Thirty-nine-year-old Lu Kewen is the owner and founder of a Beijing-based “self-media” online news channel, which produces videos and commentary on a wide range of political, historical, economic, and military issues. Since its establishment three years ago, the enterprise has reportedly amassed 15 million subscribers across several social-media platforms. As Tuvia Gering notes in detail, much of Kewen’s content is blatantly anti-Semitic:
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 anti-Semitic 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 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.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/antisemitism-with-chinese-characteristics