“Our country is crumbling,” American influencer Jackson Hinkle says in a YouTube video from March. “The working class have terrible jobs. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our government is spending hundreds of billions on wars in Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, everywhere else, and we’re letting all these 7 million illegal migrants come into our country in one year.”

Hinkle is attempting to explain the meaning of “MAGA Communism” to Zhang Weiwei (張維為) of Fudan University’s China Institute, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s favorite propagandists and public intellectuals. The ideology he espouses is a chimera born of two seemingly irreconcilable belief systems: the right-wing nationalism and nativism espoused by former US President Donald Trump — represented by his campaign slogan “Make American Great Again” — and the ostensibly far-left authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party.

“What we’re trying to do as MAGA communists,” Hinkle says, “is show the American youth that yes, communism is good… China is the embodiment of it and we should respect them and also try to work with them rather than go to war with them.”

The exchange, conducted at a forum in Moscow and uploaded to Zhang’s YouTube channel, was just one of several Hinkle joined in affiliation with the Guancha Syndicate (觀察者網), an online news portal and China Institute partner closely associated with China’s “new nationalist” movement. At Guancha’s invitation in February, Hinkle also joined a forum in Shanghai attended by some of the country’s top intellectuals.

This strange spectacle begs a simple question: Why is China platforming — indeed, treating as a renowned expert — a 24-year-old whose ideas more closely resemble edgy conspiracy-theory memes than any coherent ideological alternative?

The Horseshoe Game

On the face of it, this appears to be an incomprehensible and out-of-touch choice. But Hinkle’s meteoric rise on social media and his wide target audience seemingly offer authorities in Moscow and Beijing access to swathes of the US population they may have once found unreachable. He appeals both to the left — through his pro-Palestine stance, his identification as a “communist,” and his frequent denunciations of American imperialism — and also to the right, with his anti-“woke” nationalism peppered with invocations of the “deep state” and “globalist” conspiracy theories.

Over the past two years, this approach has earned Hinkle 2.6 million followers on X, plus a few in the Kremlin. More recently, PRC media have also begun to see him as royalty. He has appeared on panels and in interviews alongside well-known figures like Zhang, venture capitalist turned Guancha founder Eric X. Li (李世默), Russian government officials, and Aleksandr Dugin, the far-right political philosopher dubbed “Putin’s brain” by some foreign media.

In March, Hinkle announced, in English and simplified Chinese, that he was opening his own Weibo account. “I’ll be collaborating on content with some of China’s most influential academics & largest social media influencers. Looking forward to building this bridge between our people,” he wrote in a post sent from Moscow. There, his account has become a source for content on Israel-Palestine and US anti-war protests, both for ordinary users and media like RT News, the state-controlled international network funded by the Russian government.

With an election approaching and the US entrenched in two wars increasingly unpopular with the general public, Russia and China are using Hinkle and others like him to further discredit the US government and elicit sympathy for their own regimes.

From Zero to Hero

The fact that any government is assigning so much importance to Hinkle would have been inconceivable just a couple of years ago.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Hinkle was essentially a nobody. He began his foray into politics as a left-wing environmental activist who ran a failed 2019 campaign for city council in San Clemente, California. It’s unclear when or why, exactly, he took his radical turn, but as Russia’s war on Ukraine pressed on, Hinkle saw a steady rise in visibility for his pro-Putin views as he became part of a network of Western propagandists helping to legitimize Russia’s invasion to foreign audiences.

But his popularity truly took off on Elon Musk’s X thanks to his posts about Israel and Palestine. Since October 2023, Hinkle’s following has grown from about half a million followers to 2.6 million. His personal account has become akin to a content farm, where he mostly shares photos and videos of world leaders or injured Palestinians with short, emoji-laden captions like: “Israel is a TERRORIST STATE,” (31 million views) or “DROP A LIKE if you stand with IRAN!” (3.9 million views). He also engages regularly in homophobia, antisemitism, and denial of the Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, and has circulated numerous false claims.

