Chinese in the diaspora are known as the Jews of Asia.
I had a Chinese computer tech ask me how Jews are so rich when they take so much time off for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays.
During my first trip to China in the summer of 1985, I visited English Corner in People’s Park in Shanghai one Sunday afternoon. It’s one of the places where young Chinese people used to practice their English with visiting foreigners. Officials from the university where I was teaching in Shanghai escorted me there, and a big crowd quickly gathered to talk with me—a tall, curly-haired foreigner—and pushed closer to shower me with questions.
Some of the questions seemed strange to me (“Do all Americans have AIDS?”) but most were routine, such as, “Where are you from? How do you like China? Are you married? Do you like Chinese girls?” After two months in China, none of this was surprising to me except for one additional question: “What is your religion?”
I was taken aback at first—it’s not a question I often hear when I travel abroad—but after a brief pause I answered, “I am Jewish.” The young questioner gave me a thumbs up and said, “Jews are the best.”
I got a similar question—and similar response—everywhere I traveled in China later that summer: Kunming, Chengdu, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Guangzhou. My unscientific survey suggested that the Chinese liked and admired Jews, although they didn’t seem to know much about them. I knew that there had been Jewish communities in Shanghai and other Chinese cities until shortly after WWII but that there was little evidence of their presence after the Communist takeover in 1949. There were a handful of Jewish tourists and visiting faculty at the time of my first visit. But I was curious about how average Chinese people had developed an image, seemingly a positive one, of Jews.
I visited China several times after that summer, but it wasn’t until 2008, when I was selected as a Fulbright lecturer at Nanjing University, that I had a chance to explore the popular Chinese image of Jews. By then, there were many Jewish visitors and business people from the United States and Israel. And economic reforms were transforming the country. Making and spending money seemed at least as important as Communist ideology.
When I first arrived to teach in Nanjing in the fall of 2008, I was joined by Yan Li, a history graduate student from my home university who had been staying with her family in Beijing. Yan and I visited bookstores throughout the city. We started at a small bookstore that featured books about evangelical Christianity. Yan asked the young woman who worked there if they had books about Jews, but the clerk had trouble answering the question. She didn’t know what Yan meant by “Jew.”
At larger bookstores, we found entire sections devoted to books about Jews. Most of the books focused on finance, such as 16 Reasons for Jews Getting Wealthy by Chu Ke; The Secret of Talmud: The Jewish Code of Wealth by Jiao Yiyang; and Secret of Jewish Success: Ten Commandments of Jewish Success by Li Huizhen. Yan helped me translate the books and we found they were filled with misunderstandings and stereotypes. And books purporting to be based on the Talmud were mostly pithy sayings about wealth with little or no connection to actual Talmudic passages.
Some of the misunderstandings are almost comical. One of the best-selling books is What’s Behind Jewish Success by Tian Zaiwei and Sha Wen. “It is said that Jews are distinguished by their noses,” the authors write. “All Jews have hooknoses. This is not accurate. Despite hook-nosed Jews in cartoons, only Jews in Russia and the Near East have hooknoses in real life.” They also write that “to save time, Jews never beat about the bush in negotiations as Chinese often do.” Jews control the diamond market, the authors also write, since diamonds are “valuable and easy to carry which is ideal for Jews who are always drifting.”
The most prominent author and editor of Chinese books about Jews is He Xiongfei, who identifies himself as a literary critic, orator, Jewish studies expert, and visiting professor at Nankai University. He is director of Xiongfei Limited in Hainan and has edited a number of book series on intellectual, literary, and cultural studies. His most popular series is titled “Revelations on the Jews Superior Intelligence,” launched in 1995. His books include Jewish Wisdom of Family Education: The Cultural Code of the Most Intelligent and Wealthy Nation in the World (2005); Secrets of Jewish Success: The Golden Rule of a Miraculous Nation (2004); and Uncovering the Enigma of Jewish Success in the World (2002). He also has edited Collection of Jewish Strategies (1995); Jewish Life of Money (2002); Jewish Magnates of Ideas (1995); Legend of World Famous Jewish Celebrities (1996): Riddle of Jews (1997); and Jewish Bigwigs’ Skills of Making Money (1996). His most recent publications are cartoon books for children about Jewish wisdom and the Talmud.
In the best-seller The Spirit of Jewish Culture (the English title on the cover is Whats [sic] Behind Jewish Cleverness) by Sai Ni Ya, one of He Xiongfei’s pseudonyms, he writes that Jews “are the most intelligent, mysterious, and the wealthiest people in the world. In a sense, not knowing about Jews equals not knowing the world! When Jews sneeze at home, all the banks in the world would catch a cold one by one. Five Jews together can control the gold market of the humankind; the antagonism between the East and the West, in a sense, can be said to be that between two Jews—Jesus and Marx.”
