Two pieces of China's valuable cultural past, the bronze heads of a rabbit and a rat, stolen from the Old Summer Palace by British and French forces during the second Opium War in 1860, are scheduled for auction in Paris Wednesday night.

Long before the auction, the Chinese government, cultural heritage organizations and lawyers have been actively pursuing the return of the Chinese treasures. However, at this specific moment, the owner of the bronzes, French businessman Pierre Berge, offered to swap the two sculptures for the application of human rights in China and the freedom of Tibet. From the Chinese point of view, it's an absurd requirement by abducting China's cultural relics with human rights issues.

It's a big irony that Berge uses the bronzes, the exact evidence of human rights abuses done to the Chinese by British and French colonists more than a century ago, to ask China to apply human rights.

In 1860, the British and French forces used guns and cannons to invade Beijing, sacked and burned the grand Old Summer Palace on the outskirt of the capital and stole numerous Chinese cultural treasures, including the 12 bronze animal heads.

In the next year, the great French litterateur Victor Hugo wrote: "Two robbers breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures; one of the robbers is called France and the other Britain." He hoped that one day France would feel guilty and return what it had plundered from China.

In the echo of Hugo's just condemnation and in face of his broad humanitarian sentiment, it is kind of narrow-minded and funny for Berge to offer to trade with someone something that actually belongs to that person.

The Chinese government has always paid great attention to the recovery of its lost cultural relics. It is the international community's broad consensus and the basic, inalienable right of the relics' original homeland to protect their cultural heritage and promote the return of relics, a right making up an important part of human rights.

Berge's decision to put the stolen treasures up for auction has deeply hurt the Chinese people's cultural rights and national feelings. His linking human rights to the return of the bronzes is also an irony to the international cause of human rights issues, as it is an infringement upon "the Chinese people's cultural rights under the pretext of human rights," as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu put it.

It is unlikely that Berge doesn't know the source of the two bronze sculptures, and doesn't have the common sense that looted countries always hope their stolen treasures be returned to them.

Berge's offer originates from prejudice rather than ignorance, a prejudice reflecting some people's West-centered complex, and a customary thinking of imposing their values upon others.

It is well known that in modern history Western powers not only stole numerous cultural relics from less developed countries throughout the world by means of war, but also seized natural resources from those countries, making them struggle in long-term poverty without basic rights for their people.

Now the developing countries have walked on the path of independence and self-striving, yet some people in the West like Berge choose to ignore human rights development in those countries,and frequently "kidnap" international affairs in the name of "human rights."

They advocate the theory that human rights are higher than sovereignty, and connect the issue with aid, trade, the Olympics, and even with relics.

Those actions fully display the arrogance of Berge and his ilk.

People can't change history, but they can correct mistakes made in the past. They also should learn from history, and establish correct ethics and historical values.

Over the past century, many countries including China have taken back relics plundered in wars.

Those who returned the relics, without doubt, have done the right thing no matter whether they do it for moral redemption, or because of their new views toward history and reality.

China is willing to bring its relics scattered overseas back home through international cooperation, by lawful and diplomatic means, and in accordance with related international laws and principles.

China, which is on the way to a great historic renaissance, will firmly walk on its own path, and make contributions to the development of world civilization.

Source: Xinhua