Is it possible that Xi believes the antisemitic nonsense that he and the CCP are foisting upon the Chinese people? If Xi does believe even to a certain extent that the Jews control the world, then he would see the Jews and, of course, Israel as standing in the way of achieving his own ambitions for China much as he views the US. Regardless of what Xi actually believes, he is not the first national leader to use antisemitism as a means to an end. Other leaders have found, however, that the end was not what they had envisioned.
That would be difficult because to be anti-semitic in any meaningful sense you have to at least understand the nature of, well, judaism in some manner, and for the vast majority of the Chinese it is an abstraction from old WWII documentaries that makes the passing mention - the focus is, understandably, focused on the Sino-Japanese part. Although there was one enough of a Jewish presence in Shanghai that people my grandmother's age - 93, btw - knows that "Jews exist", the war in Europe really is a sideshow when the Japanese committed literal atrocities in my home village to the extent that despite the village being named after my father's family there never was more than 10 people related to me who lived there, and my grandparents accounted for 2 of them.
The more educated would know that out of the very few non-ethnic-Chinese who managed to naturalize, those with Jewish backgrounds, if not necessarily actively practicing the religion to any degree, occupied most of the spots, namely Israel Epstein, Sidney Rittenberg, Ruth Weiss, etc. Of course, they were defined by their adherence to Maoist ideals, so their Jewishness was at most a sort of abstract background that's not particularly important compared to being true believers of party doctrine. That generation had passed and the public at large who did not study history at university that empassed the era would know very little about them if they even know of the names. I think the most telling aspect would be the lack of ethnic slurs for jews in a language where there are background-related slurs that are granular down to the next village over. This in spite of of 20k Jewish refugees ending up in Shanghai during WWII shows that beyond erasure - which was official policy when it comes to replacing loan words and places named after foreigners and really was never fully achieved in places where Mandarin was not the first language of anybody - wasn't even necessary. In contrast, slurs about Russians, Indians, Americans, the British, SE Asians generally, ethnic minorities are effectively normalized. My late grandfather who had an 8th grade education and achieved the status of heading all of light industries in Suzhou during the 80s and 90s mixed in the words casually, as his Mandarin was never fluent and he never preferred to use it unless necessary, which amongst family certainly was the case. Even if there were words to the effect, the topic of judaism simply never came up. I later did fieldwork in regards to the use of pidgin in Shanghai from 1860 to 1939 and once again, racism was rampant, although not really anti-semitism. Being so ethno-nationalist and atheist by default and by decree, the CCP would have a difficult time with identifiers that are not connected to ethnicity - which emcompasses race to a certain extent without the nuance and complexities in American racism - or politics. The closest context would be the broad anti-religiousness that is policy, but how does one even explain what a secular jew is in Chinese? The concept is nebulous to even the educated, never mind that most Chinese simply do not think about the west very much at all, since there's virtually no chance for most Chinese to even leave China, period.
Having a tabula rasa is convenient to project just about anything onto it, but the lack of context also negates that. Does Xi actually understand anti-semitism, considering that his reputation amongst the literati, including CCP members, is generally not a positive one, although not an opinion expressed in public or even beyond family. Chinese contains so many layers of subtext and relies so much on puns and other wordplay that communication that is literal - and official communication always is - is frequently taken with a lot less seriousness in a way that is hard to convey from a western perspective. The official line is parroted often but taken seriously only when it becomes an economic issue. Sometimes the private is is that only foreign governments take the CCP at face value. This was a joke that was made by a police chief and of course, CCP member, at his son's wedding, in America, where he grew up with me The way families describe relationships is confusing to many including me but he's a blood relative on my mother's side that would be of my mother's generation and slightly older. And he's only telling me that because he knows that I know and can appreciate the joke without being a threat to his position. Social climbing can be ruthless and the CCP uses purges as regime change. The country is no less corrupt, just a different set of people took over some of the spots. What the CCP managed to do, perhaps to its detriment, is to essentially make politics not something that people really care about. This both safeguards and undercuts the state. It means that you are unlikely to see another Tiananmen Square '89 any time soon, but also, it makes the sort of infrapolitical resistance by ignoring the law extremely common to the point where the government's demonstration of power is far more performative than in the west. The way the west seems to both treat China as a threat and at the same time, at last during the last administration, kept acting in ways that benefits China, was sufficiently confusing that the popular conspiracy theory that Trump is somehow working for China is still floated about. To those who pay attention, the confusion is a matter of priority, since historically Russia have not just used bellicose language but have committed ethnic cleansing and occupation, and with a nationalistic education centered on irredentism and grievance that requires a foil or at least a heel at all times, Xi's support for Russia isn't taken as a policy change that is permanent but more of a convenient and temporary change of focus. Russia is being seen as having put themselves in a place to take advantage of. The anti-semitism, which really can only be manifested in messaging since people simply don't know anyone who is jewish for the most part, is like the first 30 minutes of the nightly news, and Xi is lucky in that people regard him so lowly. A replication of the old imperialist power dynamic would actually make his position untenable. The ethno-nationalism that is the CCP's raison d'etre woul demand that. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Also, keep in mind that because politics is effectively something that ordinary people cannot participate in, public opinion essentially doesn't matter when it comes to politics. Even if somehow a large percentage of actual people - not just sockpuppets on social media - buy into the messaging, the best way to demonstrate what that means would be to point out that in spite of all of the very real and still sometimes raw anti-Japanese sentiment, the GFW's primary job right is to block porn made in Japan from websites hosted in places like the US (which is offshore to them).
