How George Soros became China’s perfect nemesis

Three months after citywide protests erupted in Hong Kong in the summer of 2019, state-owned newspaper Ta Kung Pao published an article with a caricature that could have easily come from the Nazi-favored tabloid Der Stürmer. It showed a disturbing image of a crocodile emblazoned with the menacing visage of billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros; his ophidian fangs, a symbol of predatory greed, clamped down on the once-vibrant city of Hong Kong, leaving a trail of chaos and dollar bills in its wake.

The scene is made all the more chilling by the presence of Jimmy Lai (Lai Chee-ying 黎智英), “a traitor to the Han Chinese,” per the headline. The pro-democracy media mogul is charged with “colluding with Soros to incite a revolt that would overthrow the government.”

Soros’ depiction by Chinese media as a “big crocodile” — Chinese slang for “criminal kingpin” — has its origins in the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. At the time, the hedge-fund maverick placed a bet against the Hong Kong dollar as the former British colony was getting ready to become part of China.

Nowadays, Soros is a mainstay in headlines from Eastern Europe to the U.S., where he has become a convenient villain invoked by everyone from Charlottesville’s neo-Nazis to Turkey’s Erdogan when blame needs assigning. His advocacy for progressive and liberal causes through his Open Society Foundations has earned him many enemies over the years, but the “mastermind puppetmaster” has also been linked to imaginary deep states and color revolutions, great replacements and white genocides, earning him the moniker “the most hated man in the world.”

But it was only recently that Soros found a welcoming home as a resident bogeyman of the People’s Republic of China. The antisemitic cartoon screeds can only partially be explained by blind racism; Soros, in fact, stands as a perfect enemy to the Chinese Communist Party.

Soros and the PRC: a failed love affair

Soros and China have a long history that predates his legendary standing.

In the waning years of the 1970s, George Soros was a name primarily associated with the finance industry for his successful hedge fund. But he wanted to use his vast wealth for good. Inspired by his formative experience as a Holocaust survivor and later by his mentor, philosopher Karl Popper, Soros made it his mission to fight against “the enemies of Open Societies.”

In its early days, his foundations provided scholarships for Black South Africans during apartheid and supported movements focused on opening up the Soviet system in Eastern Europe and his home country, Hungary. Soros’s initial success in the 1980s inspired him to replicate it in other closed societies beyond the Iron Curtain. According to Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Soros believed that “change in a big country such as China could attract greater attention from the world.”

The local organization that agreed to partner with Soros in 1986 was the Research Institute for the Reform of Economic Structure (RIRES), also referred to by some as the Economic System Reform Institute (ESRI), directed by Chén Yīzī 陈一咨, economic advisor to the reformist Zhào Zǐyáng 赵紫阳.

According to Weber, the fund coordinated over a hundred meetings between Hungarian and Yugoslav reformers and like-minded Chinese delegates. It also provided thousands of grants and scholarships.

But Soros quickly discovered that his China dream could not be realized. From the beginning, his work was surveilled. Anti-reform hardliners suspected him of being a CIA agent whose goal was to undermine communism.

From there, the China Fund was put under the control of the China International Culture Exchange Center (CICEC), a front for the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Members of the CICEC at the time included Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 father, Xí Zhòngxūn 习仲勋, and Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平.

Yu Fang, then China’s deputy spymaster, went by the fake name Yu Enguang while posing as the CICEC’s director, and was appointed co-chair of the China Fund. As fewer and fewer people applied for grants, Yu began to siphon the foundation’s resources to facilitate Party-run foreign exchange programs. It was a “180-degree turn from the project’s original goal of promoting open society,” Alex Joske writes in his 2022 book exposing the inner workings of the Ministry of State Security. “And Yu’s mission wasn’t just to protect China from external threats but to lay the groundwork for influence operations that shaped the world.”

The lack of independence and the expulsion of reform-minded officials from the Chinese government finally prompted Soros to pull the plug in May 1989, just weeks before thousands of students descended upon Tiananmen Square to demand freedom. Secret Party records that were recently made public show that Soros was singled out as the main instigator of the protests by China’s then-minister of public security.

