose installation is currently to be seen at Tate Modern.1

Within a highly competitive environment, in which many countries and their museums have been developing major exhibition programmes and exchanges with Chinese museums, how are museums and galleries in Britain rising to the challenges offered by China’s burgeoning museum sector? Undoubtedly, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum have been at the forefront of this activity, with East Asian collaboration and partnership a priority for both institutions. Over the last few years, the two museums have sent substantial shows to China and hosted shows of Chinese art and artefacts. The V. & A., which has become a leading institution for research on contemporary Chinese art and design, has developed relationships with the Guangzhou Museum of Art as well as with the Palace Mus­eum and the Capital Museum in Beijing. It has sent exhibitions of Olympic Games posters to Beijing (2008), and of Vivienne Westwood’s designs to Shanghai and Hong Kong (in 2005 and 2008). The exhibition Decode: Digital Design Sensations has just closed at the Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City is currently on view at the V. & A. (to 27th February). Recently on show in the Shanghai Museum was India: the Art of the Temple, a unique collaboration with the British Museum. In 2013 the V. & A.’s exhibition The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts will be held at the Palace Museum in Beijing. In the same year the V. & A. is planning to stage a major exhibition of Chinese painting from the tenth century to the eighteenth. And the V. & A. and the British Museum are collaborating on a spectacular exhibition devoted to the history of porcelain to be held at the National Museum of China in Beijing, which itself reopens in 2011 after extension and refurbishment.

The British Museum has developed an equally fruitful relationship with East Asia and in particular Chinese museums. Historically it has strong academic and curatorial relationships with individuals and institutions in Japan, Korea and China, where it has a programme of staff exchanges, notably with the Shanghai Mus­eum and in Beijing, the Palace Museum, the National Museum of China and the Capital Museum. The First Emperor (2007–08), with loans from the Museum of the Terracotta Army in Xi’an, was the British Museum’s most popular exhibition since 1972. It has also hosted Treasures of Shanghai (2009) and from its own collections showed The Printed Image in China (2010). The British Mus­eum has also sent important exhibitions to China, and in 2009 it inaugurated a new permanent gallery of Chinese ceramics.

The considerable efforts of the V. & A. and the British Mus­eum to collaborate with China are to be applauded. Britain and its Empire form a troubled part of China’s recent history and memory, through the forced opening of Shanghai and other Treaty Ports to international trade, and the ceding of Hong Kong, causing a deep sense of humiliation and inferiority in the Chinese psyche. In many political respects the resurgent Chinese capitalist Leviathan – paradoxically still a Communist state – is behaving like the British Empire in its rise to global domination, utterly confident and unable to view the world from outside its own superior perspective. However, this inexorable rise is widely seen in China as a way of overcoming the sense that the country was humiliated and held back by the Western powers.2
Notwithstanding the current age of economic austerity it is to be hoped that other national museums and galleries in Britain – and not just those with pre-eminent East Asian collections such as the V. & A. and British Museum – will collaborate with institutions in China. A genuine exchange of culture and audiences between China and the West has the power to heal old wounds and build a new and beneficial understanding.

1 The 8th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, runs to 23rd January; for Ai Weiwei’s Tate Modern installation, see the review on p.52 below.
2 R. Bickers: The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1800–1914, London forthcoming (February 2011).