His virality and bizarre ideology have earned him interviews with right-wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, as well as former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who as suspended by the network in 2021, and left-wing British MP George Galloway, plus a recent profile in The New York Times. Hinkle has not disclosed how much money he makes from his posts, but the social data intelligence company Notus estimates he collects more than 4,000 dollars per month in advertising revenue.

Despite its profitability, MAGA communism “at its core is a working-class movement,” according to Hinkle. “It’s the first time we’ve had class consciousness reintroduced in the American political debate for decades.” Its target demographic is the “MAGA movement” itself: “working-class individuals that feel as though they’ve been screwed over by the establishment, whether it’s the warmongers, whether it’s big pharma, whether it’s Wall Street.”

At an event announcing a new think tank earlier this year, “MAGA communism” founder Haz Al-Din explained that America is failing because it is run by “a small cartel of American capitalists” who represent “foreign interests.” In a similar vein, Hinkle says that America should instead look to countries like China and Russia, which are “much nicer, much cleaner, much safer, have no homeless, [and] have better infrastructure” while at the same time “are not waging imperialist for-profit wars.” They discuss the dream of a “multipolar world” to replace American “unipolarity” with the help of financial institutions like BRICS. Though MAGA communists stress that they disagree with some of Trump’s positions, they have recently become bolder in advocating for him, claiming he is “the only candidate working to build global peace.”

Strange Bedfellows

Hinkle seems to be an extreme example of “tankie” leftism, referring to Marxist-Leninists who support acts of violent repression as long as they’re done by regimes in their camp. Others have called him a right-wing grifter exploiting the crisis in Gaza to spread misinformation and gain an online following. But what Hinkle echoes most familiarly, as Ben Lorber explains in a recent piece for Jewish Currents, is a long tradition of conservative nativism and “America First” nationalism gaining ground in pockets of the MAGA right among figures like Carlson, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon.

“There’s this sort of horseshoe dynamic going on where the further left or the further right you go, you sort of meet in the middle and the CCP seems to be comfortable dealing with either extremity as long as it aligns with the CCP’s view,” said Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Code Pink, Code Red

English-language media in the PRC, particularly the generously-funded CGTN, have been platforming foreign “tankie”-esque figures like Galloway, Calla Walsh, and Jeffrey Sachs with increasing regularity. Andy Boreham, a New Zealander who hosts the English-language show “Reports on China” with the Shanghai Daily, seems lately to be increasingly comfortable espousing far-right views, expressing sympathy for Trump and praising far-right commentator Andrew Tate for “helping China spread the word.” Boreham also recently released a 37-minute interview with Hinkle. In Europe, China has succeeded in courting both the far-right and far-left, with Hungary’s Viktor Orban emerging as a close ally.

“The Communist Party doesn’t have any political principles so they have no difficulty identifying with people identifying as far right or far left, even people as being avowedly anti-Chinese. They are extremely practical to a fault in thinking about who their collaborators might be,” says Eli Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University who studies labor and social movements in China.

The CCP’s ethnonationalist tendencies and positions on issues like immigration and gender make its positioning closer to that of Russia, Trump, and the Republican party than the American right may like to admit, “a big exception being how they approach this question about empire,” Friedman says. It was for those issues and his nationalistic, “strongman” style that Trump gained his share of Chinese fans during his presidency.

In China, Hinkle is so far being platformed only by the tight-knit circle of propagandists surrounding Zhang’s China Institute and Guancha, which is not directly controlled by the CCP but abides closely by government narratives. It is unclear who invited Hinkle to China and who is translating his posts into Chinese for Weibo, but The New York Times reported that he “visited Russia and China this year at the invitation of organizations close to the governments.”

“The combination of him having such an influential account on X and him already being sort of vetted in a way by the Russian Foreign Ministry and Dugin would help make any decision by this Guancha Syndicate group to invite him onto panels,” Ryan said.

Engagement is Everything

The appeal to more extreme voices in the Chinese media reflects its commercialization and a growing need for more engaging and controversial content, says Maria Repnikova, a researcher of China’s political communication at Georgia State University. In that way, it may be taking notes from Russia.

“[It’s] interesting to consider how much RT is a model, is an inspiration of an alternative propaganda platform that has been arguably more successful. This matrix might have influenced this approach as well in China,” she said.

