Talk:Chinese people in Israel

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Editing the talk page[edit]

Disregarding the "do not edit this section" warning, I edited the above archived discussion in order to add the {{unsigned}} for User:Deadmaster, in order to make it clear who has put forth what arguments. Please shout if you disagree with my action here. (I have also done the same for the section "they are not israelis", but this should not be controversial). And everyone please remember to sign your posts on talk pages using ~~~~ and indent your replies using the proper number of :. Thanks.

Also I'm putting this section at the top so that the Table of Contents does not appear within the "Do not edit" box. cab 13:10, 3 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was Do not move. I'd recommend something more descriptive like the "Ethnic Chinese in Israel" idea from CaliforniaAliBaba (talk • contribs) but that doesn't need a WP:RM. —Wknight94 (talk) 11:36, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move[edit]

Israeli Chinese → Chinese Israeli … Rationale: some people mix up wether it are Israeli Chinese or Chinese Israeli. This article discusses Chinese Israeli … Please share your opinion at Talk:Israeli Chinese. — Deadmaster 11:08, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Survey[edit]

Add "* Support" or "* Oppose" followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your opinion with ~~~~


Oppose. Neither "Israeli Chinese" nor "Chinese Israeli" is a well-known term; how about "Ethnic Chinese in Israel"? cab 10:18, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

An Israeli Chinese is someone from Israeli origin or descent that owns the Chinese nationality. A Chinese Israeli is someone from Chinese origin or descent that owns the Israeli nationality. 

I've added a clarification:

See here what an African American is (from the African American wikipedia article):

An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. Many African Americans have a degree of European, Native American, Asian and/or Latin American ancestry as well. The term refers specifically to black African ancestry; not, for example, to white or Arab African ancestry, such as Arab Moroccan or white South African ancestry. Definitively, African American means an American of black African descent.

So: an American African would mean that an American holds an African nationality.

Please move the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Deadmaster (talk • contribs) 19:12, 21 August 2006

Actually, I believe proper English would be Chinese Israelis, which is currently empty... --Eliyak T·C 16:58, 22 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
UPDATE: same goes for Chinese Mongolians and Chinese Indonesians. --Eliyak T·C 17:01, 22 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Two points:

  • First, contrary to what some people are going around asserting, there is NO rule either in the English language or on Wikipedia like "ethnic group name always comes first". You cannot generalize from the basis of a single example such as "African American", or from American usage. Both forms are seen, for example, Chinese American and Burmese Chinese. In some cases, such as Chinese Indonesian/Indonesian Chinese (both referring to Chinese people in Indonesia), the two forms are both used with equal frequency. There is no grammatical error here; either nationality or ethnic group can be an adjective perfectly well.
  • On Wikipedia, we should use the form which is most widely known, rather than the form which some Wikipedians think is "most logical". However, in this specific case, I don't think that either form "Israeli Chinese" nor "Chinese Israeli" is well known. When you google them, most of the results are about state-to-state relations between Israel and the People's Republic of China. Actual results about Chinese people in Israel are pretty much not there. So I'd suggest "Chinese in Israel" (along the lines of Chinese in Singapore).

Please also see this discussion on naming conventions which I have initiated. cab 10:26, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

they are not israelis.[edit]

what about citizenship? they came to israel to 1-2 years to make money. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.68.76.81 (talk • contribs) 12:28, 28 August 2006

You are right. This article needs a clean-up or it must face deletion. It depicts Chinese as cross-border workers. I don't know if this is encylopedical......
and on a second revision: I don't even believe they are Israeli Chinese either, because that would mean that there are Israeli with Chinese Nationality.
Look at the example of African Americans. African descendants who have the American nationality.
The entire article is very weird too, unlike the other "Overseas Chinese" articles... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Deadmaster (talk • contribs) 04:31, 2 September 2006
REPLY >> Where does it say you have to be a citizen of Israel? "Israeli" is an adjective describing the location of these Chinese. Pure and simple. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.81.199.59 (talk • contribs) 20:37, 3 September 2006
I don't think citizenship is the key here, and even though I am very sympathetic, and the article highlights a community leader who was deported despite trying to assimilate, they are not israeli in any sense, since they are deliberately kept isolated by their exploiters (i.e. explicitly prevented from becoming "israeli" by being forbidden from contact with israeli). bottomline: 30,000 chinese citizens effectively abandoned by the chinese government in israel. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.38.151.64 (talk) 15:48, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Move to Chinese in Israel[edit]

Given that:

  • The article discusses both Israeli citizens/potential citizens, as well as non-Jewish guest workers without citizenship to whom the term "Israeli" generally wouldn't apply
  • Both "Chinese Israeli" and "Israeli Chinese" are highly ambiguous terms for which no citation has been provided, and both of which produce only a few hundred hits on Google, the vast majority of which do not relate to the topic of this article but instead talk about foreign relations between Israel and China
  • We Wikipedians should not be inventing or trying to define terms (especially terms for references to self-identifying entities) merely by analogy to other terms

