‘The Jews’ in Chinese Cultural Debate, 1915–30

Abstract

Representations of ‘the Jews’ in modern China are complex: while they seem to correspond to images of ‘the Jews’ in Europe, it would be superficial to reduce them purely to ‘Western influence’. In China, representations of ‘the Jews’ have been endowed with indigenous meaning by modernising élites. By constructing ‘the Jews’ as a homogenous group, or ‘the Jew’ as a constitutive outsider, who embodies all the negative as well as positive qualities that were feared or desired by various social groups in China, the Chinese, as a homogenous ‘in-group’, were able to project their own anxieties onto the figure of the outsider. In this respect, representing ‘the Jews’ corresponds to a widespread fear of, as well as need for an ‘other’, which can be found in many cultures and societies. However, my interest here does not lie in determining the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it focuses on the implications associated with ‘the Jew’ as an ‘other’, which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the ‘self amongst various social groups in modern China.’