From Global Anti-Imperialism to the Dandelion Fighters China’s Solidarity with Palestine from 1950 to 2024

China is one of the few states to have flipped its diplomatic stance on the ‘Palestinian–Israeli conflict’, doing so in the most dramatic manner from the 1950s to 1970s. In only 20 years, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) official foreign policy dramatically changed from almost establishing diplomatic relations with Israel in 1950 to denying any legitimacy of the Israeli state during the 1960s to 1970s. As I demonstrate in this chapter, it was in the Maoist era, especially from 1955 to 1976, that the foundation of China’s diplomatic support for the Palestinian liberation movement was laid, and this legacy is still one of the main factors guiding China’s official stance on Palestine today. 

From 1950 to 1976, China during the Mao era gradually deepened its understanding of the Palestinian question and eventually concluded that the Palestinian struggle was an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist national liberation movement. Diplomatically, the PRC in this era not only showed its solidarity with the Palestinian armed struggle through providing diplomatic support, funding, and even military training to Palestinians, but also by launching various cultural exchange programmes between Palestinian and Chinese diplomats and intellectuals. In terms of China’s domestic politics, the PRC in this era also launched a comprehensive internal propaganda and educational campaign aimed at reinforcing pro-Palestine solidarity among Chinese people. 

After the end of the Mao era, China increasingly deepened its bilateral relations (and especially its economic ties) with Israel, and China’s role in supporting Palestinian liberation was not only marginalised but was also significantly downgraded compared to the previous position. However, the pro-Palestine position of the 1950s to 1970s remained influential in guiding the Chinese state, and the historical legacy of China–Palestine solidarity has been re-discovered and rejuvenated by Chinese youth during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

In order to understand the nuanced dynamics of China’s Palestine solidarity movement and China’s reaction to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in this chapter I provide a systematic review not only of the evolution of China’s perceptions of the Palestinian struggle, but also of Maoist China’s efforts at establishing solidarity networks with the Palestinian movement, both in terms of diplomatic channels and China’s own domestic propaganda and educational campaigns. 

Heavily influenced by the Soviet Union, the newly established PRC initially saw Israel as a postcolonial state led by a left-leaning national-bourgeois government and thus was open to recognising Israel. (Shichor 1979) On 9 January 1950, the Israeli foreign minister sent a letter to Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in which he recognised the PRC, making Israel “the first Middle Eastern government to recognise the PRC”. (Shichor 1979) This news was reported in the People’s Daily, China’s official newspaper, on 17 January 1950 as a diplomatic success for China. (People’s Daily 1950) By contrast, in August 1950 the Arab League chose not to recognise the PRC, lending further support to the PRC’s favourable view towards Israel. (Harris 1993)

However, this short-lived possibility of mutual recognition between China and Israel soon disappeared when China entered the Korean War in October 1950. To avoid irritating the US, the Israeli government put off its plan of establishing formal relations with China. (Shai 2019) The Israeli government’s decision to side with the West in the United Nations during the Korean War destroyed the Chinese side’s previous fantasy of Israel as left-leaning, and led the PRC to reconsider the matter of mutual recognition. 

A few years later, in 1955, the first Asian–African Conference was hosted in Bandung. During this conference of postcolonial states, China had the opportunity to cultivate its ties with Arab leaders, while Israel was excluded from the meeting due to the vehement opposition of Arab states and Indonesia, a Muslim-majority state with historical ties of friendship with Palestine. Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai initially proposed to include Israel in the conference, but after a long discussion with the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and with the representative of the Syrian delegation and future chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Ahmad Shuqiry, Zhou concluded that supporting the Arab people’s anti-imperialist struggle was a priority for China. (Shindler 2014) According to a report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on 22 April 1955, during the conference Zhou made a strong statement in support of the Arabs, stating: “had it not been for foreign intervention, the tragedy of the Arabs of Palestine would not have taken place”. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency 1955)

During the 1950s the PRC reduced its diplomatic contact with Israel, but did not view it as a wholly illegitimate entity. In March 1956, in the lead-up to the Suez Crisis, the People’s Daily quoted an Israeli Communist Party (ICP) statement claiming that “the majority of Israeli people” were in favour of an “independent, peaceful, and neutral foreign policy” between the West and the socialist bloc. (People’s Daily 1956a) In September of that year, the People’s Daily again quoted an ICP claim that “the Israeli people do not want to and should not risk themselves for British, French, and American billionaires”. (People’s Daily 1956b) This illustrates that although the PRC had already decided to put its relations with Arab states before its relationship with Israel, it still saw Israel as a legitimate state which might not fall entirely into the arms of the Western bloc. The Communist Party of China’s (CPC’s) party-to-party relationship with the ICP in this era also shows that the PRC did not hold an anti-Zionist stance at this time. During this period, the PRC’s perception of Israel was determined solely by Israel and Arab states’ relations with the West, and was not built around an understanding and recognition of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine.

However, the war of 1956 fundamentally reshaped China’s perception of Israel. From 1956, China increasingly thought of Israel as a ‘running dog’ of Western imperialism that threatened Third World liberation and the global socialist movement. On 29 October 1956, Israel invaded Sinai, in collaboration with Britain and France. Israel’s joint military operation with Britain and France not only led the PRC to view Israel as an aggressor against Egypt, but, more importantly, it prompted the PRC to label Israel a regional ally of Western imperialists. On 1 November 1956, the People’s Daily, for the first time, directly condemned Israel as “a voluntary little pawn on the chessboard of Western colonisers”. (People’s Daily 1956c) On 7 November, the Chinese government officially published a statement demanding that Britain, France and Israel “immediately withdraw all forms of military force invading Egypt and stop the aggressive war on Egypt” and announced that China would soon send aid to Egypt. (Institute of International Relations 1958) After the Suez Crisis, Chinese foreign policy became one-sidedly pro-Arab. China gave up its support for the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in its diplomatic rhetoric, openly criticised Israel for invading the Arab states, and explicitly supported the Palestinian people’s right of armed struggle.

With the advent of the Sino-Soviet split Chinese foreign policy became even more radical than that of the Soviet Union.1 At the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow in 1957, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, explicitly opposed Khrushchev’s idea of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the capitalist bloc and advocated for armed struggle against capitalist states. (Central Chinese Communist Party Literature Research Office 1997) In January 1958, Mao officially listed “permanent revolution” as one of the guiding ideas of the Chinese government. (Central Chinese Communist Party Literature Research Office 1995) Driven by the principle of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’, China actively supported anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-feudal nationalist and socialist movements all over the world, and specifically in the Third World. 