Israel’s war on Gaza has become a useful tool in bolstering China’s existing narratives that position the US as a hypocritical warmonger in contrast with China as a peacemaker. And as a particularly contentious election approaches, Israel and Gaza are featuring prominently Chinese “Spamoflage” campaigns, according to findings by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). These efforts have pivoted from standard “Spamoflauge” activity — first detected in 2017 in connection to China’s Ministry of Public Security — toward a more explicitly right-wing, pro-Trump “MAGA” perspective, posting real and AI-generated photos and videos on “culture war” issues alongside pro-CCP narratives. Many of these accounts have shared posts from Jackson Hinkle and related influencers.

Researchers say these campaigns aim to amplify existing divisions rather than sway the election in either direction. Some such posts have garnered significant engagement. In one notable example, Alex Jones shared a post by what ISD identified as a Chinese “Spamoflauge” account on X claiming that “Biden and the CIA had sent a neo-Nazi leader to fight in Ukraine with the Azov Battalion,” a claim that originated on Russia’s RT News. However, that strategy appears to have been largely ineffective.

Hinkle’s ideology would appear to align well with that of Chinese nationalists, but he hasn’t achieved popularity within China. Many see straight through his grift: when the false claim that Hamas had killed an Israeli sniper circulated on Chinese social media last November, state-backed The Paper traced the claim to Hinkle and called him a “spreader of false information.” “I get high blood pressure just watching Jackson Hinkle for one minute,” one Weibo user commented. “I don’t know why every site is pushing him.”

His long-term resonance among Americans is up in the air, too. Some tech research companies have found that a significant number of his followers are likely fakes and that his posts have been amplified by networks of inauthentic accounts, some of which have previously posted unrelated content in Chinese. A look at his presence on other platforms reveals much smaller followings; after Hinkle was kicked off YouTube, he moved to Rumble, where view counts on his videos rarely surpass the tens of thousands. Offline, he remains relatively unknown.

His ideology, too, leaves much to be desired from both the left and the right. A left-leaning audience may be fooled by his seemingly pro-Palestine viral posts, but a deeper look into Hinkle’s ideology exposes no more solidarity for Palestinians than a strategic placement of a Palestinian flag during a speech in which he makes a clear reach to the right in focusing almost exclusively on Israel’s crimes against Christians. What CCP media attempt to portray as solidarity with Palestine, too, is negated by China’s close economic relationship with Israel and exchanges on “anti-terror” strategies and surveillance technology.

In the end, Hinkle seems to be a much dearer friend to the Kremlin, which has been far more successful in courting the American right. China seems as though it wants to replicate that success, but it has a problem: Russia, unlike China, does not pose a credible threat to American dominance. “For people on the right in America, it’s a question of the ordering of principles. For them, the preeminent principle is American dominance. Then they can’t compromise with China,” says Cornell’s Friedman.

Recent news of China’s renewed access to the Russian port of Vladivostok this May sparked celebration among some Chinese netizens. But among others, it was a painful reminder of its “century of humiliation,” beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, the Qing dynasty’s ruling Manchu royals had reluctantly handed over their homeland, which included the port, to their northern neighbors. More territory was ceded to the Japanese invaders in 1931, resulting in the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo.

On National Humiliation, Don’t Mention the Russians

The Vladivostok decision sparked a debate in corners of Chinese social media about whether a debilitated and increasingly reliant Russia would be made to return the stolen land. Surprisingly, a third perpetrator has emerged alongside the Russian and Japanese empires: the Jews.

In the early 20th century, “before moving into Palestine, Jewish capital chose to settle in the Northeast [of China]”, explained a May 19 article by popular WeChat account “Blood Drink” (血饮). It added that the Jews “were even willing to make a Devil’s bargain with the Japanese fascists and give almost all of their money away for this purpose.”

Over one-hundred thousand people have now read the post, many of whom learned for the first time how “during the ensuing eight-year war, Japan’s military industry, which was financed by Jewish capital, massacred tens of millions of Chinese civilians.”

As with most conspiracies, the Jewish-Japanese blood libel contains a kernel of truth. It is based on a little-known episode in World War II known as the “the Fugu Plan” (河豚计划).

