Adopted Hatred: Antisemitism in China’s Long 20th Century

In 1934, Chinese literary giant Lu Xun wrote: “Although I am not a Jew, I always like to discuss profits and losses.” In a 1973 discussion with Kissinger on Israel, Mao emphasised that Jews “are not a monolithic group; Marx collaborated with Engels and not the capitalists.” In 2023, amidst renewed conflicts in the Middle East, anti-Semitic comments flooded the Chinese internet. With acute ramifications today, my presentation examines how expressions of and objections to anti-Semitism, a discourse rooted in the West, were transferred and adopted in the long 20th century in China, where Jews barely constituted a fraction of the vast population. It asks: Who were the actors responsible for introducing and disseminating this imported hatred, and what were their motivations? How did late Republican Era (1930s) politics mobilise or combat anti-Semitism as it permeated the nation’s intellectual sphere? How did anti-Semitism evolve with China’s stance on Israel and Palestine as Mao’s revolution (1949) and Deng’s reforms (1978) upended China’s state ideology and global alliances? Finally, how did anti-Semitism interact with anti-imperialism and xenophobia, and what impact did this have on Jews in China?

This cultural and intellectual history compares Chinese anti-Semitism’s various iterations, revealing the changing landscape of knowledge transfer between China and the West, engendered by racial and political ideologies, geopolitics and information technologies. While Republican-era intellectuals’ privileging of Western knowledge made them particularly receptive to anti-Semitism, Maoist anti-racist and anti-imperialist agendas guided his government’s support for Palestinian liberation, steering it away from anti-Semitic dogmas. Building on Irene Eber’s foundational work, I will study anti-Semitism’s effect on Chinese Jewry’s daily life, exploring how Baghdadi and Ashkenazi Jewish communities variably navigated local hostilities and their racialised sociopolitical positions in semi-colonial and post-colonial China.

Foregrounding Chinese perspectives, this presentation counters claims that China was historically free from anti-Semitism (Hochstadt and Pan). Chinese intellectuals creatively interpreted global events and adopted international discourses to reflect national anxieties, advocate for local agendas, and situate their nation on the world stage (Karl). As a global phenomenon transcending the Western and Islamic worlds, even in societies with a minimal Jewish presence, anti-Semitism operated as a “theoretical framework for making sense of the world” (Nirenberg). These dynamics allowed Chinese writers to adapt various anti-Semitic imageries, casting Jews as cunning foreigners to promote the consumption of domestic goods and as nationless wanderers to guard against national demise during the Japanese invasion.

Visually, by showcasing imageries and quotations, the poster will compare different iterations of Chinese anti-Semitism in the country’s various historically contexts of the New Culture Movement, the Second Sino-Japanese War, Maoist diplomacy, and the post-Mao economic boom. It demonstrates the discourse’s negotiated relationship with Chinese modernity, nationalism, communism, and developmentalism. Furthermore, it employs Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping that locates Jewish residencies in Shanghai and Harbin, offering fresh analyses of how different Jewish communities interacted with the foreign colonial establishments and the local Chinese population. This will shed light on the ways Jews perceived their racialised sociopolitical positions in semi-colonial and post-colonial China.