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Jewish Conspiracy Theories Find an Audience in China

(China Media Project) Jordyn Haime and Tuvia Gering - A May 19 article on the popular Chinese WeChat social media platform claimed that during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, "Japan's military industry, which was financed by Jewish capital, massacred tens of millions of Chinese civilians." While in 1939, Japanese experts had proposed to invite 50,000 German-Jewish refugees to the puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China, Jews were never seriously involved in the Fugu Plan, which never came to fruition, writes Meron Medzini, a professor of modern Japanese history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Fugu Plan is featured as the top search result for the word "Jew" on Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok. A three-part video series about the historical "mistakes" of the Jews 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 quick search for "Jews" on WeChat, BiliBili, Weibo, or Zhihu reveals that negative, anti-Jewish content and conspiracies take up significant real estate among the top results. Antisemitism can also be found among leading academics, party-state journalists, and military strategists. It begs the question of how a country with a negligible Jewish population and an even smaller indigenous Jewish community could form such strong opinions about people they had never met.
2023-07-20 00:00:00
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