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Love/Hate
Inside China’s Bizarre Obsession With Jews
How ‘Jewish’ became Chinese shorthand for success
On a muggy summer day, I happened upon two twentysomething Chinese men bickering over the best angle for a selfie in front of the memorial wall at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. After they declined my offer to help with the photo, I asked why they had come to the museum. They said they were aspiring entrepreneurs, and they had come to learn how to be like the Jews.
“Jews are rich and good at business,” one said.
“And very clever,” the other added.
I told them I was Jewish.
“Jews are great!” said the first. “But you don’t look Jewish.”
“What do Jews look like?” I asked.
“They wear suits and hats and have big beards.”
I pulled up a picture of a Hasidic Jew on my phone.
“Yes, like that,” one said.
As it turns out, Jews have become something of an obsession over the past two decades in China. Stores carry how-to books teaching the business secrets of the Talmud, classes in Shanghai claim to provide a Jewish education, and chatty taxi drivers make the money gesture when they find out their fare is Jewish. In 2014, Chinese recycling tycoon Chen Guangbiao made headlines by publicly announcing his ambitions to buy the New York Times. In a TV interview, Chen claimed he would make an ideal newspaper magnate, saying, “I am very good at working with Jews.”
For Jews in China, the adulation is both lucrative and unsettling. A number of Israeli immigrants have built businesses off selling “Jewishness” to a society keenly interested in wealth and business success. But a token status is always precarious, and members of the Jewish community feel that tension too.
“I know the Chinese think they love Jews,” says James Ross, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and editor of The Image of Jews in Contemporary China. “But a lot of the things they say are misleading stereotypes.”
Though China is home to a small native Jewish population, for most Chinese, Jews are an oddity. The modern Chinese term for “Jew,” youtai, was…
