Qing reformer Liang Qichao urged Chinese to imitate Jewish racial survival.

Evidence

The Jews as orientals also played an important role in the racial discourse during the same period. For example, Xue Fucheng remarked in his diary that “the Jewish race has been living in different countries in the West for over a thousand years … [they] still keep their traditions, they will not intermarry with any other races.” It was thought that preserving their racial identity or their oriental-ness was the main, if not the only, reason that the Jewish race was able to survive and to thrive in the West. As Liang Qichao, the eminent late Qing reformer, put it: “For a thousand years, Jews have been stateless. But they survived as a race in the world with an enormous power, and they have also kept their own racial identities. In comparison, many other ancient people such as Babylonians, Philistines, Greeks and Romans did not survive.” According to Liang and many of his contemporaries, if China was to compete with the Western barbarians, the Chinese race must learn from the Jews. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 367

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s curated material on Orientalism, diaspora studies, and national survival narratives — e.g. who gets cast as the ‘model minority’ and why, plus modern claims that preserving distinct identity is what lets a people endure.
• SEED: Article angle: the Jewish diaspora as a template for Chinese racial survival preached a century before contemporary ‘Chinese smartness’ discourses — how one diaspora becomes everyone’s aspirational mirror.