Are Beijing’s Influence Operations Really Coordinated with Chinese Anti-Semitism?

Eliana Aiken’s essay “Anti-Semitism as Information Warfare” raises an important and timely question: has anti-Semitism become a strategic resource that states can exploit in international competition? Her discussion of Russia and Iran places anti-Semitism within a broader framework of geopolitical competition and information warfare. China, however, presents a more complicated case that deserves more careful examination.

The question is not whether China engages in influence operations beyond its borders. Nor is it whether anti-Semitism exists in China’s digital sphere. To both, the answer is a definitive “yes.” But the more difficult questions are: does the usual model of state-directed propaganda adequately explain the production of anti-Semitism inside China? What is the relationship between anti-Semitism as an instrument of propaganda and its presence in China’s domestic discourse? And lastly, to what extent is anti-Semitism part of a deliberate information-warfare operation on the part of Beijing? Without carefully seeking answers to these questions, one runs the risk of assigning more explanatory weight to governmental policy than the available evidence can support.

The Chinese case reveals two divergences in the conventional information-warfare model: between the state and the production of anti-Semitism at home, and between domestic anti-Semitism and influence abroad. When we look at the problem in China’s case, the state may matter less than a traditional propaganda model assumes because, historically, as Aiken notes, Jews and anti-Semitism have occupied only a marginal place in China’s public sphere and its policy agenda.