Soros vs. China

Even after the China Fund debacle, Soros remained a rock star in China among certain circles.

Revered as the doyen of the hedge funding industry, Chinese entrepreneurs remained fond of him — or perhaps interested in his Jewish financial secrets. His books would still top the charts and his presence would fill up conference halls, including at the annual Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan.

Soros, for his part, had not given up on China. Even as the U.S. pivoted to counter the “China threat” under the Trump administration, he continued to write fervent op-eds urging engagement with China to avert global chaos. His penchant for betting against economies was tolerated in Beijing as long as it focused on foreign currencies.

Everything changed when he turned his sights on the Chinese yuan. In an interview given in January 2016 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he predicted a looming catastrophe for the Chinese economy: “I’m not expecting it, I’m observing it.”

The Chinese stock markets went haywire. Share prices on the Shanghai stock exchange fell 22% by the end of that month alone, just as Xi Jinping was on a grand tour of the Arab Gulf and Iran, attempting to boost global investors’ confidence. “President Xi suffered a loss of face in the Middle East because of Soros’ remarks,” an anonymous Chinese media source told Nikkei Asia.

This meant war.

On January 28, the front page of the Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, stated, “Soros’s war against the yuan and the Hong Kong dollar cannot possibly succeed.” According to a Xinhua News Agency editorial, “Reckless speculations and vicious shorting will face higher trading costs and possibly severe legal consequences.”

Soros didn’t back down. His bearish predictions for China grew over time, culminating in a severe warning to BlackRock’s China overtures in 2019, which he labeled a “tragic mistake” and a “national security risk” to the U.S. and other democracies. In that year’s Davos address, he explained: “Last year I still believed that China ought to be more deeply embedded in the institutions of global governance, but since then Xi Jinping’s behavior has changed my opinion.”

The Xinjiang concentration camps, the crackdown on private enterprise, the militarization of the South China Sea, and the restrictions on freedom in Hong Kong are all bad enough, but it is something else that keeps Soros up at night. Big-data surveillance and censorship, artificial intelligence, biometrics, and all-seeing sensors have augmented the WWII-era “authoritarian armory,” enabling weapons of total control that Soros’s professor Karl Popper couldn’t fathom in his darkest dreams. Soros has notably targeted the disputed “social credit” systems, as well as Chinese telecoms behemoths Huawei and ZTE, which Xi is happily peddling to Russia, Iran, and other aspiring despots to empower their own domestic repression.

“The instruments of control are useful tools in the hands of authoritarian regimes, but they pose a mortal threat to open societies,” Soros told the Davos attendants, adding that “China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world, but it is the wealthiest, strongest, and technologically most advanced.” In his mind, “This makes Xi Jinping the most dangerous opponent of open societies.”

Beijing retaliated in kind, its onslaught escalating with each round. Gradually, the lines between fact and conspiracy blurred as the man was transformed into the personification of Chinese fears. The idea that Soros is behind so-called “color revolutions,” dissident movements, and “spiritual infiltrations” empowering civil society and NGOs hell-bent on destroying China was personally conveyed to Xi’s predecessor, Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛, in a series of meetings in 2005 by Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Chinese pundits and party-state media have called Soros anything from a “financial predator” and “global economic terrorist” to “the most evil person in the world” and “the son of Satan.” Between the epithets, they blamed him for global financial crises and his foundations for color revolutions. Notably, they said he attempted to torpedo the former British colony’s handover to China in 1997, 20 years before he allegedly conspired again against it with Jimmy Lai. And it was Soros who apparently led the charge during Trump’s trade war, which highlighted Chinese leaders’ concerns that corporate America is doing the U.S. government’s bidding to undercut Chinese competition and “defeat China.”

Global dreams, Jewish conspiracies

Soros’s Jewish heritage has not gone unnoticed by Chinese commentators and policymakers, who, much like their Western and Russian counterparts, gleefully capitalize on antisemitic tropes to get their political messages across.