I suggest moving this article to Chinese in Israel, and making both Chinese Israeli and Israeli Chinese disambiguation pages along the lines of American Chinese. Any objections? cab 02:40, 4 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Misnomer[edit]

How can Israelis who become naturalized citizens of China be called "Israeli Chinese"? The word 'Israeli' describes nationality. It has no ethnic connotations. If an Israeli Arab called Seyed Hussein becomes a Chinese citizen then he becomes a "Chinese Arab". If an Israeli Jew called Ayal Levi becomes a Chinese citizen then he becomes a "Chinese Jew". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Utc-100 (talk • contribs) 06:13 8 September 2006

Well there's no rule in English or in Wikipedia that says putting nationality first is wrong. E.g. British Chinese, Burmese Chinese, Malaysian Chinese, Thai Chinese, all of which talk about Chinese people. (In fact, in most non-ethnic words, the nationality comes first. We talk about "Israeli actors" rather than "actor Israelis", for example.) The difference between those terms and "Israeli Chinese" is that all those are terms actually in use in the real world, whereas the term "Israeli Chinese" appares to have been entirely invented by Wikipedians.
Anyway, based on these comments and ones from User:Deadmaster on my talk page, I will go ahead and move this. cab 23:50, 7 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese Jews who have made aliyah section[edit]

This section, which is a stub, focuses on the miniscule number of people who are descended from the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng, which has mostly entirely disappeared save for people who are essentially ethnic Chinese and who merely know that they are descended from Jews--as the section points out, a few members of that group of people descended from the Jews of Kaifeng have succeeded in "returning" to Judaism; some of those have subsequently emigrated to Israel and settled there. There is, however, another class of "Chinese" Jews who moved to Israel--the Jews of Russian background who lived in Harbin (the parents of Israeli PM Ehud Olmert grew up in Harbin), as well as many members of the Baghdadi Jewish community which was well-established in Shanghai prior to WW2, and German-Jewish and Eastern-European-Jewish refugees who were sheltered in that city--many subsequently moved to Israel. There are also, of course, individual Chinese with no connection to the Kaifeng community or any other historical communities of Jews in China who have also undergone conversions to Judaism and made aliyah. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.119.129.16 (talk • contribs) 22:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the information, do you know of any books or articles on the topic? You might also be interested in this page: Harbin Russians. Cheers, cab 23:27, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Hey cab, got your message--this is my wikipedia username which I negligently often forget to use. I think there are a number of books and articles on the Jewish communities of Shanghai, I googled "shanghai" "jews" and came up with the following results.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jews+shanghai

The Jews in Harbin were a subset of the Russians in Harbin, I guess. One might say they were Harbin Russians of Jewish faith--rather than Chinese Jews. As opposed to the Kaifeng Jews, who lived in China for centuries and assimilated amongst the Chinese, the Shanghai (both Sephardic and European) and Harbin (Russian Ashkenazi) Jews don't seem to have assimilated much to China. They were foreigners in China. So, really I don't know how accurate it is to speak of them as "Chinese Jews". However, from what I understand, a number of them moved to Israel, and of that number of those born and rasied in China, a few spoke various Chinese dialects. Allegedly, Israeli PM Olmert's parents could converse in Chinese.[[1]] 

ShmorgelBorgel 17:19, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"related groups" info removed from infobox[edit]

For dedicated editors of this page: The "Related Groups" info was removed from all {{Infobox Ethnic group}} infoboxes. Comments may be left on the Ethnic groups talk page. Ling.Nut 23:09, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Picture in infobox[edit]

Hello, I have tried to clean up a bit earlier, and I put the picture of Eli Marom where it imo belongs. Some IPs insist on putting it back into the infobox, the latest even insists that Marom's picture has to form a gallery of its own of famous Chinese people in Israel. I think that's ridiculous, particularly in view of the fact that the huge majority of people from China in Israel, according to the article, are nameless workers who will never make it into the portrait gallery. Any objections if I remove the picture from the infobox and add it under the heading “Jews from Shanghai” as before? Ajnem (talk) 16:11, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes in fact I do object. I am not just "some IPs", I have a long history of contributing to articles of this type, and I gave my reasons in my edit summary: infoboxes on articles of this type generally contain a gallery of pictures of famous people, where such pictures are available. The question of how "representative" these people are is a misleading one. 61.18.170.115 (talk) 14:18, 26 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes indeed, dear IP, they “contain a gallery of pictures of famous people” – not the picture of one person. Ajnem (talk) 11:24, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
So do you have any actual argument against leaving it where it is instead of cramming it somewhere down the page where it disrupts the layout, and waiting for pictures of more such people to become available? 61.18.170.149 (talk) 14:55, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, if you object to the resulting “layout”, I'll suggest to remove the picture from the article. It's a side issue anyway, the article is what needs improving, not the layout. Ajnem (talk) 16:59, 14 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese People in the Negev[edit]

In the Negev, there is room for a few Chinese cities. Both Israel and China were abandoned by the British and left undefended against forcible Americanization and gentrification. Israel is being niggardly with regard to Chinese visas. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.186.208.214 (talk) 14:22, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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