In the PRC’s view, the regional conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis had become a stage upon which the socialist bloc and the Third World were coming together to struggle against Western imperialism. While the Chinese leadership was still more concerned with affairs in East Asia, such as the Vietnam War and the Taiwan Strait conflict, Palestine was seen as a remote ‘frontier’ holding back Western imperialism. The leadership believed that the result of the struggle on this ‘frontier’ could affect the security of the PRC. For example, Zhou Enlai, premier of China, emphasised the unique role of Arab anti-imperialist struggles in the world by arguing that Arab states are located in a region that is a crucial front against imperialism that “shields both Africa and Asia”. (An 2008) In March 1965, Chairman Mao Zedong also said the following to the first PLO delegation to visit China:

Imperialism is afraid of China and the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you and Formosa for us. The West does not like us, and we must understand this fact. The Arab battle against the West is the battle against Israel. (Shindler 2014),2

In addition, Israel’s victory in the wars of 1956 and 1967 convinced the Chinese that the Arabs were the weaker party and the victims in the conflict. The Palestinian experience of being invaded by a Western-supported colonial state reminded the Chinese of their own historical trauma of being “invaded, attacked and humiliated by foreigners” and thus a sense of solidarity was formed. (Cooley 1972)

Driven by China’s radical Maoist ideology, together with the image of Palestine as the ‘frontier’ of global competition, alongside sympathy towards the Palestinians elicited by China’s own historical trauma, the Chinese largely perceived Israel as a ‘running dog’ of US international interests in the region. By the mid-1960s, when China’s Cultural Revolution started, the radical faction in the Chinese government began to gain more control over Chinese diplomacy3 and China’s stance towards Israel entered its most radical phase, with China now questioning the fundamental legitimacy of the Israeli state. 

In 1965, Lin Biao, the vice chairman of the CPC from 1958 onwards and the designated successor to Mao, defined the main characteristics of Mao’s theory of ‘people’s war’ and advocated that all oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America should use the tactics of ‘people’s war’ against “US imperialism and all of its running dogs”. (Lin 1965)

This perspective guided China’s enthusiastic support for guerilla warfare all over the world, including in Palestine, where Palestinian guerilla forces became an ideal model of ‘people’s war’. PLO leaders happily accepted this view of their struggle and were willing to create an image of themselves as in the vanguard of Third World guerilla warfare and students of Mao’s theories in order to gain more support from China. For example, when visiting Beijing on 21 March 1970, the entire PLO delegation to Beijing, led by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, held copies of Mao’s Little Red Book as they exited their airplane, evoking joyful reactions from their Chinese counterparts. (Central Studio of News Reels Production 1971) 

After Mao’s famous speech on 20 May 1970, in which he set out his support for “the struggles of the Palestinian and other Arab peoples against the Israeli aggressors”, (Mao 1970) the PRC’s official rhetoric regarding Israel became entirely negative. It was officially labelled “a base for US imperialism to invade the Middle East”. (Central Studio of News Reels Production 1971) Meanwhile, Chinese slogans in support of the Palestinian people became increasingly combative and focused on encouraging armed struggle and the destruction of the Zionist state. For example, a Chinese film on the Palestinian struggle exclaimed: “Do not solve this peacefully, do not kneel to surrender, absolutely no!”. (Central Studio of News Reels Production 1971) Even Zhou Enlai, who was probably the most moderate diplomat in the Chinese government in this era, underlined that he saw Israel as an unnatural state, stating to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “it must be said that the establishment of such a country in such a manner is a very curious and peculiar phenomenon to have occurred since the First and Second World War”. (Nickes 2007) 

During the period from 1965 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the PRC’s official narrative of the history of Palestine evolved into a completely anti-Zionist one, representing a significant shift away from its position in the 1950s of viewing Soviet support for partition as “a stance of justice”. (Xu 1950) For example, a 1973 Chinese book on the Palestinian question, prepared specifically to guide government officials, not only labelled “Israeli invaders” as “a little pawn on the chessboard of US imperialist invasion”, but also condemned “Soviet revisionism and socialist imperialism” for  “sheltering, spoiling, and acquiescing to Israeli aggression”. (Institute on the Religion of Islam of Northwest University 1973) 

In 1971, Qiao Guanhua, the chief Chinese delegate to the United Nations, defined the “intrinsic nature of the Middle East question” as “the aggression against the Palestinian people and the other Arab peoples committed by Israeli Zionism, with the support and connivance of the superpowers”, labelling both US support for and Soviet “acquiescence” with Israel as roots of the problem. (Cooley 1972) According to Mohammed Khalil and Mohammed Rif’at, two Palestinian representatives of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization who visited Beijing in March 1964, Chinese officials specifically emphasised to them that “China did not bear the stigma, as did Russia, of having voted for the creation of Israel”, (Cooley 1972) thus illustrating the Chinese perception of the creation of Israel as an illegitimate colonial project in the modern era. 

The PRC’s strong pro-Arab sentiment was also evident in its stance during the war of 1973. On 23 October of that year, Qiao Guanhua delivered a highly combative speech at the United Nations Security Council in which he not only referred to the war as “a sacred battle of Egyptian, Syria, and Palestinian peoples and armies fighting against invaders and recovering occupied land,” but also claimed “it is righteous for the peoples of Egypt, Syria and Palestine to use whatever measures they wish to recover their own occupied territories, meanwhile any slight provocation done by Israel is criminal behaviour”. (People’s Daily 1973) 

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese support for Palestine was not limited to the diplomatic level. Chinese leaders also intentionally institutionalised discourse in support of Palestine within Chinese society and culture. The first and most direct way they did this was encouraging mass demonstrations. As shown in a propaganda documentary titled The Palestinian People Will Win, made by the Chinese government in 1971, the Chinese state often organised massive demonstrations in Beijing in front of the embassies of Palestine, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), and Syria, expressing solidarity with those countries. The second way Chinese leaders inculcated support for Palestine was through educational initiatives encouraging the Chinese working class to learn about and write about Palestinian affairs. For example, the short documentary mentioned above was often shown in cinemas, and a transcript of the film was also published and was available in libraries across China’s major cities. In addition, many books on Middle Eastern affairs were published during this period, all presenting a strong anti-Zionist perspective.4 During the Cultural Revolution, the state also encouraged factory workers to form ‘workers’ theoretician groups’ to conduct research on Marxist theory and contemporary politics. The Workers’ Theoretician Group of the Wuhan Heavy Duty Machine Tool Factory, for example, cooperated with history professors from the Central China Normal University to write an academic book titled The Origin and Development of the Palestinian Issue, which was later published (in 1976) by one of the most authoritative state-affiliated publishers.5 

Solidarity with Palestine was also a focus of Chinese literature and the intelligentsia during the 1960s and 1970s. Just as many freedom fighters from the PLO received training in Chinese military academies in this period, so many Palestinian diplomats and intellectuals also studied at Chinese universities, worked as Arabic professors or translators in Chinese universities, or were invited to attend cultural and academic events in China. For example, the works of Ghassan Kanafani were translated into Chinese and were widely circulated in the country, and Kanafani visited China in 1965, being warmly received by Marshal Chen Yi, whose enthusiasm for poetry was well-known. The poems of Abu Salma, Chairman of the General Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists, were introduced in China as early as 1964, and his famous poem ‘The smile of Mao Zedong’, in which he writes “We have fought the same fight. We have endured the same suffering … When Mao’s smile appears on the horizon, Earth’s skies become clear for miles and miles”, received a tremendous reception in the country.6 In 1975, the state-affiliated renmin wenxue chubanshe (People’s Literature Press) published a book titled Battle Poems of Palestine, which was a collection of poems written by Palestinian fedayeen (in translation), alongside poems praising Palestine written by Chinese workers and intellectuals.7

