A Typology: Drivers of Antisemitism in China

This chapter counts twelve specific, separate “drivers” – that is sources or causes – of China’s current antisemitism. Many of them are connected or operate together, even if they are separate. Their number and variety are large, arguably larger than they would be for countries with a long history of indigenous antisemitism.

China’s Confrontation with the United States

An Interplay of Three Factors Related to the United States: Three factors connected to America are fueling antisemitism in China. First, America’s political and economic confrontation with China, second China’s economic difficulties, and third the conviction that American Jews (2% of the population) control the country’s wealth, media, and politics. The presumed control of the world’s largest economy by a minuscule minority, the Jews, is seen as a demonstration of the inequity of capitalism. This control is said to be visible in the legendary personal riches of Jews and their support for Israeli interests. That the support of Israel is often the outcome of a complex game of domestic and foreign policy considerations, is generally not understood.

Human rights arguments increase the tensions between China and America, supported by the West. This has repercussions for Israel. The United States continues condemning China’s treatment of its Uyghurs, calling it in 2024 officially as “genocide and crimes against humanity against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs,”⁴⁴ and China retorts in anger, vilifying America as “an accomplice to the genocide in Gaza.”⁴⁵ The repeated public mentions of “genocide” by both powers helps legitimize the term’s use as a slur against Israel. The United States sees Chinese antisemitism and the attacks against Israel primarily as an anti-American propaganda tool. Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the United States Special Antisemitism Envoy (until 2024) made this point and called Chinese antisemitism “a cause for alarm.” Chinese officials underlined the propaganda value of the antisemitism quarrel when they declared: “We use the Jews as a stick to beat the Americans.” In other words, antisemitism has become part of the wider big power confrontation.

Hostility to America, Israel, and Jews combine in many countries. Everybody is aware of the strong links between the United States and Israel.

China’s Search for Friends and Allies

Arabs and Muslims: Chinese media antisemitism became more discernible around 2021, just as the country’s Middle East policy became more actively pro-Arab and anti-Israeli, particularly at the United Nations. This is no coincidence. Once China became convinced of the reported solidarity of all Jews, not least by Israel’s and the Jews’ own telling, it was not irrational to add antisemitism to its anti-Israeli tool kit. In the West, the wish to improve relations with the Muslim world often leads to policies inimical to Israel, but not always to Jews. It is Muslim minorities in the West and their local supporters that add anti-Jewish hostility at home to governmental anti-Israeli policies abroad.

Not only China, but most countries, Western and Non-Western, fear Islamic violence and want good relations with the Muslim world and local Muslims.

The China-Russia-Iran “Axis”: China has formed strong links, even a quasi-alliance with Russia and Iran (maybe to be followed by North Korea).⁴⁶ The purpose is to strengthen political, military, economic and technological cooperation. Such links often enlarge cooperation to culture, tourism etc. to increase mutual “bonding.” There is a historical precedent for antisemitism as a method of bonding between countries in strategic quasi-alliances. It was the “Axis” – the first political use of the term – uniting Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan before World War II. Fascist Italy had almost no popular antisemitism and no legal discrimination against Italian Jews until 1938. Then Hitler made a state visit to Rome to mobilize Italy’s support, and its leader, Mussolini, issued his anti-Jewish laws not long after. Today, Iran incites China against Israel. On February 14, 2023, China’s and Iran’s president, the latter on visit to Beijing signed a joint declaration, amongst others criticizing Israel and demanding that it submits its nuclear installation to UN control. No other great power leader has ever signed a similar public demand of Israel, certainly not jointly with Iran. Whether Iran also fueled China’s media antisemitism and whether Russia too played a role is not clear.

The triangular quasi-Axis allying China, Russia and Iran is a unique configuration in today’s geopolitical landscape.

