The Jews and the Chinese
On their diverging path and fortune
My Chinese History lecturer said, “Only two types of people study Chinese history: The Jews and the mad”. He is Irish and I’m Chinese, so the implication is clear: We’re both crazy to learn the history of China.
Ideally, Chinese history is no more complicated than European or Middle Eastern histories. Ideally, learning, and mastering Mandarin Chinese isn’t harder than learning and mastering Persian, Russian, or Latin. But there is something about Chinese history that is off-putting most people. Sure, a Chinese man especially in Asia might describe himself as a nerd of the Three Kingdoms or the Water Margin saga, but he will not study them academically, and I have seen Chinese men having the difficulty of separating the history and the fiction.
In any case, studying Chinese history in the 21st century is a sad pursuit, especially if you compare it to European history classes. The lone, silent classes in the late afternoon. The smell of mould and the sight of dust on the bookshelf. The lack of tutors and energetic students. And yes, I was the only Asian, the only Chinese student in my class.
After all, what’s to like about Chinese history? There are no inspiring protagonists, just vicious and opportunistic villains who prevail. Too many decent people were sidelined too early. Many Chinese are proud of the achievements of the People’s Republic of China in the last 30 years, but they cannot cope with the dark history of China in the 20th century, from the failures of the Republic of China to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
So, what attracted the Jews to Chinese history? They were studious, they might have been good with languages, and both people have been compared for their similarities as leading scholars and international entrepreneurs. Any student of Southeast Asian Studies would learn about the role of Chinese traders and tycoons in Southeast Asian economies, including King Vajiravudh’s 1914 article calling the Chinese “Jews of the Orient”.
China unthinkably became a communist state in the 1950s and Mao Zedong offered a different kind of communism. The more Western socialists and social scientists didn’t know about China, the more they were intrigued. How could you transform a nation of rice farmers into communists? How would the lives of women transform, with Mao saying, “Women hold up half the sky,”? Is it possible to see two kinds of China, communist in the mainland and capitalist in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia?
Socialists, including Jewish Americans, studied China in the 1960s, and Mao, along with Ho Chi Minh, became a hero for American and European students. They were not Europeans, they were not square, and they were associated with eastern spiritualities beloved by left-wing Jewish Americans like Allen Ginsberg – Tao Te Ching, Buddhism, and Bhagavad Gita. Whether they knew about the Cultural Revolution or not, the point was China and North Vietnam offered an alternative vision to the boring American life.
It took a Jewish American to ruin this socialist fantasy, and he is very comfortable with China. Henry Kissinger enjoyed his time negotiating with Zhou Enlai before the surprise visit of anti-communist Richard Nixon to Beijing. While Republicans had no problem re-electing Nixon and consequently giving more power to Kissinger, the American left silently shelved their admiration of Mao and the People’s Republic of China.
Kissinger, consequently, heightened Jewish American interest in China. China wasn’t the closed place it used to be, and Singapore, a majority Chinese republic in the south, learned from Israel to build a prosperous and strong state in a hostile neighbourhood. Open immigration and trans-Pacific flights led to the migration of Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Macanese, mainland Chinese, and Southeast Asian Chinese to North America.
By the 1990s, the Chinese and the Jews had learned about each other’s cultures. Jewish Americans reputedly feast in Chinese restaurants on Christmas because it’s the only place open. Global Chinese learned about Jewish American cultures from sitcoms like The Nanny and Seinfeld, and the Holocaust from films like Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, and Life is Beautiful. My teenage celebrity crushes were Winona Ryder and Natalie Portman, and I was astonished to learn their birth surnames, respectively Horowitz and Hershlag.
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I hoped studying the Holocaust would help me understand the anti-Chinese May 98 riots in Indonesia. Why all the hate? Why the mass rapes, beyond looting and murder? How did economic breakdown lead to racial hate? And finally, how did the local intellectual ignore it, if not tolerating it?
Seno Gumira Ajidarma wrote extensively about May 98 in his essays and short stories, and Amy Chua linked both Sinophobia in Southeast Asia and anti-Semitism in the United States to hatred for the market-dominant minority in World on Fire. But generally, May 98 was a taboo topic even for Chinese Indonesians.