Interestingly, the Palestinian armed struggle even featured in children’s books in China in the 1970s. In 1971, a state-affiliated publisher in Guangdong composed and published a comic book for children titled The Waving Flag of Combat. Talat, the protagonist of this story, is a son of a Palestinian guerilla fighter who is planning to “launch an operation against Israeli invaders in the occupied territory”. On the morning of Talat’s 13th birthday, his father promises to bring him a jar of soil from Palestine as a birthday gift. Instead of waiting for this gift, Talat himself participates in a guerilla attack against the Israelis and so receives the birthday gift he has always longed for: the guerilla force totally defeats the Israelis and the flag of Palestine is raised over the liberated territories.8 

One year later, in 1972, the same publisher produced another comic book for children named Little Hero Qassam. In this story, little Qassam, a Palestinian child whose father had been killed by the Israelis in the 1967 war and who thus had to escape to Amman as a refugee, joins a guerilla force at the age of 14. Disguised as a common boy transporting his belongings on a donkey, little Qassam smartly leads Israeli soldiers into an ambush by the guerilla force and thus destroys a stronghold of the Israeli army.9 This comic book was so popular that in 1973 little Qassam’s story was re-created in a long poem accompanied by paintings, which was published by another state-affiliated publisher based in Heilongjiang province.10

People who are familiar with Chinese literary traditions from the Mao era can easily see that the images of Talat and Qassam were strongly influenced by the images of fictional Chinese figures such as Wang Eerxiao and Zhang Ga the Little Soldier, both of whom were fictional boy scout guerilla fighters based on real prototypes of Chinese children who participated in guerilla warfare against the Japanese occupation during WWII. By drawing on China’s own historical experience to imagine and create literary and artistic images of Palestinian freedom fighters, the Chinese ‘literary and art workers’, as they were referred to in the Mao era, disseminated the seeds of pro-Palestine solidarity among the Chinese public. The legacy of these works from the 1966–1976 era still largely serve as the foundation of pro-Palestine sentiment among Chinese youth today. 

When Mao passed away in 1976, the Cultural Revolution was put to an end with a coup in which the old-guard, moderate faction within the CPC forcefully addressed leaders of the radical-Leftist faction, who were later given the derogatory name of the ‘Gang of Four’. Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the reformists, took two years to consolidate his power within the party. In 1978, Deng successfully held the famous Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CPC, which marked the beginning of Deng’s ‘reform and opening up’ policy. As Deng pointed out during a conversation with Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1988, the Chinese government’s guiding principle “shifted from class struggle to develop[ing] the economy”. (Deng 1988)

In terms of diplomacy, this shift meant that supporting global revolutions was no longer an agenda in China’s official diplomacy, and by early 1980, Deng had already stopped the PRC’s aid to communist groups in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and southern Europe. As China attempted to attract foreign investments from the West for its economic development, support for anti-imperialist struggles also became increasingly marginalised in Chinese foreign policy. China started to consider the possibility of establishing diplomatic ties with members of the capitalist bloc, including Israel. 

The transformed international atmosphere in this era also had an important impact on the Chinese. In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat gave his famous speech at the Israeli Knesset, and enhancing Egypt–Israel relations led the Chinese to believe that the intractable ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ might be coming to an end. Driven by this perception, in July 1980, He Ying, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, publicly announced that China’s new stance on the Palestinian question was that “all states in the Middle East should enjoy their right of independence and survival”. This statement marked the end of China’s policy of the 1960s–1970s of supporting Palestinian armed struggle and the dismantling of the Zionist regime. China started to see the existence of the Israeli state as not inherently antithetical to the existence of a Palestinian state. In December 1982, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the CPC, proposed to King Hussein of Jordan that Arab states “must respect and restore the national rights of the Palestinian people, and simultaneously recognise Israeli people’s right to peaceful survival”. In the same month, during his visit to Egypt, Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang again announced that China was preparing to recognise Israel’s “right of survival” as long as Israel “withdraws from occupied Arab land” and “restores Palestinian’s legitimate rights of reconstructing their states”. 

In September 1988, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen announced China’s ‘five-point proposition’ on Middle Eastern affairs, which included elements such as promoting dialogue, asking Israel to withdraw from all occupied Arab territories in exchange for security assurances, and, most importantly, promoting mutual recognition between the State of Palestine and the State of Israel. Though the different administrations of successive Chinese leaders have announced their own proposals on Middle Eastern affairs under different names, the essence of Qian’s ‘five-point proposal’ – promoting a two-state solution through dialogue – remains the core of China’s foreign policy on Palestine. 

Trade is certainly one of the most important elements that has brought about this shift in China’s stance towards Israel. In 1985, seeking the establishment of an official relationship with China, Israel reopened its general consulate in Hong Kong, which had been closed for more than 10 years. It also started to sell high-technology products, especially military technologies and equipment, to the Chinese mainland through Hong Kong. After China’s short-lived honeymoon period with the US ended with an ugly break-up in 1989, Israel became one of the few channels through which China could purchase advanced military technologies in circumvention of the Western arms embargo. This relationship remained important to China until 2001 when Israel unilaterally tore up its trade agreement with China under US pressure. 

Desire for trade and the belief that the ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ was coming to an end, prompted China to become increasingly open to establishing full diplomatic ties with Israel. During 1990–91, numerous states in the socialist bloc, including the Soviet Union, established diplomatic relations with Israel. This was the decisive factor that pushed China to finally establish diplomatic relations with Israel, which it did in January 1992.

As a result, China welcomed the Oslo Accords in 1993. The People’s Daily, for example, claimed that peace between Palestine and Israel was now possible under the Accords. Even when Netanyahu’s right-wing government severely sabotaged the peace process in 1996, the Chinese official media still argued that “the seeds of peace ha[d] already been planted to the hearts of Palestinian and Israeli peoples by the Oslo Accords” and that Israeli public opinion was pro-peace and anti-Likud (“Zhongdong huhuan” 1999). In October 1993, one month after Oslo, Yitzhak Rabin became the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit China, indicating that Beijing was not only optimistic about the future of the Oslo Accords but also convinced that deepening its relationship with Israel would no longer be a problem for China’s relationship with the PLO and the Arab states.

