Why do some American officials oppose giving aid and comfort to Chinese propaganda whereas others—can they really be doing so obliviously?—seem to have no problem with it?
An example is a handover by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to China in service of the CCP doctrine that Tibet, like other lands that the People’s Republic of China has conquered or wants to conquer, has always been a part of a millennia-old China murkily equated with the People’s Republic of China established in 1949 (“US hands over Tibetan Buddhism relics to China,” The Christian Century, March 19, 2025).
The recent transfer of cultural artifacts, including several Tibetan Buddhist relics, from the US to China may help advance the Chinese government’s efforts to distort Tibet’s history and appropriate its religion and culture, Tibetan scholars and other critics of the transfer say.
On March 3, the Manhattan district attorney’s anti-trafficking unit handed over to officials from China 41 “illegally exported” cultural artifacts, including a bronze money tree, pottery, jade pieces, Buddha statues, and Tibetan Buddhist cultural relics, Chinese state-run media reports said.
The transfer was conducted as part of an agreement between the two countries to protect cultural heritage and identity and prevent Chinese cultural relics from illegally entering the US. Since the pact was first agreed to on January 14, 2009, the US has sent 594 pieces or sets of cultural relics and artworks to China….
But sending Tibetan artifacts to China has raised concern that Beijing will use them to justify its rule in Tibet, which the country annexed in 1950.
An event to celebrate the travesty was held on March 3, 2025, in New York. A year earlier, in April 2024, the same Manhattan DA trafficking unit had turned over 38 relics, most of them “Buddhist religious objects from Tibet,” to the Chinese Consulate General in New York.
Kate Fitz Gibbon, executive director of the Committee for Cultural Policy, told Christian Century says it’s an outrage “to return Tibetan objects in the diaspora to the People’s Republic of China, which is deliberately destroying Tibetan cultural heritage.
“Since China occupied Tibet, U.S. authorities have accepted that Tibetan artifacts belong to the Tibetan people, not China’s government. The turnover by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit directly challenges that policy.”