In 1939, Japanese “Jewish experts” had proposed to invite 50,000 German-Jewish refugees to Manchukuo with the hope that Jewish capital would help revitalize the territory. Drawing on their expertise of the fabricated antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they hoped that a “deal” with the Jews would inspire them to help improve Japan’s position in the war due to their supposed power over the West. It was named after the “fugu,” the Japanese blowfish that — like the Jews — was a delicacy when handled correctly, but deadly if not. Although Jews indeed found refuge in Japanese-controlled areas during World War II, they were never seriously involved in the Fugu Plan, and the plan never came to fruition, writes Meron Medzini, a professor of modern Japanese history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Fugu Plan, though, takes on a different meaning inside China: It demonstrates a foreign assault on the homeland, with “Jewish capitalists” portrayed as the puppeteers behind Western governments seeking to “contain” China’s rise.

The Fugu Plan, though, takes on a different meaning inside China: It demonstrates a foreign assault on the homeland, with “Jewish capitalists” portrayed as the puppeteers behind Western governments seeking to “contain” China’s rise.

At the time of writing, the Fugu Plan is featured in the top search result for the word “Jew” (犹太人) on Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese equivalent of TikTok. The video is the first in a three-part series about the historical “mistakes” of the Jews.

In less than eight minutes, the video’s narrator blames the Holocaust on Jewish greed, accuses Jews of starting China’s “century of humiliation” by financing the Opium Wars, and describes their cunning Fugu Plan with the Japanese.

Other videos about the Fugu Plan have received as many as 200,000 likes and 30,000 shares. Millions of others have followed the story on social media, where it can also be found with a simple search on Bilibili, WeChat and Weibo, among other platforms.

The narrative has become so popular that an acclaimed Chinese author Yang Shu (杨树) received state funding to pen a spy novel based on the story, which has been short-listed for television or film adaptation by the state-led Chinese Writers Association.

The conspiratorial spin on the Fugu Plan only scratches the surface. A distinct brand of localized antisemitic conspiracies is thriving on Chinese media platforms. A quick search for “Jews” on WeChat, Douyin, BiliBili, Weibo, or Zhihu, reveals that negative, anti-Jewish content and conspiracies take up significant real estate among the top results.

The economics of antisemitism

Antisemitism is not just a social media phenomenon. Despite Beijing’s tight control of the information space, it can also be found among leading academics, party-state journalists, and military strategists. Whereas benign pro-LGBTQ posts and dissenting political voices are often censored, Jewish hatred is openly propagated.

The mirror image of this phenomenon is more well-known. Any Jew who travels through China and reveals their heritage will be met with an admiring torrent of ostensibly “philosemitic” remarks: Jews are inherently intelligent, clever, business savvy, and wealthy. Today, this attitude is widely understood by outsiders as a harmless admiration of stereotypical Jewish traits.

The issue with this “positive” spin is the very fine line that separates it from overt antisemitism. To those who admire Jews for being inherently intelligent and good with money, holding resentment for their supposed disproportionate power over American institutions like Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and Hollywood is not a major leap.

None of this is to say that antisemitism is widespread in China, or to suggest the PRC is a uniquely and irrevocably racist country. However, it does beg the question of how a country with a negligible Jewish population and an even smaller indigenous Jewish community could form such strong opinions about people they had never met.

Chinese antisemitism should first be viewed as one manifestation of a broader problem of racist nationalism in Chinese discourse. Earlier this month, many observers were shocked and appalled to see how China’s top diplomat Wang Yi hinted at an East Asian race-based bonhomie against “sharp-nosed” and “yellow-haired” Europeans and Americans, advocating for an East Asian alliance that “can eliminate external interference and achieve sustainable development.”

To those who admire Jews for being inherently intelligent and good with money, holding resentment for their supposed disproportionate power over American institutions like Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and Hollywood is not a major leap.

The irony is that despite exhibiting some of the most well-documented instances of systemic violence, dehumanization, and discrimination against ethnic minorities, China is rarely called out for racism.