Though it was now committed to the so-called two-state solution, China never wavered from its support for Palestine, at least in its diplomatic rhetoric. On 20 November 1988, following Arafat’s declaration of a Palestinian state five days earlier, China officially announced its recognition of the State of Palestine. In December that year it upgraded the PLO office in Beijing to the Palestinian embassy. In December 1995, China officially established its embassy to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. In May 2004 it moved it to Ramallah. Former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was invited to visit China 14 times throughout his lifetime. Surprisingly, the majority of these visits took place after 1980 (his last visit to China was in 2001). Until the end of his life, Arafat maintained a close personal friendship with Deng Xiaoping and with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. 

As already mentioned, from the start of Deng’s reform in the early 1980s until the 2010s, Chinese policymakers were convinced that diplomacy should serve economic interests, not vice versa, and thus Chinese foreign policy towards the Middle East mainly focused on trade while intentionally refraining from getting involved in ‘issues’ in the Middle East. As Hua Liming, former Chinese ambassador to Iran and the United Arab Emirates, admitted, “in this era, the Middle East [was] a marginalised region in the overall Chinese diplomatic strategy”. (Hua 2014) 

Since 2013, however, the Xi Jinping administration has shown a revived political interest in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, connected to its desire to promote China’s international prestige as a global power. In 2013, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu separately visited Beijing, Xi proposed to facilitate dialogue between the two (this proposal was ignored by Netanyahu). In July 2017, Xi announced his ‘four-point proposition’ for solving the ‘conflict’, which shares the same essence as Qian Qichen’s ‘five-point propositions’ announced in 1988. The ‘four-point proposition’ asserts that China supports the two-state solution and a “completely sovereign and independent State of Palestine based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital”. In addition, it reiterates the importance of solving the Palestinian question through political dialogue and demands that Israel “immediately stop all activities of settlements on occupied territories in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334”. (People’s Daily 2017) 

To promote Xi’s ‘four-point proposition’, Beijing hosted a Palestine–Israel Peace Symposium in December 2017, attended by leading figures from both sides: Ahmed Majdalani, secretary general of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, and Member of the Knesset (MK) Yehiel ‘Hilik’ Bar, deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset. 

In May 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi again reiterated China’s interests in inviting Palestinian and Israeli representatives to engage in dialogue in Beijing. In his speech at the United Nations Security Council, Wang not only emphasised that “the Palestinian issue has always been the centre of problems in the Middle East”, but also, for the first time, claimed that “the world will not truly have peace unless the Middle East is stable”. Wang’s words have become the norm in China’s diplomatic rhetoric on Palestine today. This perspective of seeing the resolution of the Palestinian question as indispensable to global peace should be seen as part of the broader legacy from the Mao and Zhou era, in which the Chinese leadership saw Palestine as a frontier shielding both Asia and Africa from Western imperialism. However, in contrast to China’s position in the Mao era, its reluctance about being viewed as picking sides limits its foreign policy today.

It is important to point out that although China has continued to voice its political commitment to the Palestinian struggle and Palestinian state (including fighting hard for Palestine to become a member of the United Nations and to facilitate – ultimately unsuccessfully – peace talks), between 2015 and 2020 China and Israel underwent a brief honeymoon period of increasing trade and investment. As US–Israel relations faced difficulties due to Israel’s aggression in the occupied West Bank and its hostility towards the Iranian nuclear deal, the Netanyahu administration attempted to flirt with China. In his visit to China in 2017, Netanyahu praised the bilateral relationship as “a marriage made in heaven”, and expressed an interest in joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative. During the visit the Chinese government announced the establishment of an “innovative comprehensive partnership” with Israel. Four months later, Netanyahu would use the exact same phrase to describe Israel’s relationship with India, China’s geopolitical rival. Ultimately, Israel did not officially sign on to the Belt and Road Initiative, despite China’s unilateral insistence on labelling Chinese investment programmes in Israel, including the Haifa Bay Port, as programmes affiliated with it. 

Nevertheless, economic interests, particularly relating to high-technology, have fuelled China’s growing interest in Israel. In addition, since China’s relationship with US President Donald Trump during his first administration (2017–2021) was very poor, with most communication channels between China and the US severed, China also sought to use Israel as a bridge for continued contact with the US. 

The largest Chinese investment in Israel during this era was the Haifa Bay Port (or new Haifa Port). In 2015, the Chinese state-owned company Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) signed an agreement with Israel in which it acquired the rights to operate the Haifa Bay Port for 25 years, starting in 2021. This agreement was widely publicised in 2018 and was seen as one of the Belt and Road Initiative’s flagship projects in the Middle East (the agreement remains legally valid until today). In 2023, the Haifa Bay Port consisted of 80 per cent of Israel’s transshipment containers (Lavi 2024). As I discuss below, the prosperous picture of the Chinese-operated Haifa Port project was severely damaged in the Gaza war. China is currently paying the costly price of putting its faith in the sustainability of its honeymoon period with Israel.

Reviewing China’s foreign policy from the 1980s to the present, one notices that China has vacillated between its anti-colonial principles, inherited from the Mao era, and its current economic interests. On the one hand, China’s perception of Palestine is still heavily influenced by Mao’s legacy and China still sees Palestine as an anti-colonial frontier that is shielding both Asia and Africa from Western imperialism. But, on the other hand, China’s Middle East policy in the post-Mao era is in its nature economic-centric and China is unwilling to forgo its trade with Israel to support Palestine. Political solidarity with Palestine and economic ties with Israel create a contradiction in China’s foreign policy. China’s response to this contradiction is to declare itself a friend of both sides and to portray itself as a potential mediator. 

From 1992 until 2023, when the international community still reserved some hope for dialogue and a two-state solution, China was able to manage this contradiction in its foreign policy and to enhance its separate relationships with Palestine and Israel. In the eyes of the Chinese government, its diplomatic and trade relationship with Israel neither became an obstacle to China’s traditional friendship with the Palestinian Authority, nor prevented China from unequivocally speaking in support of the State of Palestine in international platforms such as the United Nations. 

However, China’s image as a common friend of both Palestine and Israel has become increasingly unsustainable in recent years, because of two main dynamics.  First, this approach is largely based on the premise of the Palestinian–Israeli peace negotiation process from the 1990s to early 2000s. As Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank exacerbate tensions and make the two-state solution almost impossible to achieve, China’s faith in this solution may already be outdated as regards the reality on the ground. Second, this foreign policy approach is based on China–Middle East relations during the 1990s and 2000s, when China’s engagement with the region was highly limited in economic respects, and when China did not wish to exercise any political influence in the region. However, from 2013 onwards, on the one hand China has sought to enhance its global reputation in the developing world through renovating its historical solidarity with Palestine; and, on the other hand, through the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese investments in Israel grew rapidly from 2015 to 2023. Therefore, the contradiction between the political and economic agendas in China’s Middle East policy has inevitably intensified in the last few years and China’s attempt to continue its self-perceived ‘balanced’ position has become untenable.

