It’s fair to say that the Chinese Communist Party has little regard for history. After all, it’s estimated that some three-quarters of China’s vast wealth of cultural heritage was deliberately destroyed during the orgy of mass murder and destruction of the Cultural Revolution. With Mao’s demented exhortation to eradicate the “Four Olds”, Red Guards embarked on a rampage of smashing, burning and looting. Chinese literature scrolls and paintings were burned and torn to pieces. The millennia-old Temple of Confucius in Shandong was completely destroyed.
Even today, the destruction continues. Ancient temples were flooded for the Three Gorges dam, and destructive construction at tourist sites is degrading what remains of much of Chinese heritage.
With so little regard for their own heritage, it’s hardly surprising, then that the CCP is openly looting Commonwealth war graves.
A Chinese salvage ship has been caught red-handed looting the war graves of 840 men, ripping up the World War II wrecks of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse for high-quality steel.
Malaysian media and maritime open-source intelligence analysts last week located a dredger sitting illegally over the designated war grave of the two British warships sunk by Japanese bombers in December 1941.
It should also be remembered that, during the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, the worst mass murder in human history, Communist officials used the bodies of their victims as fertiliser. These are not people who put respect for the dead ahead of purely mundane greed.
The steel used in the era’s warships was of exceptionally high quality and represents a quick and easy source of scrap to be smelted into new products […] The current condition of the British wrecks remains unknown.
Looted and melted down for cheap Chinese knockoffs, is the most likely condition.
A formal public complaint has been issued to the Malaysian government’s National Heritage Department […]But it’s not the first time the Chinese-registered salvage ship has been caught looting war graves.
The Chuan 68 and its crew were temporarily detained in 2017 amid allegations it had removed three Japanese World War II wrecks near Usukan, Malaysia.
And the Indonesian navy had reportedly intercepted the ship in April of the same year while it was scavenging a shipwreck near the Anambas Islands. It allegedly fled to international waters.
The wrecks of the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth and the US heavy cruiser USS Houston – both lost in the weeks after the fall of Singapore – have also been targeted. And two Dutch warships sunk days earlier have entirely disappeared.
News.com.au
All this, just as blindly greedy Australian big businesses pat themselves on the back, now that their rivers of Chinese gold are flowing again. It might serve to remind them just what manner of looters and desecrators they’re falling over themselves to sign up to.
Somehow, though, I doubt the same people who’ve sold off the cream of Australia’s natural resources for a quick Chinese buck are going to much care.