Wu Guangqiang

    THE hilarious-yet-predictable New Year’s show on CCTV, an annual staple of the traditional Chinese Spring Festival Eve, likely drew some public attention during the holidays. But just before the new year, another piece of news might have caught even more of the public eye: A dresser and stool set, made of jade and asserted by its owner to be a Han Dynasty antique, was reportedly auctioned for 220 million yuan (US$34.93 million).

    Art pieces sold for sky-high prices are no longer news in China — what interests people, though, is how many items sold at crazy markups are genuine. There have been numerous disclosures of auctioning fake items. The most notorious case was the “jinluyuyi fraud.” (A jinluyuyi is a jade garment knitted with fine gold wire.) Early in the 2000s, a crooked businessman named Xie Genrong swindled 1 billion yuan (US$156 million) from a bank using forged artifacts, including two fake jade suits. The brilliant part of the story was that a team of experts set the price of one suit at 2.4 billion yuan after “appraising” the “treasure,” which was sewn together from a bundle of worthless jade pieces by Niu Fuzhong, a relics expert.

    As a reward, each expert received more than 10,000 yuan for the appraisal.

    Bearing a striking similarity with the jade suit case, the recently sold jade stool set comes with an attractive story. It was sold by Beijing Zhongjia International Auctions, whose Web site describes the 138-kg dressing table and 35-kg stool as being from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220).

    But art experts and historians are challenging the authenticity of the pieces.

    “This is an absurd forgery,” said archaeologist Liu Qingzhu, a former director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. According to Liu, Chinese in the Han Dynasty sat on the floor, not on stools.

    With a scam so obvious that even a layman can see through it, there come a few questions: Who would buy the costly fake? Why and how did appraisal experts from the auction house make such a silly mistake? Why is there an absence of regulation and punishment against all these deceptions?

    By some accounts, these deals may be far more complicated than they seem. It’s common sense that no fool would buy these sham articles — so there may be ulterior motives. Rather than real transactions, some of these deals could be used to cover up dirty practices such as money laundering or loan fraud. As for the authority and integrity of auction houses and experts, well, they have long been regarded with a deep distrust after frequent scandals involving fake certifications of authenticity and collusion by buyers, sellers and auctioneers to push up prices.

    When asked about the failure to distinguish the false article, a spokesperson for the auction house defended his firm by citing China’s Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics, which fails to specify legal obligations for relevant parties’ breach of duty or mistakes.

    In essence, the law states: As long as the auctioneer does not guarantee the authenticity of the goods before the auction, the auctioneer does not assume warranty responsibility. This loophole enables some irresponsible experts to present certificates for fake items and auction houses to sell them, hence forming a profit chain.

    The mysterious ineffectiveness of supervision has fueled proliferation of the tricks. Not a single offender has been penalized in recent years.

    It’s time for stronger regulation of these unbridled deceptions. Though ordinary people are just spectators of such elaborate games, they are victims of lesser scams every day — and victims of the cultural tone set by high-price fakes.

    Fraudulent schemes may be unavoidable, but loose supervision abets them.

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer. He can be reached at jw368@163.com.)