How do the Chinese view Israelis

A report from Sihan Cao

You need to split Jews and Israelis.

For Jews, we have a sort of inexplicable admiration. As a Shanghai native,I think the sentiment now becomes part of urban legacy of my hometown, passed from the senior generation to the younger. The history of Shanghai does attribute largely to Mizrahi businessmen by the turn of 20th century. The most famous building of the Bund, the Cathay Hotel (it is currently named as Peace Hotel) was developed by the legendary Sasson family. Other Jewish tycoons like Kadoorie family and Silas Aaron Hardoon were also revered by the elder locals. Another chapter of the Shanghai-Jew love affair was the Shanghai ghetto story. To put a happy ending of a miserable history, Chinese TV shows never tired of playing clips of aged Jews with American accent returned to Hongkou(虹口) to see their former hosts, and expressed their wholehearted gratitude, etc.Beautiful story, very touching but also exaggerated.

My generation of urban Chinese grew up with the myth of Jews: most intelligent people on earth; born merchant genius; adaptable wherever they are, and most importantly, at least we believe Jews see us as friends (why it was Henry Kissinger assigned to meet our beloved premier Zhou Englai ? ). There was even a popular teaching program titled as “how to make your kids as clever as Jews” (or under similarly hilarious name) back to 1990 s. Middle-aged parochially patriotic Chinese (usually born in the Mao era) would tell you “We Chinese are the cleverest in the world, only Jews could match us.” Cleverness is something really cherished by we Chinese,and certainly we never underestimate Jew’s cleverness. So, you know how we see Jews now.

While for Israelis, it was another story. Xinwen Lianbo （a daily news program ran by official mouthpiece) used to reserve the last ten minutes (its whole duration was 30 minutes)for the endless Israel-Palestinian conflict. I clearly remembered that when the 2000 Intifada broke out, me and my cousin, eight year old then, followed the entire struggle via Xinwen Lianbo during our summer vocation (we had to, because there was a cartoon series following Xinwen Lianbo). The likes of Hamas, Fatah, PLO, Likud, Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak were among the very first foreign terms instilled into our memory. And interestingly, the office mouthpiece never tired of introducing the connotation of ‘Hamas” in full length every time, “Today, the Islamist Resistance Movement, Hamas, launched missiles towards …” So, we were propagated to sympathize the Palestinians like our great mentor Chairman Mao did in 1950–60s. Israelis had to play the villain role in this narrative. Nonetheless, more and more educated young Chinese began to realize that Israel possessing advanced technologies in various areas and runs an respectable education system under its disposal. Recently,more and more Israeli enterprises come to China and I am sure the image of Israel would be whitewashed very soon among next generation of Chinese elites. At end of the day, we are very pragmatic people, we don’t give a damn about the Zionism or Al Nakba. People in Far East all have a strong Worship of Winner mentality. And Israelis certainly fulfill the Chinese imagination of winner in many ways.

Sorry for my verbiage.