This article examines the tension between antisemitic discourses in Republican-era China (1912–1949) and the memories of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution to Shanghai between 1938 and 1941. While contemporary Chinese and international scholarship often asserts the absence of antisemitism in China, analysis of press articles, missionary writings, and translations of Western sources reveals that antisemitic stereotypes entered Chinese public discourse via Christian missionaries, foreign-educated intellectuals, and German and Japanese propaganda. These tropes served domestic political and geopolitical agendas—from nationalist mobilization to anti-communist and pro-Japanese collaborationist strategies—and largely manifested in print rather than in systematic violence. In postwar Shanghai, Jewish refugees were increasingly portrayed as agents of American influence in anti-imperialist debates, with local conflicts, such as housing disputes, reinforcing these narratives. Nevertheless, most refugee memoirs omit references to antisemitism, depicting China as tolerant—a perception shaped by language barriers, the focus on survival, and a deliberate emphasis on gratitude and political correctness. The article calls for a critical reassessment of these memory traditions and demonstrates how selective perception and global knowledge circulation shape the current image of Sino-Jewish relations.
Liu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.