ABSTRACT
With the official banishment of racial discourse by the Communist Government after 1949, the myth of the ‘Jews’ as a ‘race’ seemed no longer to be current in Communist China. The notion of ‘race’, however, did not disappear completely. Mao Zedong, for instance, defined ‘nation’ as a distinct racial and cultural group. By the same token, Israel was perceived in China as the ‘Jewish nation state’: the ‘old Jewish race’ with a new country and new language. Like the left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s and 40s, Mao also conflated the notions of ‘class’ and ‘race’ into a vision of ‘the life and death struggle’ (nisi-wohuo de douzheng) of the ‘coloured people’ against ‘white imperialism’. China’s political role in Afro-Asian solidarity since the 1960s meant that the Jews in Israel, as the enemy of the oppressed Palestinians, could no longer be defined as the ‘oppressed people’: instead, their image was reconfigured/reconstructed into ‘the instrument of the American imperialists’ and into the image of ‘the poisoned knife which the American imperialists pushed into the heart of Palestine.’ 1 Closely associated with the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation), ‘Mao Zedong thought’ had been styled as the ‘compass for the suffering Palestinians’. Communist China terminated all official diplomatic contacts with the state of Israel. By then, the last group of Jewish residents together with the rest of the remaining foreign population had left China. Generally speaking, largely due to the influence of official media propaganda, the ‘Jew’ was no more than an image and a distant enemy, who was associated with one of China’s most dangerous enemies – the Americans – as well as one of China’s closest allies – the PLO.