Looking for Scapegoats

Projecting One’s Own Offenses onto the Jews: The Soviet Jewish writer Vassily Grossman discusses antisemitism in his autobiographic novel Life and Fate (1959): “Tell me what you accuse Jews of – I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”⁴⁷ Grossman’s observation, gained during the Second World War in his native Soviet homeland, is a convincing explanation of antisemitism. Projecting one’s own culpability into others is a well-documented psychological defense mechanism. Blaming Israelis and their “Zionist,” that is, Jewish, supporters for crimes against humanity and genocide, and calling them Nazis can be found in many, including European, countries. Many of these countries have carried out wide-spread cruelties and wars of annihilation during their past colonial conflicts or have persecuted their own Jews or other minorities in the more remote past or have collaborated with Nazi Germany in the murder of their Jews in the recent past. Sticking the Nazi label on Israel allows them to project their own, conscious or subconscious memories onto the victims – memories that remain a source of qualms and irritation. But the Nazis were not in China, and China did not persecute Jews, yet China’s anti-Israeli polemics are using the Nazi metaphor surprisingly and too often. When Professor Yin Zhiguang calls Gaza an Israeli “open-air concentration camp,” one could ask whether he had subconscious memories of camps in China.

Canary in the Coal Mine: According to an old European saying, “The Jews are the canary in the coal mine.” The leading French historian Fernand Braudel has suggested a link between growing Jew-hatred and economic crises in European history.⁴⁸ Rising antisemitism announces the approach of economic hardship and social tensions. Is China now replicating this experience, not against local Jews because there are almost none, but Judaism more broadly and the Jewish state? China’s economic growth has slowed, according to foreign reports, and youth unemployment is high. Perhaps the canary analogy remains valid.

Xenophobia: Hostility to foreigners seems to rise in China, occasionally encouraged by official sources as “patriotic.” Other manifestations of Chinese xenophobia are much worse than antisemitism, for example, a widespread public hostility against African students. In 2023/24, there were several unprovoked, violent street attacks against foreigners. In the past, xenophobic violence in China occurred during periods of social and political tension, such as during the “Boxer Rebellion” in 1900. In many countries, people who dislike foreigners tend to dislike Jews too.

The Jews are Themselves to Blame: Blaming the Jews for their own misfortunes and for the hostility they encounter was originally a mission of the Biblical prophets but has since become an antisemitic trope extended also to Israel. The Gaza war has become the most potent contributor to this thought, but the tendency existed long before. A small group of leftist Israeli and Jewish writers play a major role in this self-blame game. Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, published in 2009, says it all in the title of his book, and Ilan Pappe’s “revisionist” 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and his other, similar books justify the Palestinian rejection of the creation and continuing existence of Israel.⁴⁹ Both authors are well known to Chinese academic researchers of the Middle East and have influenced Chinese views. A completely different issue is the reported negative Chinese reactions to some Israeli propaganda, which was considered exaggerated.

The Jews seek Global Power: According to all too familiar tropes, the Jews want to dominate the world – if they don’t dominate it already. This is the theme of the notorious 19th century antisemitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is cited by Lu Kewen and other Chinese internet antisemites. They project onto the Jews what they may wish for their own country, or what they know China too is accused of by the West: seeking world domination. This would be a classic case of projecting China’s own supposed sins onto the Jews and Judaism, as described in driver No. 4.

Blaming Jews for internal or external problems is one of the oldest and most frequent antisemitic reactions.

Overthrowing the West’s Global Order

A Project to Overthrow the West’s Global Order: Kevin Rudd’s (former Australian prime minister) 2024 book, On Xi Jinping, concludes from Xi’s own statements and policies that his true long-term aim is to overthrow the established global order and replace it with a new China-centered system supported by the “Global South.” If this is so, Muslim countries would form the largest single bloc in this new, imaginary order. As the Jewish people and Israel are an integral part of the West, their place in the “new” world order would be greatly reduced. In China’s “Global South” fantasies, the Jew/Israeli could become a fading symbol of the old, moribund order. If Rudd is right, maybe Chinese antisemitism aims at anticipating or even promoting this outcome. Today, China is the only credible initiator of an overthrow of the global order. The only other candidate, though not yet a credible one is radical Islam. The United States, the status-quo super-power, is sending mixed messages.

China is the only country with a credible plan for a radical change of the global order.

