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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