I came across a 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project report.
Nothing really surprizing except that if you scroll down to a table entitled “Views of Christians Jews and Muslims”, half the Chinese have an unfavourable view of Jews.
I can’t recall any significant historical or modern interaction between these two peoples. Can anyone explain this ?
Look at all the unfavorables for Chinese:
Jews - 49%
Muslims - 50%
Christians - 47%
The simple explanation to me is that they have a similarly unfavorable view of all religious groups. Nothing special about Jews.
Well, the actual numbers were:
Group…Favorable…Unfavorable
Christians…26%…47%
Jews…28%…49%
Muslims…20%…50%
which are really pretty close numbers. I would guess that there is simply an general xenophobic attitude toward “Western” systems of belief that may be slightly modified by contact, rumors, or old myths.
Going by your chart, it looks as though China has an unfavorable view of the three religions posted on the chart.
Christians: 26% favorable view, 47% unfavorable view.
Jews: 28% favorable view, 49% unfavorable view.
Muslims: 20% favorable view, 50% unfavorable view.
I would put a lot of it on the government and the low (not zero) tolerance of religion in society. But I am sure someone else can explain or analyze the numbers a little better. It just does not look like the Jews are on a different level than the other two groups.
Damn, I am slow.
Echoing what Tom said. Plus what we don’t see is the Chinese favorable/unfavorable impression of Taoism or Confucianism.
I have no idea why (if true) the Chinese should feel this way. I just want to point out, in answer to your comment about Jews not having m,uch interaction with the Chinese, that there is indeed a Chinese Jewish population. There’s a display about them in the Hall of Man in Asia section of the American Museum of Natural History. A very weird little sidelight in history that goes wildly against your expectations. These Chinese Jews look physically Chinese, so it’s very weird to think of them as Jewish. They seem like some long-lost 13th tribe or something.
Aside from that almost completely irrelevant fact, I have nothing.
Its just that there has been a lot of interaction between the Chinese and the Muslims/Christians. I would expect that the Jews were as irrelevant to the average Chinese person as Confucianism is to North Americans.
The Taiping Rebellion explains a lot about China & negative views of Western Religion.
Shanghai was also the home to as many as 18,000 Jewish refugees during WWII. Because Shanghai was essentially an European colony (run under mandates by the French and British among others) it had a highly Europeanized International Settlement and a western-looking main street called the Bund.
Shanghai was virtually the one place in the world that did not require visas for entrance in the 1930s. Since Jewish refugees from Germany (and Poland and Russia and elsewhere) were legally stateless, they could not be allowed in any country. Shanghai, long the vice capital of Asia and the openest of ports, would accept them, or anybody. They came by the thousands, mostly penniless, and lived in the Hongkou ghetto alongside the Chinese, next to the International Settlement.
The Japanese took over Shanghai in December 1941, ending that route of escape.
Those Jews who survived the war - most of the dead came from malnutrition rather than deliberate culling by the Japanese - left for America, Canada, or Israel or a few other countries within a year or two after the end of the war. The long-term legacy of the Jews in Shanghai appears to be as dimly remembered in China as it is in the US, so I doubt that feelings among the Chinese in general were greatly impacted by this.
It’s such a strange and little known event, though, that I like to remind people of it whenever possible. A book and documentary called Port of Last Resort is amazing. The documentary even has home movies of Shanghai that people hid away from the war and kept until the millennium!
I know of no major incident specifically between Jews and Chinese. The Chinese were in agressive wars with border countries and world powers from about 1840 through 2000. I think the poll is misinterperted to mean anything other than those groups don’t match their personal beliefs. Having a government that shoots you for having religious beliefs, tends to influence the opinion of the residents. Some things are different from thirty years ago, but not different enough, and crushed beliefs do not come back without a source. This Chinese situation I discribed is way over simplified, but close enough for my point.
Omigod–I’m Chinese!
My experience in Singapore was quite the opposite. The Singapore Chinese seem to have very favorable views of Jewish people. I have heard more than one of them call Singapore the Israel of S.E. Asia.
The sources I looked at say that the Jewish population in China historicaly has had a good relationship with others by mututaly ignoring each others beliefs. A large number of Jews in China emmigrated to Isreal after WW II.
Was there interaction at all between the Dutch (and other seafaring Europeans) and the Chinese? Jewish underwriting and mercantilism seem to have played a large part in the history of many early contact trade arrangements.
Supposedly, Chinese Americans also have mostly favorable opinions of Jews.
Though I’ve read an example, I think from Stanley or Derald Wing Sue (psychologists) discussing model minority stress, of Chinese-American students who worked too hard being called “Jew” as an insult by their Chinese-American peers.
I have also experienced that. There are a lot of similarities in the diasporic (is that the word?) cultures and how they integrate and become successful worldwide. Maybe it’s just in the Mother Country where there are issues.
Note also that the official Communist doctrine of the People’s Republic of China is disapproving of religious belief in general, identifying it with backwardness, superstition, feudalism, and other unpopular things. I believe the PRC is officially an atheist state. So it’s not that surprising that formal systems of religious belief—especially foreign ones with few connections to Chinese history and tradition—get high negatives in public opinion.
Slight hijack after reading the linked report from the OP: maybe my ignorance is showing here, but how could Christians have a higher approval rating (92% vs. 89%) in Lebanon than in the U.S., when 76% of Americans are Christian, while only 40% of Lebanese citizens are Christian (55% are either Sunni or Shiite Muslims)?