In his seminal book on the subject, historian Frank Dikötter shows how racialized discourse has been a part-and-parcel of Chinese nationalism since its inception in the late nineteenth century. Sun Yat-sen, dubbed “the Father of the Nation,” shared many Chinese revolutionaries’ fear and hatred of the ruling Qing’s “Manchu race.” This led him to incorporate racist nationalism into the bedrock of his political thought. “Sun claimed that only nationalism could forestall racial destruction,” writes Dikötter. Conspiracy theories about the Manchus persist in China to this day.

Sun and his contemporaries among China’s intellectual elites have attempted to construct a sense of national identity by appropriating Western antisemitic representations of Jews. By defining the “Jewish race” as a homogeneous group, argues Zhou Xun (周逊) with the University of Essex, they hoped to create a similar sense of unity among the Han-Chinese race. This process of othering the Jews has allowed the Chinese to project their own anxieties and desires onto a group that is both foreign and familiar.

Chinese nationalism under Mao Zedong viewed racial issues through the prism of class struggle, though there were times when the differences were merely semantic. When socialist Israel aligned itself with the “capitalist” Western Bloc, China gravitated towards the anti-Zionist Muslim world, viewing the Jewish state as “the enemy.” With little to no personal contact with Jews, many Chinese scholars and statesmen came to rely on the deeply antisemitic Soviet and Pan-Arabist anti-Zionism that masqueraded as legitimate criticism of Israel.

The enduring legacy of ultra-leftist “enemy studies” abounds in the works of Beihang University military strategist Zhang Wenmu (张文木). In a series of articles for a peer-reviewed socialist journal under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Zhang describes Covid-19 as a usurious American-Jewish bioweapon aimed at China and humanity as a whole. In keeping with the teachings of Mao and Karl Marx, Zhang says that “what Jews require most is an environment conducive to borrowing, which includes things like financial crises, pandemics, disasters, and, preferably, war.”

In the early 1990s, during the second coming of reform and opening, opportunistic writers and publishers flooded bookstores with “get-rich-quick” guides in an attempt to profit from the pervasive stereotype of the “Jewish Shylock.” An entire genre of books has emerged that portrays Jews as a wellspring of financial wisdom, a source from which the Chinese could learn valuable lessons.

One of those books is The Jewish Guide to Getting Rich, which includes a seemingly admiring line: “The money of the world is in the pockets of the Americans, but the money of the Americans is in the pockets of the Jews.”

Following this logic, nouveau riche families in Shenzhen can now enroll their kids in posh programs designed to help them “learn from the best” in management, finance, and parenting so that they, too, can carry on a Rothschild-like legacy.

However, these assertions become troubling when they contribute to the notion that Jews are influencing America’s trade war and efforts to contain China. Similar conclusions can be found in viral videos and posts discussing the alleged Jewish-Japanese Fugu Plan, in which “Jewish capital” supposedly supported Japan’s war against China.

Conspiracy theories thrive on ignorance and sensationalized content reaps lucrative clicks and revenues. However, spreading rumors online risks falling afoul of China’s dreaded Cyberspace Administration, inviting charges of “picking quarrels and making trouble” that could lead to imprisonment. Antisemitism avoids this fate, given that these narratives are seamlessly embedded within state-sanctioned nationalistic frameworks, warning against foreign encirclement and influence.

“The issue of Jewish conspiracies in our region is more pervasive and profound than we realize,” Simon K. Li told the JTA wire service last year. Li highlights that these conspiracies find greater expression on social media platforms like Douyin and Tencent QQ, where anonymity allows for open discussions, rather than in direct face-to-face interactions

A prime success story of this tactic is Currency Wars, a five-volume book series by Song Hongbing. Beginning in 2007, its publication represents a significant turning point in the integration of Jews as stakeholders in popular conspiracies.

The series claims to reveal the secrets of an international financial cabal dominated by a small group of wealthy Jewish elites, most notably the Rothschild family. According to the author, their intentional manipulation of the Federal Reserve results in major social, political, and military disasters.

Despite being panned in China and elsewhere for their broad generalizations, factual errors, and overt antisemitism, Song’s books were a commercial success, with over three million copies in circulation as of 2020. They even received endorsements from senior officials in Beijing, including former Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan (王岐山), who reportedly recommended the series to his staff.

