By Wuyue Sanren (五岳散人)
EO Online
Translated by Zhu Na
Original article: [Chinese]  

 Almost all Chinese know what a jade burial suit is, sometimes these jade pieces are sold in the antique market, but it is hard to find the whole jade burial suit, something private collectors cannot have. But a recent case under investigation showed business man Xie Genrong owning two jade burials suits and using them as collateral to borrow 700 million yuan from the Construction Bank for a period of three years. But it turned out both are fake. These two so-called jade burial suits were actually constructed by a well-known antique appraiser Niu Fuzhong, with jade pieces provided by Xie.

Why did the bank believe that they were genuine in the first place? Basically, they were identified and valued by five experts from The Palace Museum in Beijing at 2.4 billion yuan. These experts were then hosted by Niu, and received several hundred thousand yuan as appraisal fees.

After a few years, this was revealed to the public and one of the five experts had already died. Consequently, the other four experts blamed the dead expert, claiming that they were only invited as guests and followed that particular expert’s opinion in the appraisal. What they said shows they have no sense of shame. They don’t take responsibility, and all blame the dead colleague. Where are their morals? We all know where.  

In fact, people working in this field can easily see that friendship and money were involved in this appraisal. For example, when someone buys a fake antique and doesn’t want to accept that it is fake, they find an expert to assess the antique. After the appraisal the fake thing becomes a real treasure.

In a normal society, experts are a group of people who are respected. They use their own professional knowledge to become advisors and the usual judge of these items. They should greatly cherish their profession’s high status in society and their reputation is their life, which is also the reason why people are willing to pay for them. Whereas in this case, the word, “experts,” has become a derogatory term not because they are unprofessional, but because they use the reputation and social credibility of experts to openly and shamelessly appraise a variety of fake stuff. This is not just occurring in the antique field but also in other fields.

 If we go back to look at many social problems, there are always experts coming out to whitewash all kinds of institutions. Knowledge trains people and equips them with intellectual and academic honesty, so that they don’t misbehave. In only one case will they give up this constraint, which is when they do not want to pursue knowledge, but use it as a tool to benefit themselves.

 Why does it occur? This is because the authority in our society has become authoritarian, and uses it to profit unscrupulously. There is no restriction on this authoritarianism, so naturally experts won’t be responsible for the knowledge itself, and use it as a tool.

This is almost a metaphor, where the epitome of the value system is about to collapse. In society, people whose reputation ought to be beyond reproach abuse their status. Public institutions that should have the best reputation have almost become a pool of iniquity, and experts who should be most credible have lost public trust, appraisers are fake. There is no justice in this society.

No matter how gorgeous a jade burial suit is, it is only cloth that wraps the body. The title of “experts,” no matter how brilliant it is, if it is misused, will eventually become the “cloths that conceal their body.”