Mick Hartley

There are plenty of reasons to criticise China, but at least antisemitism isn't a problem there. Right? Well, not so fast. Chinese media are encouraged to emphasise the history of the country as being one long struggle against the evils of western imperialism and foreign meddling, most notably in the humiliating Opium Wars. And wherever you get foreign meddling and clandestine groups planning nasty stuff, combined with toxic nationalism, you find good old antisemitic tropes fitting the bill very nicely. And if it crops up in the heavily regulated world of Chinese media, it can only be because it's tolerated, if not encouraged, by the Communist Party.

Tuvia Gering in Tablet – Antisemitism With Chinese Characteristics:

Consider the case of Lu Kewen.

The 39-year-old Lu is the owner and founder of Lu Kewen Studio, a Beijing-based “self-media” online news channel that produces videos and original commentary on a wide range of military, historical, political, and economic issues. Since its establishment only three years ago, Lu’s enterprise has reportedly amassed a following of 15 million subscribers across several mainland social media platforms; in September 2021, Lu was appointed as the spokesperson for Chinese automaker behemoth BYD, which likened him to the revolutionary literary hero Lu Xun. The meteoric rise of Lu, an ex-assembly line worker turned media sensation, has sparked envy, admiration, and derision among some Chinese academics and journalists: One typical critic attributes his success not only to his colloquial and user-friendly content, but his willingness “to completely disregard the facts and sensationalize reports for the sake of traffic.”

On May 29, 2021, about a week after the Gaza ceasefire went into effect, Lu posted an 8,000-character screed in five parts titled “What Should We Make of the Jews?” The manifesto is not an original work; it combines antisemitic tropes from medieval Europe with more recent libels from the Middle East in a way that would strike most Western readers as almost pitifully familiar. Entire sections of the work, in fact, appear to be plagiarized or directly translated into Chinese from the darkest corners of the English-language internet. In certain parts, Lu adds his own musings to the mix; in others, he just quotes at length from Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Long after last year’s Gaza conflict had subsided, Lu continued to publish articles arguing that even if “beaten to death,” he “will never agree that Jews are a good partner to the Chinese people.”

But if Lu’s work is as hoary and derivative as any standard-issue Stormfront post, he has nevertheless been effective at making such hate speech more relatable to an otherwise unfamiliar Chinese audience.

According to Lu’s videos and commentary, Jews are manipulators, penny-pinchers, loan sharks, and drug dealers. More than an ethnic group bound by blood and history, they operate like a private club, an elitist cabal whose members are linked by a web of common interests, “especially the American Jews.” It is through these social connections that Jews have infiltrated key global positions and “took control of the three cornerstones of American society, namely finance, media, and culture.” The Jewish penetration of American power is so far advanced that the Bush, Obama, and Biden families and administrations have all fallen prey to Jewish influence. Because Jews control the anti-China U.S. media and hold key positions in Biden’s anti-China cabinet, they are the “ideological voice” of the United States, the spearhead of the West’s accelerating crusade against the Chinese government and people.

One of the conspiracies outlined by Lu (itself a product of foreign neo-Nazi forums from the late 1990s, around the time of the handover of Hong Kong) accuses Jews of being “the world’s most powerful drug barons” and therefore of being responsible for the eruption of the mid-19th-century Opium Wars, which to this day represent the nadir of contemporary Chinese history. Impressed on every Chinese boy and girl from a young age, the official historical narrative of the Opium Wars is of an Imperial China that was utterly humiliated by foreign, Western powers and forced to sign unequal treaties that violated its sovereignty and left its people drugged, backward, and exploited. And in Lu Kewen’s fantasy, the Jews are to blame for everything.

A charming illustration added to Lu's article. ‘The short ones with the big nose are Jewish".

Nor, as Gering goes on to show, is Lu Kewen the only one peddling antisemitism now in China….