I studied the Holocaust with Robert Manne in two subjects, first as a part of 20th Century Politics, and then the specific Honour subject. Obviously not cheery topics, as the Jews spent the 20th century (and again, since October 2023) meditating on the origins of evil, the escalation of evil, and the banality of evil.
In other words, how could the ladies and gentlemen of Vienna, Hamburg, and Berlin participate in Nazism, from Kristallnacht to Auschwitz? What was the point of the concentration camp when Germany knew it was losing the war? And after the wars, how did the survivors deal with the loss, nightmares, and survivor’s guilt, as Primo Levi did? How did their children deal with the knowledge and their parents’ memories, as described in Maus?
Obviously, the Holocaust was a process that escalated for over ten years and killed six million, while the May 98 riots happened over two days and killed about a thousand. Again, by studying the Holocaust, I wanted to understand the nature and extent of Sinophobia in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
In Iblis Tidak Pernah Mati (The Devil Never Dies), Seno Gumira Ajidarma imagined that in 2033 Indonesian children will learn about May 98 in history class, including the mass rapes and murders. He knew it was just a fantasy and it’s always a fantasy. Instead, now “1998” invokes the memory of shot students, abducted activists, and missing looters, not Chinese Indonesian women and girls.
Western academics who studied the event, like Karen Strassler and Jemma Purdey, suggest that Indonesia may prefer to remember 1998 as a masculine struggle for democracy, hence its martyrs must be masculine too, instead of being othered women.
And that omission brings me to 7 October. Again, I can understand when Muslim media omit the mass rapes and murders of Israeli women. I cannot understand when Western media do the same. What has happened to feminism? What has happened to the “fear of anti-Semitism” still spoken by Western commentators on 6 October?
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Until 6 October, Jewish and Chinese Americans seemed to be on the same page. Both were targeted by criminals and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) bureaucrats. Both were deemed white-adjacent. Both were disliked by fringe Republicans and Democrats. But it’s no longer the case.
Many Jews say they can expect hatred from the local Muslim population. But they didn’t expect hatred and indifference from the rest. So far, I can classify three kinds of Chinese people who are fine with 7 October.
First, we have the Chinese bots, in line with Beijing. Before October, Israel still saw China as a client and alternate partner in military, technology, and trade, but China has been very pro-Palestine since 7 October. It’s likely that China sees Israel as an American client state and values better relations with Iran, another antagonist of the United States and Israel. Some Chinese have also identified Jews as an obstacle to China’s rise to greatness. During the Great Recession, I’ve heard Singaporeans complain that if not for the Jews, America would have collapsed, and China would have ruled the global economy. I imagine they were not that happy that more Jews migrated to Singapore in the 2010s.
The second is North American academics who have defended 7 October as “decolonization”, and since then demanding the university to support their agenda. Asian American students, who might include Chinese Americans, are also curiously active in ripping the posters of kidnapped children posted in American cities.
One may laugh at the contradiction of Chinese women and non-binary people supporting Islamists like Hamas, but they truly believe that Islamists are liberators and Zionism is white supremacy, putting American rhetoric into Middle Eastern politics. That how did they get their post and that’s how they plan to keep it.
The third is the youth who network online. Like the second group, over the last ten years, they have exchanged radical postmodern ideas, mixing pop culture with identity politics, making memes out of grievance against white people, and mixing fandom with digital activism. Naturally, they omitted racism against Chinese Americans if it wasn’t done by white Americans, and here they support Free Palestine (which no longer means a sovereign Palestine next to Israel) because it’s a part of progressive politics. Anti-Israel, if not anti-Jew, information spread through TikTok and Instagram infographics has worked wonders this October, honed by years of experiences and evaluation.
In short, suddenly Jews around the world are reminded of how they are hated by different kinds of people, and it takes a mass rape and murder of Jews to explode this anti-Semitism. On the other hand, while Sinophobia is not accepted anymore in Southeast Asia and the West, since 7 October Chinese American academics and youth have seized the opportunity to attack Jews to prove their political credibility, and probably to settle old grudges through a political means. The Jews might always like the Chinese, but the feeling is not mutual.