Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the quantity and virulence of antisemitic content on China’s tightly controlled internet — especially on its social media — have skyrocketed. This unprecedented surge in antisemitism online in China could be possible only with the blessing of the Chinese government, which appears to be using anti-Jewish hate as a tool of its anti-U.S. and anti-Western diplomacy.

Comments comparing Jews to Nazis are pervasive on videos relating to the Israel-Gaza war on one of China’s largest video-sharing platforms, Weibo. State-controlled media outlets have been spreading conspiracy theories about the American Jewish community online as well, including the idea that a small number of Jewish Americans control the vast majority of power and wealth in the United States. A false statistic along those lines, originally posted on Oct. 10 by state broadcaster China Central Television, went viral online, becoming a Weibo trending “hot topic.”

Of course, not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and antisemitism existed in China before Oct. 7. But via its internet censorship regime and state-controlled media, Chinese authorities have been fueling the flames of anti-Jewish hate online. Now, the U.S. government is starting to publicly push back on China’s promotion of antisemitism.


“What we saw after October 7 was a drastic change in the social media within China. The antisemitism became more unplugged, more free-flowing,” the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, Aaron Keyak, told me in an interview. “And because we know that the Chinese internet is not free, that’s a conscious decision by the Chinese government to allow that kind of rhetoric to be greatly increased.”