Philo- and Antisemitism, Two Sides of the same Coin⁵⁰

Philosemitism Reverting to Antisemitism: Antisemitism is a reversal of the earlier philosemitism of some Chinese readers and intellectuals. According to Dr. Mary Ainslie of the University of Nottingham, these are two sides of the same coin.⁵¹ They are not as contradictory as they would be in the West. The classical Chinese stereotypes of the Jews emphasized traditional Western values and achievements, which many Chinese admired. When China’s views of the West deteriorated and Israel was increasingly seen as a mere annex of the United States, philosemitism flipped into antisemitism. Some say it was a mistake to promote an excessively positive image of the Jews in China. The “two sides of the same coin” paradigm is very Chinese and has no contemporary parallels in the West (but it likely does have parallels in Japan and South Korea).

Antisemitism Reverting to Philosemitism: In the West, some portrayals of Jews are negative but can take a positive cast in China. The claim that Jews control all the banks was, in some cases, a popular compliment in China: “We envy you, please tell us how you did it.” In the 1920s, Shakespeare’s Shylock, the literary embodiment of an evil Jew, was translated and commended by Chinese nationalists who read The Merchant of Venice as praise for a proud Jew who took revenge for the violence Christians were inflicting on his people. It was a model the Chinese were invited to follow.⁵²

The “Two-Sides-of-the-same-Coin” paradigm is currently unique to China (and probably East Asia)

Antisemitism is a Meme⁵³, a Culturally Transmitted Pandemic⁵⁴. China joins a Global Movement.

Antisemitism, a meme or cultural pandemic, spreads like a viral pandemic: The term “meme” was coined by the geneticist Prof. Richard Dawkins. It is analogous to “gene”:⁵⁵ “Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission,” and also viral transmission. Antisemitism can be studied as a meme. What makes it comparable to a microbiological (bacterial or viral) pandemic infection is that in its acute form it appears unexpectedly, is transmittable and fast spreading. It returns again and again over centuries and across nations and cultures. It shows identical or similar external symptoms, and sometimes new ones appear and can be lethal. The current antisemitism meme seems universal and so far, irradicable. It was brought to the surface to reach its present strength by Israel’s wars, but its infectious agents existed before, some hidden and others openly visible. Memes are called “viral” because they are activated and spread like a virus, much faster than a gene, much more widely, and over longer periods. Memes replicate themselves by imitation, “leaping from brain to brain.” Memes are easily shareable and spread online (therefore sometimes called “internet memes”) mainly through social media platforms but also through public media. Before the modern information revolution, memes such as antisemitism spread more slowly, through written texts, official decrees, sermons, folk tales, rumors and hearsay, but could also spread very widely and last as long as they do today.

Google defines meme as “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture, and it often carries symbolic meaning.” This is how antisemitism can be described except that its spread is not limited to one culture but crosses through many – it is global. Among others, memes may take the form of ideas, jokes, images, videos, melodies.

Contemporary memes often start with a “meme generator,” that is, a free online “image maker” which permits anyone to add their own text or image. A catch phrase or unusual term can be a meme generator. Has the term “genocide,” as leveled against Israel, turned into a meme generator? Both the United States and China officially incriminate each other (and Israel in China’s counterattack) by using this term.

“Memes allow people to participate in cultural experience,” according to another definition found on the internet. Antisemitism is certainly a “cultural experience,” for the victims no less than the actors, and China participates in it together with the West and of course, the Muslim world. The rise of antisemitism developed in parallel in China and the West after the October 7 massacre, but in China it started more quickly and strongly than in the West. By now the West has pulled even, and the Muslim world was antisemitic long before.

Can the spreading of a meme be dissuaded, limited, delayed or stopped? The question is important with respect to antisemitism. Spreading is accelerated by individuals who act as points of connection or “nodes.” If such individuals can be identified and stopped, a meme can sometimes be reduced or extinguished. The policy implications of calling antisemitism a meme need to be further discussed. Giving it a label that recalls an infectious illness could be helpful. An end to the current Gaza war would certainly weaken and slow down the spread of this meme but will not stop it in the short term or make it disappear. Its roots are too deep, and it has spread too widely.

By becoming antisemitic, the Chinese joined the wider world, the South and the North.