By Harvey Dzodin

The other day I was talking to the legendary Sidney Rittenberg, who came to China with the American military in 1944 and who worked and lived with Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai and the first generation of the leaders of the People's Republic of China in the caves of Yan'an.

He mentioned to me that many Jews from all over the world, independent of each other, came to China in the early years of the PRC.

This story got my attention and set me to thinking about the many similarities between Chinese and Jewish people, as well as the Chinese perceptions and misperceptions about us.

Many Jews consider Chinese food to be their favorite foreign cuisine, but the mutual affinities run well beyond the similarities between wonton and kreplach (dumplings) in chicken soup.

There are important fundamental values and experiences that draw us together.

Our values and traditions, whether drawn from Confucius or the Talmud, have much in common, such as filial piety and respect for the family.

Chinese, like Jews, value the multigenerational family and children go to great lengths to support their parents.

Unfortunately, this tradition is faltering in the West, and I fear that it will suffer the same fate in China as more people here become affluent.

Both of our cultures also value education, albeit I believe for different reasons.

In the Jewish tradition, learning, both secular and sacred, was and is of paramount importance. Some of our most profound thinkers have been religious scholars.

More recently, we have seen education as more of a pragmatic means to an end. Go to Harvard and you will be successful and rich!

Although Confucianism values education, I believe that Chinese are strictly pragmatic: Go to Peking University or Tsinghua University or Fudan University, and you will be successful and rich!

We also both have ancient cultures going back thousands of years and some shared experiences, especially recently.

Jews have always been persecuted and anti-Semitism has resulted in countless deaths and atrocities. Hitler was only the latest in a long line of rulers to invoke it on a mass scale.

From the Opium Wars (1840 – 42 and 1856 – 60) until relatively recently, China was also persecuted and abused by outside powers.

We also share a vast diaspora, allowing both groups to build global business and social networks.

Jews, however, cannot compete with Chinese in the spread of our cuisine. Chinese restaurants are everywhere and the Messiah will come long before we can ever win that race!

While China seems to be one of the rare countries that is thankfully free of anti-Semitism, it is not free of the myth of Jewish superiority in business.

One of my friends at the Global Times recently asked me why Jews have been so successful for many centuries but Chinese haven't.

Many Jews certainly have been successful throughout the ages, especially in professions like medicine, law and banking, but much of this success is a result of Jews historically being barred from other work.

Jews may seem to be unusually prominent, especially given our small population (around 13 million worldwide), but the idea of us dominating business or finance is a myth.

The fact remains that while there are some dynasties like the Rothschilds (banking and finance magnates in the 20th century), there are many middle class Jews, as well as some poor ones.

And if we have a lock on success, what about the two richest people in the world?

Neither Bill Gates nor Warren Buffett is Jewish, although they may share some Jewish cultural values, such as hard work and philanthropy.

Chinese people have certainly been successful.

You only need to refer to Joseph Needham's epic Science and Civilisation in China to see the inventiveness of the Chinese people throughout the ages, an inventiveness that Westerners sometimes mistakenly or arrogantly claimed as our own.

China's Hurun 2009 Wealth Report found that there were 825,000 individuals with personal wealth of more than 10 million yuan ($1.46 million) and 106 billionaires in China in 2008, the second highest number after the US.

So even though most Chinese are poor or middle-class, the Chinese have nothing at all to do to be ashamed of.

It's us Jews who should either worry, or better yet, see the writing on the wall and continue to forge partnerships of the kind that Sidney Rittenberg first noticed a half century ago.

The author is former director and vice president at ABC Television. He spends most of his time in Beijing now working on media projects