China accuses Taiwan museum of trashing tradition

BEIJING, Jan 26 (Reuters) Reforms at a Taiwan museum housing the world's biggest collection of Chinese art are an attempt to purge the vast treasure chest of its mainland heritage, state media said today, warning of a cultural battle.

Taipei's National Palace Museum houses 654,500 art works and artefacts shipped in 2,972 crates from the mainland after 1948 when Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan from advancing Communists.

Since then, the island has been politically split from China, and the museum, which reopens next month after two years of remodelling, has become a symbol of the tensions between the two sides.

The museum intends to remove explanations that exhibits originally came from Beijing's Palace Museum, known in the West as the Forbidden City, the People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's paper said.

The paper's overseas edition said the changes were part of an effort to ''de-Sinify'' Taiwan's culture and encourage the island's full independence from the mainland, a step Beijing has said could lead to war.

''The most heartless and despicable part of the boosters and enforcers of de-Sinification is how they ignorantly slash away at their ancestors, always treating language, writing and history from the mainland with such malice,'' the People's Daily said.

''We must beware of cultural policy under the manipulation of Taiwan independence thinking.'' The denunciation is just the latest symptom of the raw distrust dividing Beijing and Taiwan, where President Chen Shui-bian has pushed the island towards clearer separation from the mainland, bringing bitter criticism from China.

The museum also announced its mission is to collect, study and explain ''domestic and foreign'' art, not Chinese art, the paper said.

''The de-Sinifying implication is quite obvious,'' it added.

The reforms are part of Taiwan's broader campaign to dilute the island's cultural links with the mainland and promote local language and culture, the party mouthpiece said, calling the campaign a doomed effort.

''If you take away China's language, writing, names for people and places, books, literature and history and customs, how much culture does Taiwan island have left?,'' it asked.

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