China says foreigners stealing cultural heritage

BEIJING, Mar 13 (Reuters) Foreigners are stealing China's cultural heritage, making off with traditional costumes, ornaments, rare utensils and other articles from China's ethnic minority regions, a state newspaper said today.

''They have procured so much that some even say that we have to go to their countries to study Chinese folk culture,'' the official China Daily quoted Vice Culture Minister Zhou Heping as saying.

Zhou singled out the Miao minority in the southwestern province of Guizhou, whom he said had been targeted by foreigners looking for costumes and jewellery.

The newspaper did not single out any one country, but quoted a local newspaper as referring to a private museum in France with a collection of Miao artefacts.

Middlemen pay a nominal price -- considered a fortune by the poor Miao people -- and then whisk the items out of the country, the newspaper said.

''The loss of such treasures constitutes a threat to preserving our minority and folk culture,'' Zhou said. ''It must be checked.

''By no means should the rural regions commit the same error as the cities where development was achieved mostly at the cost of many traditions fading away and legacies eroded,'' Zhou said.

China has been fighting the loss of its antiques for decades.

Many of the finest cultural treasures were spirited across to Taiwan by defeated Nationalist forces at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

And during the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Communist Red Guards destroyed many other artefacts in their mission to sweep away ''old China'' and establish a new socialist order.

REUTERS PV BS0939