This process of othering the Jews has allowed the Chinese to project their own anxieties and desires onto a group that is both foreign and familiar.

Wuhan University professor Sunny Han Han argues that Currency Wars represents a broader trend of Chinese “pop-nationalism.” This phenomenon revolves around conspiracy theories targeting the “hypothetical West,” an abstract force believed to hinder China’s ascent.

It appeals to nativist anxieties over Western influence and globalization, which Han traces to the emergence of early Chinese nationalism in the late Qing. According to Han, such anachronisms perpetuate traditionalist groupthink. Even more concerning, they distort Chinese perceptions, ultimately perverting Beijing’s ability to communicate effectively with the world.

The ultimate Other

Conspiracy theories and racism are prevalent throughout the world, across all cultures and time periods. And yet, the setting in which they evolve is essential to understanding them.

From Sun Yat-sen to Wang Yi, racialized discourse has been an element of Chinese nationalism since the late Qing dynasty. By classifying Jews as innately external and homogeneous group, the PRC’s founding fathers were able to see a reflection of their nation’s own fate. Following decades of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, it was natural to believe that if the Chinese could be as wealthy as the Jewish Shylock, China would be the most powerful country on the planet; or that in order to create the Chinese “New Man,” one must examine how to avoid being like the subservient weak Jew.

Historical trends also influence the geopolitical landscape. China established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, after the Cold War had ended and the Maoist class mentality had subsided. Consequently, antisemitic rhetoric wrapped in anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist language had to be discarded as well. Nevertheless, countless Chinese politicians and academics carry on the Soviet legacy and use the Jewish state as a battering ram against its American “big brother,” in what Glenn Timmermans of the University of Macau refers to as “antisemitism by proxy.”

In China, where there is a minuscule Jewish minority, conspiracy theories about the treatment of the country’s sizable Muslim, Christian, LGBTQ, or African communities face greater scrutiny. Antisemitism, however, is rarely discussed as it exists primarily in elite circles and online. Diplomats from China (and Israel) would even go so far as to claim that “antisemitism has never existed in China.”

The socioeconomics of the country’s rapid development may explain the niche market for books and programs based on the stereotypical Jewish financier. At the same time, the prevalence of antisemitism in the world’s second-largest economy is concerning. China accounts for one-fifth of the world’s internet users, with over a billion active users. As scholars Yang Tian and Fang Kecheng have found, the nationalist “influencers” who coordinate and share content on a daily basis comprise a large, toxic network.

Furthermore, despite their xenophobia, they share ideological ties with the far right in the West and Eastern Europe. According to Yang and Fang, the Chinese Han majority, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the population, claim that their own majority culture is in crisis due to minority groups such as Muslims, Blacks, or, in this case, Jews.

Due to their direct import from the West, many of the aforementioned Chinese conspiracies should be very familiar to Westerners. In his lectures, for example, Jin Canrong (金灿荣), dean of Renmin University’s School of International Studies, has promoted the Great Replacement theory. Popularized by French nationalist Renaud Camus, the theory holds that non-white immigrants are replacing white European societies with the help of Jews.

What is the Fugu Plan conspiracy but the Great Replacement with Chinese characteristics?

Nevertheless, when we examine these theories through a historical lens, we can observe their transformation and incorporation of Chinese metaphors and distinct cultural and historical notions. What is the Fugu Plan conspiracy but the Great Replacement with Chinese characteristics?

To rationalize Chinese antisemitism on ignorance is, at best, patronizing. Many of its proponents, including naturalized American citizen Song Hongbing, have resided or attended school in the West. Some have even written extensively about the perils of “Western” antisemitism.

Contemporary antisemitism — whether in the United States, Europe or China — is, in the end, a conspiracy that has proven remarkably useful around the world. As American writer and activist Elad Nehorai writes, antisemitism does not always appear to be Jew hatred: “Jew hatred is actually the end result of antisemitism.” Viewed from this perspective, perhaps no one should be surprised that kitschy admiration for Jews has turned sour; isn’t China just catching up to the rest of us?