Features
Monday, 27 April 2009 09:04
Written by Paul French

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Paper wars
Nazis and Jews fought a bitter war of agitprop in Old Shanghai

The official organ of the China branch of the Nazi Party was launched in Shanghai in 1933 as a monthly called the Mitteilungs-und Verordnungsblatt der Landesgruppe China der NSDAP. At its height, and renamed the Ostasiatischer Beobachter, it reached a top circulation of about 2,000 copies (or so it claimed). The Nazi’s propaganda was backed up by the Shanghai branch of the solidly pro-Mussolini Stefani Italian News Agency.
The influx of German and Central European Jewish refugees to Shanghai meant that both a press to serve this new community and a response to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was required. Naturally the Jews established their own flourishing press - 16 different Jewish-oriented publications were published before 1937.

Click here to read on... Paper wars
Nazis and Jews fought a bitter war of agitprop in Old Shanghai

The official organ of the China branch of the Nazi Party was launched in Shanghai in 1933 as a monthly called the Mitteilungs-und Verordnungsblatt der Landesgruppe China der NSDAP. At its height, and renamed the Ostasiatischer Beobachter, it reached a top circulation of about 2,000 copies (or so it claimed). The Nazi’s propaganda was backed up by the Shanghai branch of the solidly pro-Mussolini Stefani Italian News Agency.

The influx of German and Central European Jewish refugees to Shanghai meant that both a press to serve this new community and a response to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was required. Naturally the Jews established their own flourishing press - 16 different Jewish-oriented publications were published before 1937.

The Jewish press in China had started with the English language Israel’s Messenger in 1904, set up and edited by a Sephardi Jewish businessman Edward Ezra. It appeared fortnightly and then monthly until 1941, consistently taking a rather strident pro-Zionist stance. Ezra, an extremely rich British citizen, constantly dabbled in the newspaper business including buying the China Press for a while. By 1939 there were around 12 Jewish periodicals being regularly published with a host of others that were short-lived. All could be found at Shanghai’s major Jewish run bookstores – The Lion and The Paragon.

Others interested parties engaged in the pro- and anti-Nazi debate too. The Russian Fascist Association launched Nash Put (Our Way) in Harbin, which viciously attacked all the anti-Nazi press as financed by Jews, and was eventually closed by the Japanese authorities in Manchuria – though later restarted on a smaller scale in Shanghai.

This is an extract from Paul French’s "Through the Looking Glass: The Foreign Press Corps in China from the Opium Wars to the Revolution" (Hong Kong University Press, June 2009). Reprinted with permission.

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