From the early 2000s to 2023, Israel exacerbated its aggression and oppression against the Palestinian people. Some of the most important events in this period include the Second Intifada from 2000 onwards; the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006; Israeli wars on Gaza in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021; the Great March of Return demonstrations in 2018–2019, which were violently suppressed by Israel; Israeli repression of Palestinian protests in 2021; and the genocidal war against Gaza from 2023 onwards. While in response to each of these events China released diplomatic statements criticising Israel’s actions, none of the atrocities committed by Israel had any impact on China’s trade with Israel. In the 2010s and 2020s, China’s economic ties with Israel grew tremendously, leading many outside of China to have increasing doubts about the sincerity of the Chinese government’s self-proclaimed support for Palestinian liberation. 

This contradiction within China’s Middle East policy will inevitably push the country towards a reconsideration of its unsustainable approach. The increasingly dire reality in the occupied land of Palestine will eventually burst the bubble of the illusory fantasy inherited from the short-lived peace process of the 1990s and 2000s, and will force China to abandon its unrealistic goal of fraternising with both sides. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, this contradiction in Chinese foreign policy has been exacerbated to an unprecedented degree and Israel has threatened to harm Chinese investments if China continues its diplomatic support to Palestine.

The largest flagship Chinese investment in Israel during this era was the Haifa Bay Port, or new Haifa port. In 2015, Chinese state-owned company Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) signed an agreement with Israel in which it acquired the rights to operate the Haifa Bay Port for 25 years starting in 2021. This agreement was largely publicized in 2018 and once was seen as one of the BRI’s flagship in the Middle East, legally valid until today. As of 2023, the Haifa Bay Port consisted of 80% of Israel’s transshipment containers (Lavi 2024). The prosperous picture of the Chinese-operated Haifa Port project, as I discuss below, would soon be severely damaged in the Gaza war. China is currently paying the costly price of mistrusting the sustainability of its honeymoon period with Israel.

Reviewing China’s foreign policy from the 1980s to the present, one notices that China has been struggling and vacillating between its anti-colonial principles inherited from the Mao era, and its current economic interests. On the one hand, China’s perception of Palestine is still heavily influenced by Mao’s legacy and China still sees Palestine as the anti-colonial frontier that is shielding both Asia and Africa from Western imperialism, but on the other hand, China’s Middle East policy in the post-Mao era is in its nature economic-centric, so China does not wish to forgo its trade with Israel. Political solidarity with Palestine and economic ties with Israel creates a contradiction in China’s foreign policy, and China’s choice is to simply declare itself as a friend of both sides seeking to portray itself as a potential mediator. 

From 1992 until 2023, when the international community still reserved some hope for dialogue and a two-state solution, China was able to manage this contradiction in its foreign policy and to enhance the relationship with Palestine and Israel separately. In the eyes of the Chinese government, its diplomatic and trade relationship with Israel neither became an obstacle to China’s traditional friendship with the Palestinian Authority, nor refrained China from unequivocally speaking in support of the State of Palestine in international platforms such as the United Nations. 

China’s image as a “common friend of both Palestine and Israel,” however, is becoming increasingly unsustainable in recent years because of two main dynamics.  First, this approach is largely based on the premise of the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiation process from the 1990s to early 2000s. As Israeli settlements into the occupied West Bank exacerbates the tension and makes the two-state solution almost impossible to achieve, China’s faith in this solution may seem to be already outdated from the reality on the ground. Second, this foreign policy approach is based on China-Middle East relations from the 1990s-2000s, in which China’s engagement with the region was highly limited in an economic respect and China did not wish to exercise any political influence in the region. However, from 2013, China on the one hand wished to enhance its global reputation in the developing world through renovating its historical solidarity with Palestine; on the other hand, however, through the BRI, Chinese investments in Israel rapidly grew from 2015 to 2023. Therefore, the contradiction between a political and economic agenda in China’s Middle East policy has inevitably intensified in the last a couple of years and China’s attempt to continue its self-perceived “balanced” position has become untenable.

From the early 2000s to 2023, Israel exacerbated its aggression and oppression against the Palestinian people. Some of the most important events include the second Intifada from 2000; Israeli invasion of Lebanon starting in 2006; Israeli wars on Gaza in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021; the Great March of Return demonstration in 2018-2019; Israeli repression of Palestinian protests in 2021, and the genocidal war against Gaza in 2023. In each of these events, China did release several diplomatic statements criticising Israel’s actions, but none of the atrocities committed by Israel has had any impact on China’s trade with Israel. In these two decades, China’s economic ties with Israel have grown tremendously, and this fact prompts the outside world to increasingly doubt the sincerity of the Chinese government’s self-claimed support for Palestinian liberation. 

This contradiction within China’s Middle East policy is destined to push the country to reconsider its unsustainable approach. The increasingly dire reality on the occupied land of Palestine will eventually burst the bubble of the illusional fantasy inherited from the short-lived peace process of 1990s-2000s and force China to abandon its unrealistic goal of fraternizing with both sides. Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, this contradiction in Chinese foreign policy has exacerbated into an unprecedented degree as Israel has threatened to harm Chinese investment if China continues its diplomatic support to Palestine.

The seemingly promising bilateral relationship between China and Israel from 2015 to 2020 created some voices (both within Chinese and Israeli society) that called for a deeper strategic cooperation between the two states. Yet what happened on 7 October 2023, and in particular the Israel bombardment of Gaza that followed, irreversibly destroyed the possibility of business as usual. 

Right after 7 October, the Israeli government demanded China condemn Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and to list Hamas as a terrorist organisation. Unsurprisingly, China refused this demand. The Chinese government does not accept the Western-Israeli narrative that portrays 7 October as the start of history. Instead, China sees the events of that day as one of the many tragedies of the prolonged ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ that has been inherited from the period of British colonial rule. The PRC, as a regime that emerged out of Mao’s strategy of ‘people’s war’, guerrilla warfare, and anti-colonial armed struggle, remains inherently sympathetic towards guerrilla forces in the Global South. Just as Mao’s China became the first non-Arab global power to fully support the PLO, China in the post-Mao era has also unwaveringly refused to label any of the Palestinian resistance organisations, including Hamas, as terrorist organisations. Even as early as 2003, in the period in which China was much more pro-West than it is today and was highly dependent on Israel for the purchase of high-technology and military equipment, China’s official media, Xinhua News Agency, refrained from referring to Hamas as a terrorist organisation in a report on a Chinese female journalist’s interview with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In 2016, under the current administration, this tendency was institutionalised: Xinhua News Agency ordered that all Chinese media “must not refer to Hamas as a terrorist organisation or extremist organisation”. (China University of Petroleum-Beijing 2019)

There is no other document that better reflects the PRC’s official stance on Palestinians’ right to resist, including through armed struggle, than the statement made by Ma Xinmin, Director-General of the Department of Treaty and Law of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and former Chinese ambassador to Sudan, at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on 22 February 2024. In the public hearing on the ‘Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’, Ma unequivocally stated: 

