The wave of antisemitic discourse across Chinese digital platforms after the Hamas attacks of October 7 shocked many observers worldwide. Yet the speed, scale, and narrative coherence of this antisemitic surge did not emerge out of nowhere. I call it “Antisemitism 3.0”: a form of antisemitism that developed without the religious or racial traditions seen in Europe and North America – and crucially in a society with only a tiny, largely invisible foreign Jewish presence.
In my earlier essay for The Diplomat, I described three phases in China’s public discourse on Jewish people and Israel since 1992. The third phase, beginning in the early 2010s and crystallizing in the 2020s, marked not merely a diplomatic divergence with Israel, but a structural shift in how “Jews” and “Israel” were narrated within China’s ideological and digital environments. The distance between tropes of “Jewish business wisdom” and “Jewish control of global finance” turned out to be one nudge away.
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