The Drivers: Shared with Others or Unique to China?

Most of the specific, identified explanations for Chinese antisemitism, eight out of twelve, would be valid for other countries as well. Only four are unique to China. In other words, if Western human rights laws and the defense of the established global order have not linked China to the West, antisemitism finally has.

Antagonism to the United States enmeshed with hostility to Israel and the Jews can be found in many countries (1), and the same is true for many countries’ policies to have good relations with the Muslim world, if necessary, at Israel’s expense (2). Choosing the Jews as scapegoats for internal and external problems (4, 5, 6, 7) and accusing them of controlling the world (8) are the most classical motives of global antisemitism. And calling antisemitism a meme, a spreading cultural pandemic, means that the Chinese version of anti-Jewish hostility is part of a vast universal movement (12). It is more comfortable to swim with, rather than against a global stream.

There are fewer, namely four possible explanations for antisemitism that are typical for China only. Bonding with Russia and Iran to form a unique triple quasi-axis could persuade China to assimilate to its allies’ traditional antisemitism (3). In China, philosemitism can turn into antisemitism (10) and antisemitism into the opposite (11) because neither antisemitism nor philosemitism have a deep historic basis there. This facilitates a reversal of both trends. And last but not least, only China could realistically try to achieve an overthrow of the Western global order (9). This would dramatically reduce Israel’s and the Jewish people’s international position.

As said, a lot of China’s antisemitism and hostility to Israel is imported from abroad, turned into a weapon for the power struggle with the West and exported back. Israel’s long wars in the Middle East encouraged China’s search for transnational solidarity against the West.⁵⁶ As the West is becoming themselves more hostile to Israel and Jews, there is currently (2025) no great difference between Western – American, European, Australian – and Chinese antisemitism. The real, critical difference is that Western governments recognize antisemitism as a serious problem which they promise to fight. This is not the case in China which denies that it exists at all and ignores that the borderline between hostility to Israel and hostility to Jews is increasingly blurred.