What Does the Bondi Beach Attack Show Us About Chinese Attitudes Towards Jews and Israel?

The Bondi Beach massacre on December 14, 2025, shocked the world and sparked intense online debates across multiple platforms, including Chinese-language forums.

Based on my observations, reactions to the tragedy across these platforms do not reflect a monolithic “Chinese public opinion,” but rather a fragmented digital ecology in which platform design and online distortion shape whether Jewish victims are humanized — or erased. 

Antisemitic commentary appears most visibly in certain Chinese online spaces, appearing as both blatant hatred and indifference towards the victims. When going offline, however, the general population of overseas Chinese students display far greater empathy.

That being said, treating these online reactions as representative of real-world attitudes obscures both the structural production of hate and the quieter presence of solidarity.

On a Reddit-like platform called Zhihu, the focus was rarely on the violence itself, but on blaming the victims.

After the news first broke, many users chose to frame the dead as deserving of harm rather than condemning the attack. In one discussion thread, a post explicitly stated that because one of the people shot fatally — a rabbi — was “pro-Zionist,” he deserved the violence. Another user constructed a popular argument in one post: he praised the shooter as “a heroic figure of resistance.” A third user condemned Australia’s act of criticizing extremism as “cruel and unjust.” 

The comment sections for these posts were even more unsympathetic. Commentators used dehumanizing emojis such as squid emojis, comparable to the “juice” emojis circulating in English-language antisemitic spaces to mock not only the victims of the Bondi Beach attack, but Holocaust victims as well. Then, not long after, these posts and comments were quickly deleted by the platform.

On an Instagram-like platform called RedNote (Xiaohongshu), the tone was remarkably different. Praising violence becomes more scarce, but most posts completely ignore the casualties at hand. Users focused on expressing fear about their own public safety, and imagining what it would feel like if such an attack occurred in one’s own neighborhood, while showing no empathy to the dead and the wounded.

Rather than debating what the victims “represented” in the grander political discourse, users spoke about the violence that was displayed at Bondi Beach without mentioning what motivated the attack — which was antisemitism.

After reading these online reactions, I brought the topic into conversations with Chinese international students in my social circle. Unsurprisingly, the students I spoke with were overwhelmingly sympathetic. A male student at UCLA told me that he donated 10 dollars to a fundraiser for the shooting survivors. A female student at USC canceled her planned trip to Australia after the incident and sent messages of condolence to the victims’ families. An Australian friend and a graduate student at the University of Sydney helped organize members of the local Chinese community to send flowers in memory of those who were killed.

Finally, I must address one question: if most people I talk to are sympathetic in real life, then why do hateful comments dominate certain online Chinese platforms?

Incentives offered by these platforms in the form of likes and upvotes by other users drives the disconnect between online hostility and offline sympathy, suggesting that visibility online is shaped less by majority opinion. Instead, the more radical you are, the more rewards you get. 

In recent years, official Chinese media rhetoric toward the Jewish people has grown increasingly hostile, particularly following developments in the Middle East and Israel.

Within this environment, antisemitic narratives — often framed as “anti-Zionism” or critiques of Western power — can circulate online with relatively little resistance, especially when they align with prevailing geopolitical sentiments of uniting the third world. However, this tolerance has clear limits. When such commentary becomes too explicit, too violent, or risks drawing international scrutiny, it is often quietly censored or removed. As a result, the opinions that remain visible online are already shaped by political filtering, rather than representing an unmediated public conversation.

The result is a contradictory system in which antisemitic discourse is neither fully endorsed nor consistently suppressed, but selectively managed to avoid reputational damage rather than to protect Jewish communities themselves. In this sense, censorship functions less as a moral boundary than as a tool of image control, intervening not to challenge antisemitism, but to ensure it does not undermine the state’s global standing. What appears as “public opinion” on these platforms therefore reflects layers of moderation and selective visibility rather than the full range of social attitudes.

Taken together, these contrasts suggest that antisemitism in Chinese-language online spaces cannot be understood simply as a reflection of popular sentiment. Rather, it emerges at the intersection of platform design incentives that empower users to share radical thoughts, geopolitical narratives, and selective censorship that prioritizes image over accountability.

When the most extreme voices are the most visible, Jewish suffering risks being reduced to abstraction or spectacle. Recognizing this distortion is a necessary first step toward confronting antisemitism without reproducing new misreadings or stereotypes of Chinese communities themselves. In a censored environment, silence and removal are themselves forms of distortion, shaping not only what can be said but what can be seen.

Angella Tang is a UChicago Biology student and a CAMERA fellow passionate about fostering cross-cultural and interfaith understanding.