OH, and in case you are wondering, yes, just about everyone in China wants to launder money out if they have any to launder out. China's not in a good place right now. When I got back and heard the rhetoric haven't changed, I can only assume that it's because the actual experts tend to be the type who would never work for the state under any circumstances. My friend gets recruitment calls from the CIA every year as he's a fluent Arabic speaker from Indiana with a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and his response is always "fuck you". ICE recruited at my law school every year and it's the only time I'd go to a recruitment event and entirely to troll them. Just as non-voting is also a political act, non-participation with an administration is also a form of protest. And there are so many reasons to not help any government with an explicit policy of escalation that is either incoherent and based in idiocy or based in a sort of nationalism that is self-defeating. And in this country, we can at least take the option of not taking a bullet for the country. Both major parties have idiotic, Eurocentric, and to a degree policies based on imaginary enemies and a failure to understand nuance. Aliens v. Predator. Whoever wins, we lose.
tl;dr: the Chinese government says a lot of things, some of it they know is nonsense, some of it they don't even quite understand enough to know that it's nonsense. China's platforms on the public side are an extension of the state messaging that is ignored and the people have no power. You're worrying about the wrong thing.
Is it possible that Xi believes the antisemitic nonsense that he and the CCP are foisting upon the Chinese people? If Xi does believe even to a certain extent that the Jews control the world, then he would see the Jews and, of course, Israel as standing in the way of achieving his own ambitions for China much as he views the US. Regardless of what Xi actually believes, he is not the first national leader to use antisemitism as a means to an end. Other leaders have found, however, that the end was not what they had envisioned.
That would be difficult because to be anti-semitic in any meaningful sense you have to at least understand the nature of, well, judaism in some manner, and for the vast majority of the Chinese it is an abstraction from old WWII documentaries that makes the passing mention - the focus is, understandably, focused on the Sino-Japanese part. Although there was one enough of a Jewish presence in Shanghai that people my grandmother's age - 93, btw - knows that "Jews exist", the war in Europe really is a sideshow when the Japanese committed literal atrocities in my home village to the extent that despite the village being named after my father's family there never was more than 10 people related to me who lived there, and my grandparents accounted for 2 of them.
The more educated would know that out of the very few non-ethnic-Chinese who managed to naturalize, those with Jewish backgrounds, if not necessarily actively practicing the religion to any degree, occupied most of the spots, namely Israel Epstein, Sidney Rittenberg, Ruth Weiss, etc. Of course, they were defined by their adherence to Maoist ideals, so their Jewishness was at most a sort of abstract background that's not particularly important compared to being true believers of party doctrine. That generation had passed and the public at large who did not study history at university that empassed the era would know very little about them if they even know of the names. I think the most telling aspect would be the lack of ethnic slurs for jews in a language where there are background-related slurs that are granular down to the next village over. This in spite of of 20k Jewish refugees ending up in Shanghai during WWII shows that beyond erasure - which was official policy when it comes to replacing loan words and places named after foreigners and really was never fully achieved in places where Mandarin was not the first language of anybody - wasn't even necessary. In contrast, slurs about Russians, Indians, Americans, the British, SE Asians generally, ethnic minorities are effectively normalized. My late grandfather who had an 8th grade education and achieved the status of heading all of light industries in Suzhou during the 80s and 90s mixed in the words casually, as his Mandarin was never fluent and he never preferred to use it unless necessary, which amongst family certainly was the case. Even if there were words to the effect, the topic of judaism simply never came up. I later did fieldwork in regards to the use of pidgin in Shanghai from 1860 to 1939 and once again, racism was rampant, although not really anti-semitism. Being so ethno-nationalist and atheist by default and by decree, the CCP would have a difficult time with identifiers that are not connected to ethnicity - which emcompasses race to a certain extent without the nuance and complexities in American racism - or politics. The closest context would be the broad anti-religiousness that is policy, but how does one even explain what a secular jew is in Chinese? The concept is nebulous to even the educated, never mind that most Chinese simply do not think about the west very much at all, since there's virtually no chance for most Chinese to even leave China, period.