The Palestinian–Israeli conflict stems from Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory and Israel’s longstanding oppression of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people fight against Israeli oppression and their struggle for completing the establishment of an independent state on the occupied territory are essentially just actions for restoring their legitimate rights. (Ma 2024)

Citing numerous articles of international laws, Ma claimed that “the struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression, domination against foreign forces should not be considered terror acts” and that “armed struggle in this context is distinguished from acts of terrorism. It is grounded in international law. This distinction is acknowledged by several international conventions.” He further declared: “in pursuit of the right to self-determination, Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression and complete the establishment of an independent state is an inalienable right, well-founded in international law”. (Ma 2024) 

Ma’s statement at The Hague is the most representative illustration of the Chinese government’s clear stance towards Palestinian armed struggle and resistance organisations in Palestine, and is one of many such statements. Through various pro-Palestine public statements since 7 October, China repeatedly called on Israel to cease its fire immediately, even as early as October 2023. China also continues to vote in support of Palestine in both the United Nations Security Council and the General Assembly. The PRC has proven to the world that it has not abandoned its anti-colonial diplomatic tradition and its solidarity with Palestine, which was shaped in the 1960s and 1970s by Mao and Zhou. Although it currently does not yet have the determination to make further efforts, such as officially joining the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement, and although it has not yet directly used the word ‘genocide’ to define Israeli crimes in Gaza in official diplomatic documents, China has nevertheless proved to the world that it is (at least) unwilling to remain silent or to serve as Israel’s accomplice in this ongoing genocide as the West (the US and Germany in particular) have done. 

From October 2023 onwards, the Chinese delegations to the UN and other international organisations have expressed strong criticism of Israel’s killing of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon. Vehement opposition and diplomatic pressure from Israel have not made China change its position. In addition, China has not abandoned its faith in facilitating dialogue on the issue. Since it is clearly impossible to facilitate a dialogue between Palestine and Israel in the current situation, the Chinese foreign ministry instead attempted to facilitate dialogue among different Palestinian political factions. On 17 March 2024, Ambassador Wang Kejian, China’s special envoy to the Middle East, met with Ismail Haniyeh, then chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau. Few details of this meeting have been published in the press, but it is very likely that it was in this meeting that Wang extended China’s official invitation to diplomats from Hamas to visit Beijing, because less than one month later representatives from Hamas did indeed arrive in Beijing and negotiate with their counterparts from Fatah. The world does not know the details of this meeting in April 2024, which was probably unsuccessful since neither faction published any sort of statement about it. 

Three months later, however, after another round of negotiations in Beijing, beginning on 23 July 2024, 14 political factions from Palestine, led by representatives from Fatah and Hamas, in the presence of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, signed a joint statement known as the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity. The statement states that all factions will cooperate together in “establishing an interim government of national reconciliation focusing on the post-conflict reconstruction of Gaza”. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC 2024) 

While the Beijing Declaration is only symbolic, and alone will not lead to Palestinian unity or stop the ongoing war in Gaza, it is important to contrast this Chinese initiative with an event that took place exactly one day after the closing ceremony of the Beijing meeting and declaration. On 24 July 2024, one of the most disgraceful moments of our era took place on the other side of the Pacific: the countless standing ovations and applause given to Benjamin Netanyahu as he delivered a 56-minute-long speech at the US Congress. This spectacle left the rest of the world shocked by the US Congress’ unconditional and enthusiastic support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. 

Unsurprisingly, China’s diplomatic support for the Palestinians has dragged it into diplomatic conflict with Israel. As early as mid-October 2023, the Israeli foreign ministry repeatedly expressed its frustration with and anger towards China in regard to its refusal to condemn Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Since then, there have been numerous sharp debates and exchanges between Chinese and Israeli diplomats in both bilateral diplomatic channels and public statements, and during UN meetings. 

In response to China’s position, Israel has targeted the Chinese-owned Haifa Bay Port in an effort to pressure China. After October 2023, the Chinese company operating the Port dramatically decreased its trade volume because of security risks as a result of the war, and in January 2024, following the Red Sea Crisis, the Chinese company ceased operation completely. Israeli mainstream media outlet Ynet referred to the Chinese firm as “the first and only company to sever its trade relations with the ports in Israel”. (Azulay 2024) In January 2024, the chairman of Israel’s government-run Ashdod Port demanded that the government end its dealings with China because the country refused to support Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and was allegedly complicit in imposing a de facto maritime embargo on Israel. (Rabinovitch and Saul 2024)

Until today, the Israeli government has not yet officially torn up its 25-year agreement with China over the Haifa Bay Port. However, considering the severe diplomatic tensions between China and Israel throughout this period, and the fact that the Haifa Port was a target of strikes launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and by Iran, the future of this Chinese investment is clearly bleak. Arguably, this project constitutes the biggest mistake so far among the Belt and Road Initiative investments in the region. 

Besides exercising diplomatic pressure and threatening to close the Haifa Bay Port, Israel has also launched a massive campaign on Chinese internet platforms in an effort to sway public opinion in China. 

On 8 October 2023, one day after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the Israeli embassy’s official account on Weibo (a Chinese social media platform similar to X), along with the Weibo accounts of Israel’s consulates in Chengdu and Guangzhou, made posts emphasising that Noa Argamani, one of the hostages kidnapped in the attack, was half Chinese. To further instigate Chinese netizens’ nationalist sentiment, the Israeli embassy also intentionally disseminated misinformation claiming that Argamani was born in Beijing,11 which was later refuted by Argamani’s mother Li Chunhong (whose Israeli name is Liora Argamani). Echoing calls from the Israeli embassy, numerous pro-Israel posts, many of which had characteristics suggesting they were the product of bots, flooded Weibo in an attempt to consolidate the misinformation that Argamani was a Chinese national. From 9 October until 26 December 2023, messages by the Israeli consulate in Chengdu never failed to emphasise Argamani’s Chinese heritage and tried to directly appeal to the emotions of the Chinese masses. A post on 26 October, for example, portrayed Netanyahu as a soft-hearted gentleman who was so heartbroken by the news of Argamani’s mother suffering from cancer that he sought to “directly plead [with the] Chinese ambassador to Israel to deliver his request for help in disregard of protocols and diplomatic norms”.12 

Though the Israeli embassy’s propaganda campaign did not achieve success in winning over a majority of Chinese netizens, it did place serious public pressure on the Chinese government. Since 2011, the Chinese government has emphasised the protection and evacuation of Chinese citizens abroad during crises as an important part of its internal propaganda agenda. In this context it would be detrimental for the Chinese government’s image domestically if a Chinese citizen was held hostage by an entity which China refused to condemn. In addition, the Chinese government normally prefers to deal with such issues in exclusive diplomatic channels, without publicising the matter, but the Israeli propaganda campaign left the Chinese government with no other option but to directly address the issue in public channels. Ironically, this attempt to instigate nationalist sentiment among Chinese people against their government was soon shattered by the very nationalist sentiment it tried to manipulate: when asked in an interview whether either she or her daughter were Chinese citizens, Li Chunhong, in an arrogant tone, chastised Chinese netizens, “Yes I am an Israeli citizen. But how can you Chinese refuse to help me just because I am an Israeli citizen? Do you understand? Helping me is a duty of everyone”. (IFeng News 2023a) Her use of “you Chinese” in this sentence evoked tremendous anger among Chinese netizens, and China’s interests in the affair totally faded away.

