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January 2, 2004
China-Israel relations
Letters
Editor: I wish to contribute a few clarifications to Dr. Rafael
Medoff's Opinion column of Dec. 12 ("Holocaust rescuers? Not
quite"), which denounces the falsehood disseminated by a certain
Web site that credits China with the saving of 18,000 European Jews
during the Shoah, when in reality the credit is due to Japan.
The site produces a Chinese pro-Palestinian poster of 1970, yet
claims that communist China was not really anti-Israel. Such a claim
challenges the truth all the more since 1970 was a year in which
Mao's "Cultural Revolution" reached a peak of xenophobic
hysteria. As for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, which
the Chinese Communists defeated after a long civil war in 1949,
its attitude could at best be considered neutral.
From 1938 to 1940, China's consul-general in Vienna, Ho Fengshan
(Ho is his surname), granted thousands of visas to Jews fleeing
Austria, but he did that against the wishes of his government.
When, in 1947, the United Nations resolution to establish a Jewish
state in Palestine was put to the vote, the representative of that
government abstained. This in spite of the fact that Dr. Sun Yat-sen,
father of the Republic of China did, before his death in 1925, express
warm support for the Zionist movement, which he identified with
his own struggle for China's national liberation, and his son, Sun
Fo, drew, in 1938, a proposal for the settling of Jewish refugees
from Europe in China's Yunnan province.
In 1949, Israel was one of the first countries to offer the new
People's Republic of China diplomatic recognition, yet the offer
was rejected. It was not until 1992 that China established diplomatic
relations with Israel.
As for Japan, its attitude is appropriately described by scholar
Pamela Rotner Sakamoto in her book Japanese Diplomats and Jewish
Refugees: a World War II Dilemma (1998), as follows: "Japanese
policy saved Jews not out of humanitarianism but rather as a haphazard
response to external conditions."
There was a Nazi-inspired anti-Semitic current in Japan in the 1930s;
its Foreign Office, which was bullied by the Imperial Army and its
"Jewish experts," instructed diplomats to discourage Jewish
refugees from going to Japan. Yet consul Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania,
ignored these instructions by issuing life-saving transit visas.
The Japanese consul in Vladivostok knowingly permitted these refugees
to embark for Tsuruga, while prefectural authorities in Kobe, suitably
bribed by Japan's Hebrew scholar Setsuzo (Abraham) Kotsuji, indefinitely
extended the validity of their visas until, after Pearl Harbor,
the refugees were all moved to Shanghai and confined to the slummy
Hongkew residential district which, however, was not a ghetto in
the ghastly Nazi sense. Once on Japan's door-step, the refugees
could not be sent back to Europe, as the Soviet Union refused to
allow for return transit.
Returning to China, it should be pointed out that, since the late
1980s, cultural, scientific, technical and military relationships
between that country and Israel have multiplied. Centres of Jewish
and Israeli studies have been established in several Chinese universities.
In 1993, Israeli president Chaim Herzog effected a state visit to
China, followed in 1994 by prime minister Izhak Rabin. Chinese students
have entered Israeli universities, while Israeli scholars and experts
work in China. The relationships between the two countries should
perhaps be described as correct, rather than friendly.
Rene Goldman
Summerland, B.C.
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