Asking what the world would have been like if modern Israel had been established in China instead of the Middle East seems about as useful as asking what if Israel had been set up in Uganda or on the moon. But a China-bounded Jewish homeland of sorts was in fact proposed.
A Foreign Policy article by Harry Saunders recalls that “Albert Einstein, a Brooklyn dentist, and pre-World War II Chinese leaders tried to create a Jewish homeland in Yunnan” (“What if Israel Had Been in China?” June 2, 2024).
A fate avoided
In light of communist China’s sustained brutal efforts to assimilate peoples and cultures within China—the Uyghurs and other Muslims, Tibetans, Falun Gong, and others—peoples that the Chinese Communist Party regards as living and thinking in ways too different from the one true Chinese way, it seems obvious that an Israel founded in China in pre-communist times would not have fared well as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries rolled on.
The people of Yunnan-Israel would have suffered as everybody suffered under Mao, and then, recovering, would have suffered again. And again. If allowed to function independently at the beginning, a Yunnan-Israel enclave would not have maintained its separateness and independence for very long. It would not have become a country.
The main person in China proposing a Jewish settlement in Yunnan was Sun Ke, “China’s top legislative official” and a member of the Supreme Council for National Defense. In 1939, in addition to thinking about how to fight the Japanese, he was thinking about how to provide a permanent settlement for the Jews, one way to enlist the sympathy and support of the West. China, he felt, was a better bet than the British idea of Palestine, which, Sun Ke noted, “has provoked vehement opposition from the Arabs there, and the violence has not yet died down.”
Sun Ke believed that a more suitable refuge could be found in his own country. Not in Shanghai, where 20,000 Jews had already fled, but in the Himalayan foothills of China’s hinterland. With Laos to the south and what was then called Burma to the west, Yunnan was a border province with an unusually temperate climate, staggering natural beauty, and enough uncultivated land to accommodate 100,000 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. What it lacked in scriptural significance, it made up for with its history free of antisemitic violence.
To Sun Ke and the unlikely coalition of Kuomintang (KMT) officials and American Jews who rallied behind his plan, Yunnan represented nothing less than the promised land of China.
The idea goes back further, to an American dentist and thinker named Maurice William. In 1934, wrote to Albert Einstein about it. Einstein told him that the plan was “hopeful and rational and its realization must be pursued energetically.” Later, he added that the Chinese and Jewish peoples, “in spite of any apparent differences in their traditions, have this in common: both possess a mentality that is the product of cultures that go back to antiquity.”
Wrong lesson
Saunders’s account of the Yunnan-Israel effort, how it was pressed and how it quickly came to nothing, make interesting reading. But the lesson for today that he draws from the failure to proceed with the experiment is dubious.
He believes that China’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, which he says seems “passive or incoherent or amateurish,” has something to do “how little experience Beijing has engaging with the political thicket that Zionism has always represented.” If only that Yunnan thing had worked out.
“Beijing’s statements have not labeled Hamas as a terrorist group,” he writes, “an omission that is sure to strain China’s once-blossoming trade relationship with Israel. Yet behind closed doors, Chinese diplomats keep trying to convince their Israeli counterparts that all this is just talk and should not be misconstrued as actual Chinese hostility toward Israel.”
So the Chinese government is just bumbling and misunderstood here?
Last year, Steven Mosher observed that
The bodies of its 1,400 Israeli and 30 American victims were not even cold before China’s state media began spewing out incendiary headlines claiming that Israel, with U.S. encouragement, was carrying out indiscriminate attacks on Gaza civilians—rather than the other way around.
China’s social media was filled with the vilest anti-Semitic comments from semi-official sources. The many atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists, including removing—and beheading—an unborn baby from the body of a dead Israeli mother, went unmentioned….
China’s propaganda onslaught has been so vicious that Jerusalem’s ambassador told Beijing earlier this week to stop supporting Hamas terrorism and stop acting with hostility towards the Jewish state….
Beyond mere hardware, China likely had a hand in the large-scale cyber attacks that reduced Israel’s response time to the incursion from Gaza….
China is following the same playbook in the Middle East that it did in Russia: Secretly encourage an attack on a U.S. ally or potential ally—and promise to aid the aggressor behind the scenes. Then, when the attack happens, loudly call for a negotiated settlement–without mentioning that it was your partner who committed the barbarous acts in the first place.
Case in point: As Israel continues to dismantle Hamas, Beijing now claims that it wants “to help cool down the escalating Palestine-Israel conflict” that it helped stoke. In fact, it is doing the opposite. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi spends his days criticizing Israel’s response to the worst terrorist attack in its history.
One reason the CCP lies so often and often so blatantly is that it can get away with it.
CCP propagandists succeed with all the people who exert double toil and trouble to put the best possible face on CCP conduct. Including cogitators who dredge up reams of irrelevant facts—facts that illuminate something or other, just not the matter at hand—to “contextualize” its viciousness. And who glide past all sorts of relevant facts indicating just how vicious and ruthless the Chinese Communist Party really is. People like Saunders.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis: “China Is Stoking a New Cold War With the West”
StopTheChinazis: “The China Gang, Iran Gang, Russia Gang, Hamas Gang, Houthi Gang…”
StopTheChinazis: “China Helps Arm Hamas and the West Helps Arm China”
