You may not care about China. But China cares about you. That is the message of an extraordinary episode in the French city of Nantes this month, which exemplifies the way in which the Chinese Communist Party regards Western notions of academic and cultural freedoms as irrelevant. Any depiction or discussion of China, anywhere in the world, is a potential threat to the regime’s legitimacy — and must be controlled. The exhibition “Son of the Sky and the Steppe”, featuring Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire, has been postponed from February to 2024. The reason is the price the Chinese authorities tried to extract for providing some of the exhibits. They objected to the use of the words “Mongol” and “empire”, and even to mention of Genghis Khan himself. They wanted full control over the tone and content of the texts, maps, catalog, and publicity material. The Heritage Office in Beijing submitted a China-focused concept for the exhibition, which the museum director Bernard Guillet said made “Mongolian history and culture completely disappear”.
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