Having a tabula rasa is convenient to project just about anything onto it, but the lack of context also negates that. Does Xi actually understand anti-semitism, considering that his reputation amongst the literati, including CCP members, is generally not a positive one, although not an opinion expressed in public or even beyond family. Chinese contains so many layers of subtext and relies so much on puns and other wordplay that communication that is literal - and official communication always is - is frequently taken with a lot less seriousness in a way that is hard to convey from a western perspective. The official line is parroted often but taken seriously only when it becomes an economic issue. Sometimes the private is is that only foreign governments take the CCP at face value. This was a joke that was made by a police chief and of course, CCP member, at his son's wedding, in America, where he grew up with me The way families describe relationships is confusing to many including me but he's a blood relative on my mother's side that would be of my mother's generation and slightly older. And he's only telling me that because he knows that I know and can appreciate the joke without being a threat to his position. Social climbing can be ruthless and the CCP uses purges as regime change. The country is no less corrupt, just a different set of people took over some of the spots. What the CCP managed to do, perhaps to its detriment, is to essentially make politics not something that people really care about. This both safeguards and undercuts the state. It means that you are unlikely to see another Tiananmen Square '89 any time soon, but also, it makes the sort of infrapolitical resistance by ignoring the law extremely common to the point where the government's demonstration of power is far more performative than in the west. The way the west seems to both treat China as a threat and at the same time, at last during the last administration, kept acting in ways that benefits China, was sufficiently confusing that the popular conspiracy theory that Trump is somehow working for China is still floated about. To those who pay attention, the confusion is a matter of priority, since historically Russia have not just used bellicose language but have committed ethnic cleansing and occupation, and with a nationalistic education centered on irredentism and grievance that requires a foil or at least a heel at all times, Xi's support for Russia isn't taken as a policy change that is permanent but more of a convenient and temporary change of focus. Russia is being seen as having put themselves in a place to take advantage of. The anti-semitism, which really can only be manifested in messaging since people simply don't know anyone who is jewish for the most part, is like the first 30 minutes of the nightly news, and Xi is lucky in that people regard him so lowly. A replication of the old imperialist power dynamic would actually make his position untenable. The ethno-nationalism that is the CCP's raison d'etre woul demand that. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Also, keep in mind that because politics is effectively something that ordinary people cannot participate in, public opinion essentially doesn't matter when it comes to politics. Even if somehow a large percentage of actual people - not just sockpuppets on social media - buy into the messaging, the best way to demonstrate what that means would be to point out that in spite of all of the very real and still sometimes raw anti-Japanese sentiment, the GFW's primary job right is to block porn made in Japan from websites hosted in places like the US (which is offshore to them).
OH, and in case you are wondering, yes, just about everyone in China wants to launder money out if they have any to launder out. China's not in a good place right now. When I got back and heard the rhetoric haven't changed, I can only assume that it's because the actual experts tend to be the type who would never work for the state under any circumstances. My friend gets recruitment calls from the CIA every year as he's a fluent Arabic speaker from Indiana with a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and his response is always "fuck you". ICE recruited at my law school every year and it's the only time I'd go to a recruitment event and entirely to troll them. Just as non-voting is also a political act, non-participation with an administration is also a form of protest. And there are so many reasons to not help any government with an explicit policy of escalation that is either incoherent and based in idiocy or based in a sort of nationalism that is self-defeating. And in this country, we can at least take the option of not taking a bullet for the country. Both major parties have idiotic, Eurocentric, and to a degree policies based on imaginary enemies and a failure to understand nuance. Aliens v. Predator. Whoever wins, we lose.
tl;dr: the Chinese government says a lot of things, some of it they know is nonsense, some of it they don't even quite understand enough to know that it's nonsense. China's platforms on the public side are an extension of the state messaging that is ignored and the people have no power. You're worrying about the wrong thing.
Hope Persuasion can look into the Chinese psyche. Has any national group ever been so willing to be dominated by it's state government? Russia maybe?