What if Israel Had Been in China?

“These people suffer the most from being without a country, and for more than 2,600 years they have moved about homeless,” Sun Ke wrote, before describing Hitler’s plans for extermination. “The British want to set up a permanent settlement in Palestine,” he continued, “but this has provoked vehement opposition from the Arabs there, and the violence has not yet died down.”

On March 7, 1939, China’s top legislative official, Sun Ke, filed a dispatch to the government’s Civil Affairs Office. As a member of the Supreme Council for National Defense, he had spent the previous two years searching for ways to give China a fighting chance against the invading Japanese. Now, Sun Ke wanted to brief his colleagues on a seemingly unrelated issue: the plight of the Jewish people.

On March 7, 1939, China’s top legislative official, Sun Ke, filed a dispatch to the government’s Civil Affairs Office. As a member of the Supreme Council for National Defense, he had spent the previous two years searching for ways to give China a fighting chance against the invading Japanese. Now, Sun Ke wanted to brief his colleagues on a seemingly unrelated issue: the plight of the Jewish people.

“These people suffer the most from being without a country, and for more than 2,600 years they have moved about homeless,” Sun Ke wrote, before describing Hitler’s plans for extermination. “The British want to set up a permanent settlement in Palestine,” he continued, “but this has provoked vehement opposition from the Arabs there, and the violence has not yet died down.”

Sun Ke believed that a more suitable refuge could be found in his own country. Not in Shanghai, where 20,000 Jews had already fled, but in the Himalayan foothills of China’s hinterland. With Laos to the south and what was then called Burma to the west, Yunnan was a border province with an unusually temperate climate, staggering natural beauty, and enough uncultivated land to accommodate 100,000 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. What it lacked in scriptural significance, it made up for with its history free of antisemitic violence.

To Sun Ke and the unlikely coalition of Kuomintang (KMT) officials and American Jews who rallied behind his plan, Yunnan represented nothing less than the promised land of China.

In the 85 years since, the Yunnan settlement plan has been mostly forgotten.