Chasing dragons: the Chinese army takes up art collecting

1 November 2008

Elliot Wilson profiles Poly Group, a company controlled by the Chinese military which uses arms-sales profits to buy back artworks that have been illicitly flogged off abroad

Poly itself is ruled from above by a rogues’ gallery of senior Chinese politburo and military officials. At the top sits Major General He Ping, son-in-law of Jiang Zemin’s predecessor Deng Xiaoping. ‘To understand Poly, you have to understand its extremely close relationship with the PLA,’ says James Mulvenon, deputy director of the Defense Group at the Washington-based Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. ‘Poly is staffed with princelings through and through,’ he adds, referring to the sons and grandsons of the men who fought alongside Mao Zedong during the 1930s and 1940s.

The company acts as the military’s extension into the outside world. While the PLA exerts simple heft, Poly wields a softer form of power. It quietly sponsors Chinese art exhibits that tour the world. When any Chinese art auction takes place, Poly representatives are there to outbid the private buyers. The job of scouring local and foreign markets for China’s scattered cultural inheritance is the purview of 41-year-old chief archaeologist Jiang Ying Chun, who works at Poly Culture and Art. His job is to seek out the few remaining Chinese tapestries, vases, sculptures and bronzes in private hands, then buy them with cash raised by selling arms to countries such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Pakistan. Poly also dips into China’s vast foreign exchange reserves — £980 billion as of June 2008. ‘If Poly needed £100 million to buy up all of the world’s best remaining bronzes, they would,’ says Colin Sheaf, chief China art appraiser at Bonhams auction house in London. ‘If they needed a further £100 million, that wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a bottomless pit.’