In addition to instigating nationalist sentiment through disseminating misinformation, the Israeli embassy also tried various other forms of propaganda online. The most commonly used strategy was simply to publicly criticise China’s diplomatic stance and to promote the Israel narrative on Weibo. On 14 October, for example, the Israeli embassy not only expressed “deep disappointment” towards China’s foreign policy stance, but also criticised the Chinese foreign ministry’s mentioning of large civilian casualties in Gaza as “misinformation that does not align with tragedies and fears which Israel suffered in the last several days”.13 Similar posts are constantly made until today. 

Besides spreading misinformation and openly criticising the Chinese government, the Israeli embassy in Beijing has also been very active in promoting pro-Israel information. For example, Israel uses the typical ‘colonial feminism’ argument to pinkwash itself as the only ‘civilised’ and female-friendly state in the region. On International Women’s Day in 2024, for example, the Israeli consulate in Shanghai organised a webinar linking women’s rights with the 7 October attack.14 

The Israeli embassy has also actively cooperated with collaborators in the Chinese intelligentsia to whitewash war crimes in Gaza. The most astonishing example of this type of propaganda is the controversial statement of Yin Gang, an authoritative and elderly Chinese scholar who served as the deputy general secretary of the state-affiliated China–Middle East Academic Society. Lecturing the Chinese masses on TV that they should “look at the Middle East with apathetic eyes”, Yin blamed the Palestinians for “professionally selling tears to the world” and claimed that “according to my in-depth investigation, not even a single person died in the bombing of al-Ahli Arab Hospital”. In the same interview, he also ridiculed the Chinese masses: “do not cry for Gaza when people tell you a fake death toll claiming that 10,000 civilians died, because this number is exaggerated probably 10 times”. (IFeng News 2023b) Eight months later, after being constantly criticised by Chinese netizens for his whitewashing of Israeli war crimes, Yin died suddenly of a heart attack. The Israeli embassy immediately published a statement referring to him as “an old friend upholding an objective and just stance on Middle Eastern affairs”,15 which was seen by many Chinese netizens as proof of Yin’s connection with the Israeli government.

After reviewing this massive-scale propaganda campaign promoted by the Israeli embassy in China from October 2023 onwards, one must ask: did it succeed in winning over the majority of the Chinese youth? The answer is a resolute ‘no’. Ever since 7 October, Chinese netizens have been overwhelmingly in support of the Palestinians’ just struggle, including their right to armed struggle. In quite poetic language, many young Chinese netizens have referred to the Palestinian parachute forces in the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as ‘dandelions fighters’. This is for two reasons. First, the flying parachutists resembled flying dandelion seeds. Second, dandelion seeds can thrive anywhere they land, and thus the vitality of this plant is seen as similar to the resilience of the Palestinian people. 

On Bilibili, the most popular video-sharing website among Chinese youth, many videos made by Chinese people commemorate the ‘dandelion fighters’. Some of the most popular videos, each of which has more than half a million views, have extremely beautiful and poetic titles, with tremendous emotional power, such as: “Mom, I have turned into a dandelion and flown back to our homeland!”; “The dandelion will never die. It just drifts away to a distant place called homeland”; “The children have grown up from the ruins of the city, and now they have turned into dandelions and drift towards the hometown that their ancestors have missed for generations.”16

Since October 2023, Chinese netizens have shown a great interest in learning more about Palestine. Footage of Gaza can be found everywhere on douyin (the Chinese TikTok) and many online content creators have devoted themselves to creating videos educating audiences on the history of the Palestinian struggle and introducing new developments in the war. Some creators specialise in introducing videos released by Palestinian resistance forces on the Chinese internet and analysing these videos for their audiences.17 Following the death of Yahya Sinwar, some creators presented translations of Sinwar’s novel The Thorn and the Carnation in Chinese, in commemoration of the Hamas leader.18

Countless Chinese citizens have contacted the Palestinian embassy in Beijing via Weibo seeking to make donations to people living in Palestine. And, by contrast, users have left countless critical comments on the Israeli embassy’s website destroying the Israeli government’s propaganda efforts. Ironically, the so-called ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ could not tolerate Chinese netizens expressing their democratic views regarding Palestine: after October 2023, the Israeli government closed off its Weibo comment area, allowing only pro-Israel comments to be displayed. In comparison, the Weibo account of the Palestinian embassy in Beijing, though also sometimes the target of unfriendly voices, has never closed down its comment area or imposed a review and selection process, as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ does. 

It is important to stress that, while the US Department of State bans comparing Israeli policy to that of Nazi Germany as a form of ‘antisemitism’, (U.S. Department of State 2016) Chinese people, as the largest victim of Japanese fascism during World War II, simply cannot help but compare the genocide in Gaza to Japanese massacres of Chinese civilians. In fact, the Chinese people’s own historical trauma of being invaded is exactly why they feel a sense of natural affinity to the Palestinians. Chinese netizens often state that ‘China’s yesterday is Palestine’s today’ or ‘Palestine looks like us 100 years ago’. And they often refer to Palestinian resistance fighters as laoxiang (fellow countrymen), which historically was a term often used to describe Chinese guerilla fighters during WWII. 

In an article on US state-owned propaganda outlet Voice of America (VOA) about alleged antisemitism among Chinese netizens, even the VOA had to reluctantly admit that many Chinese found the Palestinian resistance to be similar to the Northeast Counter-Japanese United Army, a Chinese guerilla force which desperately resisted Japanese occupation for 14 years until the ultimate victory. (Ma 2023) On the same issue, on 24 October 2023, the German embassy in Beijing went so far as to call all Chinese people who compared Israel with Nazi Germany “either ignorant dumbasses or shameless bastards”. In response, the Israeli, German and American embassies in China soon saw the comment areas of their Weibo accounts filled with furious criticism from Chinese netizens, who continued to compare Israeli war crimes in Gaza to the crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany and fascist Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Interestingly, although the Chinese state has never directly adopted this comparison in official statements or government documents, it has implicitly shown sympathy to such comparisons. China Daily, an official outlet of the state, broadcast an interview with Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian ambassador to China, in which he compared the Palestinian people today to Chinese civilians in Nanjing who suffered under Japanese occupation during WWII. (China Daily 2023) Xue Jian, Chinese Consul-General to Osaka, Japan, even shared a painting by young painter Zhou Sheji on his official X account which vividly compares Israeli soldiers to Japanese fascists who slaughtered Chinese children during WWII.19

Reviewing contemporary China’s foreign policy stance towards Palestine, one can clearly see the disjunction between two different legacies. The first legacy was characterised by the revolutionary and radical spirit of the Mao era. It is exactly this Maoist legacy that ensures that support for Palestinian liberation remains a political principle within both the Chinese government and society at large. The second legacy is the so-called ‘balanced approach’ of the post-reform era, which became institutionalised from the late 1980s onwards. This legacy leads the Chinese government to regard its relationship with Israel as neither a threat to China–Palestine relations nor an obstacle to China’s support for the two-state solution.

