A Letter to Editor of The Economist

Dear Editor,

In the last paragraph of the article "A museum boom" published in the June 14th print issue of The Economist, there is a mis-spelling of the name of the deputy minister of construction, which should be "Qiu Baoxing" instead of "Qiu Baixing". He used to be Mayor of Hangzhou, my hometown and the capital city of China's eastern province Zhejiang, so I'm quite familiar with this tough hand.

The report itself is very revealing. I see this museum construction/renovation fever around China, as well as the nationwide mushrooming applications for the UNESCO world heritages (though some do deserve such an honor), as one symptom among the many of a new "Big Leap Forward Movement", and the erections of well-facilitated, accordingly revenue-consuming, new museums serve as local governors' personal trophies for their achievements in "urbanization" and "civilization", rather than channels for public education (one reason is that some so-called museums were just instant projects and had no serious collections worth seeing). The "Stalinist-looking National Museum" mentioned in the report was actually a merger of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and the Museum of Chinese History, and the renaming was one of the steps to erase or blur the image of the "Red China" and make such tourist spots more ideologically and visually approachable to international, especially western, visitors. As a matter of fact, the Chinese government is quite happy with this strategy, which they think would help form a Beijing's Smithsonian or Museumsinsel, along with the boondoggle National Theater in Tian'anmen Square of course!

Cheers,
Eric