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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

One thing I learned recently was that when the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, they took a vast trove of priceless Chinese antiquities with them. This has long been a sore spot for China, which makes the desire to annex Taiwan not simply a dollars and cents tactical goal but also a matter of national pride.

It's like if we had a right-wing revolution in the US, and the current national government fled to Nova Scotia with the contents of the Smithsonian, the National Archives, and every important museum and library.

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How many priceless Chinese antiquities were destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution? They should have taken even more! It's like if we had a radical extremist revolution in the US, and the contents of the Smithsonian, the National Archives, and nearly every important museum and library were all burned because they're too old, oppressive and counter-revolutionary.

They did take them and a good thing too. In the cultural revolution the CCP destroyed the priceless Chinese antiquities on the mainland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds

Totally, and I'm not making any judgment about whether it was right or wrong to take all the antiquities. However, I think the current regime in China has different ideas about the value of these antiquities, and so they're eager to get them back for the sense of legitimacy and connection to China's history that they would bring.

I guarantee you that if they gave those antiquities back it wouldn't change a thing.

Not sure your analogy works, since it’s the right that is so insistent on preserving cultural artifacts while the left is the side with people actively destroying them. It’s also no coincidence. The CCP did the same thing.

> the left is the side with people actively destroying them

I was just in Central Park in NYC and there was a huge golden Civil War statue that was completely unmolested, and it's sitting smack in the middle of a very liberal city. General Sherman is very safe from liberals. I'm sure John Brown statues would be as well. Maybe it's not all the cultural artifacts, but only certain ones and the very specific things they represent?

> it’s the right that is so insistent on preserving cultural artifacts while the left is the side with people actively destroying them

I dunno, right-wingers seemed just as happy, or more, with the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled as anyone else.

If you mean specifically monuments to slavery, slavers, and the Confederate States of America, sure, the Right is eager to protect those and the left opposed, but for neither side is that about “cultural artifacts” as a broad class.

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