There are four groups of Jews, or people of Jewish descent in China. The first are the so-called Chinese Jews of Kaifeng, now estimated at some 100 families totalling approximately 500 people.

The city of Kaifeng, located approximately 300 miles from Beijing, contains the remnants of a Jewish community which flourished in the city from about the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, and which continued to be identifiably Jewish until the 1840s.

Just as the Jews of Kaifeng were disappearing as Jews, China received a new wave of Jewish settlement – Sephardi merchants from the countries bordering on the Arabian Sea who accompanied the British to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tientsin and other cities opened to foreigners in those years. Jewish communities of several hundred people were formed in each of the first three cities.

They were joined by a larger migration of Jewish refugees during the period from the turn of the century to World War II. Thousands of Jews fleeing Russia, the upheavals of World War I and Nazism, found their way to China. They established communities in such places as Harbin, Tientsin, Mukden and Shanghai.