New Weekly, produced in Guangzhou by a joint venture between the Guangdong provincial government and the 999 Enterprise Group, was one of China’s first glossy magazines, first published in 1996. It has always attempted to mix serious current affairs issues with lifestyle fluff, with each issue dedicated to one theme.
The June 1 issue’s theme is ‘The Death of Childhood: the problems of childhood in an era of electronic media’. One of the articles is called ‘Childhood Companies’ (p. 42) , which looks at various ways in which money is made from kids, starrting with the example of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, whose name is misspelled as J.K. Rolling.
This is header and subheader blurb of the article:
CHILDHOOD COMPANIES
Making money from children is no longer only a trick of the Jews. The whole world has joined this activity…
As any Jew who has lived in China knows, this is probably the easiest place in the world to be a Jew. In this writer’s experience, most Chinese people either have no prejudices about Jews at all, or believe that Jews are excellent, educated, clever people who are good at business (which is invariably understood to be a good thing). Such beliefs sometimes go together with wacky ideas about history (e.g. Hitler was a strong leader and therefore somehow good), but there is no question that China is, if anything, semitophilic.
So I wouldn’t read the above as meaning anything but that the managing editor of New Weekly is an unsophisticated idiot. Or perhaps he is like so many names on the mastheads of Chinese publications: someone who once in a while has a cup of tea in the editorial office but does not actually do anything. His name is Feng Xincheng (封新城). The magazine’s email address is editor@neweekly.com.cn.
New Weekly homepage
UPDATE:
There are some interesting comments about this on Peking Duck.