Forgotten history: China as Holocaust sanctuary

[onebyone]

Stanley Ho Building, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Photo: Wikipedia

Forgotten history: China as Holocaust sanctuary

January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the date when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. In the current historical moment it’s also important to remember another …

asiatimes.com

These Jewish communities also freely intermarried with Muslim communities, who also had a large, unfettered, and open presence in China, to the astonishment of early Western observers.

In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that China, as a civilization state, pioneered the very concepts of diversity, inclusion and ecumenical, multi-religious tolerance and harmony – drawn from its Confucian, Neo-Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, and Mohist traditions.

The late Harvard historian Simon Schama described the contrast succinctly in his book Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900:

“To survey the predicament of Jews in much of the rest of the world is to marvel at what the Kaifeng community escaped.
“In China, Jews were not subjected to violence and persecution, not demonized as God killers. Their synagogues were not invaded by conversionary harangues. They were not physically segregated from non-Jews nor forced to wear humiliating forms of identification on their dress.
“They were not forced into the most despised and vulnerable occupations, not stigmatized as grasping and vindictive, and portrayed neither as predatory monsters nor pathetic victims.”

As the US attempts to prepare the world mentally for war against China using a torrent of lies, slander, and propaganda against the Chinese peoples and government – that the Chinese are a threat to the world and to the global order; that they are committing “genocide” against Muslims – it’s important to remember this critical history.

These slanders are refuted categorically by the facts on the ground: Uighurs, Tibetans, and the other 53 ethnic minorities are thriving, proud inheritors of their own history and culture, even as they are given representation to participate as equal, valued, and respected actors in the collective development of a prosperous multi-ethnic civilization-state.

This project itself is grounded in millennia-long traditions of multi-religious/multi-ethnic coexistence, inclusivity, and universal care, continued dialectically to the current moment in the socialist mass line of “serve the people” – all people – in order to create a community of common destiny for all mankind.

 

[Nan Yang]

Chinese are very honorable.

Another is the Japanese orphans left behind after Japan lost WW2.
Despite what Japanese did, Chinese look after these orphan as their own children.