Unlike Christian or Muslim societies, China doesn’t have a centuries-old tradition of hostility to Jews deeply intertwined with ancient religious anxieties. But that hasn’t stopped European-style anti-Semitism, often framed in Communist terms, from taking hold in the People’s Republic. A baroque conspiracy theory involving a never-executed World War II-era Japanese scheme called the Fugu Plan—itself inspired by the Japanese elite’s own anti-Semitic obsessions—has of late achieved viral popularity. Jordyn Haime and Tuvia Gering write:
At the time of writing, the Fugu Plan is featured in the top search result for the word “Jew” on Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese equivalent of TikTok. The video is the first in a three-part series about the historical “mistakes” of the Jews. In less than eight minutes, the video’s narrator blames the Holocaust on Jewish greed, accuses Jews of starting China’s “century of humiliation” by financing the Opium Wars, and describes their cunning Fugu Plan with the Japanese.
A distinct brand of localized anti-Semitic conspiracies is thriving on Chinese media platforms. A quick search for “Jews” on WeChat, Douyin, BiliBili, Weibo, or Zhihu, reveals that negative, anti-Jewish content and conspiracies take up significant real estate among the top results. [But] anti-Semitism is not just a social media phenomenon. Despite Beijing’s tight control of the information space, it can also be found among leading academics, party-state journalists, and military strategists.
The enduring legacy of ultra-leftist “enemy studies” abounds in the works of the Beihang University military strategist Zhang Wenmu. In a series of articles for a peer-reviewed socialist journal under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Zhang describes COVID-19 as a usurious American-Jewish bioweapon aimed at China and humanity as a whole. In keeping with the teachings of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx, Zhang says that “what Jews require most is an environment conducive to borrowing, which includes things like financial crises, pandemics, disasters, and, preferably, war.”
Read more on China Media Project: https://chinamediaproject.org/2023/07/18/jewish-conspiracy-theories-find-an-audience-in-china/