Antisemitic Comments Increase Across Chinese Social Media
Acrimony seems to grow as Beijing strengthens pro-Palestinian stance during Israel-Hamas war, shifting China’s historic goodwill toward Jews
By Liyan Qi
Wall Street Journal
Updated Oct. 29, 2023 2:12 pm ET
The Israeli Embassy in Beijing this month. China has sought a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. PHOTO: WU HAO/SHUTTERSTOCK
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As war erupts between Israel and Hamas, a wave of antisemitic comments is sweeping through China’s social media.
In recent days, searches and mentions involving the phrase “anti-Jew” skyrocketed on the Chinese app
WeChat. On news stories about the Middle East turmoil, some comments have ranged from outright threats against Jews to negativity directed at anyone defending Israeli actions in the conflict. Influencers on Chinese social media who identify as Jewish have found themselves trolled by online mobs.
The acrimony has reached as far as “Schindler’s List,” the 1993 movie about a German industrialist who tries to save his Jewish employees from the Holocaust. In recent days, the film was hit with a flood of bad reviews on video-streaming site Bilibili and movie-review platform Douban. Some reviewers said they had changed their mind about the movie since the recent violence had occurred. “I used to like the movie, but now it looks more like a story about the farmer who saved the snake,” one Bilibili commenter said.
The rising anti-Jewish sentiment on social media dovetails with Beijing’s more pronounced support for the Palestinian cause since the war began and its distancing of itself from Israel, a U.S. ally.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in blue tie, spoke with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres last week before a Security Council meeting on the conflict. PHOTO: EDUARDO MUNOZ/SHUTTERSTOCK
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China, which has sought to portray itself as a neutral party and peacemaker in global hot spots, has called for a cease-fire in the Mideast conflict. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, who has been engaged in a flurry of diplomacy since the war broke out, urged his Israeli counterpart in a call on Oct. 23 to “respect international humanitarian law and protect the safety of civilians.” In a separate call to the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, Wang expressed “deep sympathy over the difficult situation in Palestine, and especially with the people of Gaza.”
Beijing hasn’t condemned Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which stunned the world and started the recent round of violence.
Asked at a regular briefing on Friday about China’s position on Hamas, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, “The pressing priority now is to end the fighting as soon as possible, and all parties should abide by international humanitarian law and protect civilians.”
Since the Oct. 7 attack, China’s government-run media have focused on the Israeli response, sometimes with selective or incomplete information. State media reporting on a hospital explosion in Gaza have mentioned Palestinian claims that Israel was behind the attack but not intelligence and video footage suggesting the opposite: that the hospital was hit by a failed rocket meant for Israel.
As a result, many social-media attacks aimed at Jews and the Jewish state have been driven by footage of injured children and other horrors in the aftermath of the hospital blast. “Bombing a hospital and killing children is genocide. Forget all the movies and shows about Jews’ sufferings,” a user wrote in a comment on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, which received nearly 4,000 likes.
Partly what makes the wave of resentment notable is China’s history as an occasional haven for Jews. During World War II, thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe ended up in Shanghai as well as the northern city of Harbin. In the discussion of where to establish a Jewish state in the aftermath of the war, both were mentioned as possibilities. To this day, remnants of synagogues are reminders of the connections.
Until recently, Chinese government officials have touted China’s historic goodwill toward Jews. At a pop-up exhibit in New York in August highlighting how Shanghai became a wartime refuge for about 20,000 Jews, Huang Ping, China’s consul general in New York, said that Chinese and Jewish people have been getting along for a thousand years.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York in 2017 dubbed an exhibit about the Jewish presence in China as “China: a Land Without Antisemitism.”
Matt Trusch, a Jewish American fund manager focused on real-estate projects who lived in Shanghai for more than a decade, said he often encountered stereotypes about Jews in China, usually framed in positive terms, with admiration of Jews as being good at business, but said he has never seen this level of resentment.
Trusch has been posting videos in Mandarin on the video-sharing site Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to debunk some of the stereotypes. His top video about friendship between Chinese and Jewish people, posted last year, attracted more than eight million views, with emojis of hearts and hands clapping in the comment field.
More recently, his business partner in Shanghai, whose phone number is listed in the Douyin account profile, has been receiving hate messages and threatening phone calls.
Some social-media commenters urged the Chinese authorities to dismantle the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, established in 2007 to preserve artifacts of Jewish refugees in China during World War II. Others mentioned an unusual police presence outside the museum since the war began.
This month, state broadcaster China Central Television posted on its short-video account a clip from a 2020 program called “Uncovering the Israel Element of U.S. General Elections,” which included a remark by the host that “Jews, who represent 3% of the U.S. population, control 70% of its wealth.” A hashtag the state broadcaster created around that purported factoid was one of the top trending topics that day, getting nearly 100 million views on Weibo.
The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum preserves artifacts of Jews who fled persecution in Europe and sought refuge in China during World War II. PHOTO: WANG GANG/SIPA ASIA/ZUMA PRESS
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The signs of a shift in Chinese sentiment coincide with rising nationalism and anger at the West, especially the U.S. A review of English-language posts by Chinese official accounts on various platforms shows efforts by state media to paint the U.S. and its allies as warmongering forces behind conflict in the Middle East, said Jessica Brandt, a policy director at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
Many nationalist-leaning influencers have also fueled anti-Jewish sentiment. One influencer, with more than half a million followers on Douyin, said China shouldn’t shelter Jews displaced by crises in the future. The post received 170,000 likes.
Yaqiu Wang, a research director at Freedom House, a nonprofit group based in Washington that tracks the global state of democracy, said years of crackdown on civil society in China have successfully silenced many who acted as a balancing force in online debates.
“These haters are vocal but that doesn’t mean everyone is thinking like that in China,” Wang said. “People who think differently don’t voice their opinions anymore.”
Troves of comments online, including some supporting the Nazi persecution of Jews, prompted the German Embassy in China to say it would remove comments including hate speech on the embassy’s social-media account and permanently block commenters who glorified the Nazi period or compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “Germany unfortunately experienced the era of raging Nazism. We are deeply aware of what that means,” the embassy said in a Chinese-language statement on its account.
After the sudden flood of bad “Schindler’s List” reviews, many rushed to the movie’s defense, giving it five-star ratings and helping restore its ratings average. “We should be against the neo-Nazis, not the Jewish people,” one commenter said.
Write to Liyan Qi at Liyan.qi@wsj.com
Antisemitic Comments Increase Across Chinese Social Media - WSJ (archive.ph) |