As in many other cases, the current Chinese administration does not wish to choose between its Maoist past and post-Mao legacies and attempts to simply ignore the disjunction between the two approaches by putting the differences aside and emphasising common ground. As a result, China’s response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza has tended to be mixed. On the one hand, the Chinese state has unequivocally spoken against Israel on all international platforms, and, compared to the West, the Chinese state has made it crystal clear that it supports the Palestinian people’s use of all available means, including armed struggle, against Israeli occupation. When almost all major Western powers are busy physically suppressing pro-Palestine voices by delegitimising them as ‘antisemitic’, the Chinese state not only tolerates, but also largely encourages and interacts with, Chinese netizens’ genuine expression of solidarity with Palestine.

However, it is also a fact that China’s support for Palestine seems to be driven mostly by historical inertia dating back to the Maoist era, and that China has largely ignored the new developments in the global Palestine solidarity movement. As discussed above, China was one of the first countries in the world to recognise the PLO and the State of Palestine, and was once in the vanguard of the global Palestine solidarity movement. In the last two decades, however, despite the fact that China’s historical friendship with the PLO remains a reality, the Chinese state has been quite distant from and unaware of new global trends, such as the BDS movement. The Chinese intelligentsia has also failed to establish fruitful solidarity networks for Track 3 diplomacy with Palestinian intellectuals in Palestine or the global Palestinian diaspora. 

Due perhaps to a lack of understanding of the situation on the ground and an unwillingness to put its trade with Israel at risk, the Chinese government is not willing to accept the painful fact that the two-state solution is becoming increasingly unfeasible and China’s goal of being a common friend to both Palestine and Israel no longer fits a reality in which Palestinians are facing an existential threat. In response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Chinese state has made efforts to support Palestine on diplomatic platforms, but it has not yet recognised the need to officially adopt the word ‘genocide’ to define Israeli crimes in Gaza. Indeed, while China officially supports South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ for breach of the Genocide Convention it has not yet directly used this term in its own diplomatic documents. 

In addition, the Chinese government has been too obsessed with hosting dialogues through its diplomatic platforms in Beijing, as a way of boosting its global reputation, appearing not to have fully realised that charging Israel through international legal platforms such as the ICJ and International Criminal Court, as South Africa has done, would be the best way to boost China’s image. Last, and most importantly, it is unfortunate that the Chinese state apparently continues to know very little about the BDS movement, and that there is almost no discussion, either within government or in society, on the possibility of China or Chinese academic institutions joining the BDS movement. 

Donald Trump’s second term will likely prevent China making any substantial progress on supporting Palestine, beyond publishing diplomatic statements and hosting dialogues. As mentioned above, Beijing is aware of Trump’s strong pro-Israel stance, which explains why it sought to use Israel as a potential bridge for China–US communication during Trump’s first term. Considering Beijing’s honeymoon with Israel has already ended, as seen in the heated diplomatic exchanges in the last year, Beijing has probably already abandoned this fantasy of inviting Israel to act as a middleman. However, Trump’s strong pro-Israel stance will likely also discourage Beijing from taking strong steps against Israel in terms of trade. One can expect that China’s approach will be similar to that after Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital in 2017. On the one hand, China will seize on Trump’s blind support for Israeli crimes as an opportunity to publish more diplomatic statements and host more dialogues, nominally in support of Palestine, in order to promote its international image. On the other hand, however, China will refrain from involving itself in the Palestinian or Lebanese armed struggles or any economic boycott campaigns against Israel, in order to avoid causing additional problems for the already gloomy China–US relations.

Nevertheless, we can still remain cautiously optimistic about the future of China’s role in the Palestine solidarity movement. At the state level, the Israeli government’s hysteria since October 2023 has already made the Chinese government unhappy. China refuses to condemn Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and its quarrels with Israel at the UN have already destroyed the previous honeymoon between the two states. While economic ties between China and Israel may continue to deepen in the future, after the disagreements over the Haifa Bay Port the two states may be reluctant to cooperate with each other on similar large-sale projects in the future. 

In terms of Chinese society and the cultural realm, the genocide in Gaza has prompted the increasingly anti-West Chinese youth to reconnect themselves with the revolutionary legacies of the Mao era. From actively learning about Palestine from online sources to enthusiastically creating poems, songs, videos, paintings, and other literary and artistic creations praising the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation, the present generation of Chinese youth (whose impression of Palestine is largely shaped by the horror of the genocide) is likely to be the most sceptical of the Zionist narrative out of any generation since the 1980s. As the young take up more important positions in the Chinese government and society in the long-run, there is a strong hope that China could possibly (re)embrace its anti-colonial traditions from the 1960s and 1970s and play a more active role in the global solidarity movement for Palestine. 

I would like to end this chapter with a quote from Zhang Chengzhi, a legendary Chinese Hui Muslim writer who invented the term ‘Red Guard’ during his active participation in the Cultural Revolution in his middle-school years and later devoted his career to writing about Palestine and the Islamic World for Chinese audiences. In his famous article ‘The daughter of the Japanese Red Army’, in which he commemorated a group of Japanese Maoists who participated in armed struggles in Palestine in cooperation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the 1970s–1990s, Zhang left his prophecy in poetic language: 

Persistent projects aiming at delegitimising revolutions are doomed to be futile, because domination, oppression, inequality, injustice, and human beings’ intrinsic nature of pursuing truth, all of these things will promote people to again reconsider, again respect, and eventually again re-embrace revolutions. (Zhang 2009)

As the seeds of the dandelions of Palestine drift across the globe and land in the hearts of Chinese youth, these rapidly growing kernels will inevitably break through the bonds of both the hegemony of Western narratives and narrow-minded nationalism. Chinese youth will eventually be inspired to rethink the role of contemporary China and to re-embrace their Arab brothers and sisters.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of TNI.

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People’s Daily (1956) ‘Yiselie renmin buyuan wei yingfamei huozhongquli, yigong qianze diguozhuyi Shandong dui aiji d junshi maoxian yinmou’以色列人民不愿为英美法火中取栗 以共谴责帝国主义煽动对埃及的军事冒险阴谋 [‘Israeli people do not want to risk themselves for Britain, U.S., and France – ICP condemns imperialist instigation for military adventurist conspiracy against Egypt’], 16 September.

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