Most are smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud. But this is not something that can be said of Zhèng Ruòlín 郑若麟, a popular francophone journalist-turned-public intellectual who has been a correspondent for the Chinese state-run Wenhui Bao in Paris since the early 1990s and is very familiar with European antisemitism.

According to an article Zheng published on Guancha, a popular nationalist portal funded by billionaire Eric Li (李世默 Lǐ Shìmò), Xi Jinping’s China has accepted the challenge of leading mankind toward a Community of Shared Destiny. This has made it the No. 1 adversary of “transnational financial capital,” which, to him, is driven by Jews like Soros on their mission to establish a “world government” over which they will rule.

Zheng’s sentiment is shared by Zhāng Wénmù 张文木, a prominent military strategist and professor from the prestigious Beihang University in Beijing. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang published a series of articles on the same platform based on a 70,000-character peer-reviewed journal article which claimed that the pandemic was a biological weapon unleashed by the Jewish-controlled American “loan-sharks empire” to topple China, their only obstacle to global domination. “When discussing the possible human factors of the COVID-19 pandemic, the author only mentioned George Soros, not the White House,” he wrote, “because in today’s world, it is Wall Street, not the White House, which determines the direction of U.S. foreign policy.”

Racist nationalism finds an audience among China’s top officials as well.

The core thesis of Chinese economist Sòng Hóngbīng’s 宋鸿兵 2007 best-seller Currency Wars (货币战争 huòbì zhànzhēng) is that international, particularly American, financial markets were controlled by a global clique of Jewish bankers. Naturally, Soros’ villainy appears 39 times in the first installment of the series.

According to the tycoon Desmond Shum (沈棟 Shěn Dòng), one of Song’s biggest fans was Wáng Qíshān 王岐山, until recently China’s vice president, who would recommend it to his staff. At the time, the Xi confidant was the vice premier in charge of finance and commercial affairs. “Song’s book mixed the disdain, suspicion, and awe of the United States held by many of China’s leaders,” writes Shum in his 2021 bestselling memoir Red Roulette.

"The foundation for political survival in the US is parasitically attached to Israel's powerful Jewish forces and the various political actors that are inextricably linked to them" – Dong Manyuan, former-VP and director at the Chinese Foreign Ministry's think-tank, CIIS.
1/4 pic.twitter.com/bfbusexRT1

— Tuvia Gering 陶文亚 (@GeringTuvia) April 21, 2023

Double vision

China’s equivocal approach to globalization and its complex yet pragmatic relationship with the United States have become more ideologically-driven under Xi Jinping’s helm.

In a front-page article published last month in People’s Daily titled “Xi Jinping’s Global Vision,” the Chinese leader is portrayed as a precocious globalist. It details how, from a young age, Xi would repeatedly read the Marxist classics. “Marxism is broad and profound,” he would say, “but it can be summed up in one sentence: seek the liberation of mankind.”

Few were paying attention to Xi’s global ambitions when he first proposed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 10 years ago, quixotically painting a “transcontinental Silk Road linking East and West.” With 10,000 projects worth close to a trillion dollars in close to 150 countries, the BRI has since become a household name worldwide.

More recently, Xi has proposed new visions that are “global” — by definition — from the get-go, namely the Global Development Initiative (GDI) in September 2021 and the Global Security Initiative (GSI) in April 2022. Last month, they were joined by the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), which doubles down on its revisionist assault on Universal Human Rights.

These initiatives, like the BRI, were initially ridiculed as producing enough hot air to power a fleet of spy balloons. But no one was laughing on March 10 when it was disclosed that China had successfully brokered an unprecedented normalization agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

When Xi says he wants to reform global governance and “build a community with a shared future for mankind,” the rest of the world should therefore take notice.

One man in particular is watching, and he doesn’t share Beijing’s enthusiasm for Marxist utopias. In George Soros’s mind, Xi’s grandiose ambitions, along with his export of techno-authoritarian tools of control, make him the most powerful enemy of the open society vision; rather than a liberator, this makes Xi the biggest threat to mankind.

The Chinese elite and party-state media feel the same way about this 92-year-old “reptilian Jew” and “his people.”