Sino-Palestinian Relations: From Anti-Imperialist Solidarity to Pragmatism

Mark Reid traces the history of diplomacy between post-Revolutionary China, the Palestinian liberation movement, and Israel, arguing that the PRC’s current status-quo position on the region is the result of its deepening economic ties with Israel and its oil-dependency on the Gulf states.

Introduction

As Israel continues its genocidal assault on Gaza, undeterred by global public opinion and the International Criminal Court, China and Russia have both issued diplomatic statements calling for a ceasefire and ostensibly condemning Israel. Observers on the Left familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the habit of comprador states to issue performative denunciations while cooperating with Israel should read such statements from the BRICS with a similar dose of skepticism. 

Enmeshed in the capitalist world system despite U.S. sanctions, China maintains historic ties to Palestine to provide diplomatic support while simultaneously cultivating economic ties with Israel. Chinese advocacy for the Palestinian cause withstood Mao’s handshake with Nixon even as the PRC pulled back support for most revolutionary movements in the region. Whereas Mao-era China consistently supported both Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the contemporary PRC seeks to take advantage of Israel’s high-tech sector both for upgrading its defense industries and enabling Huawei to compete with its western counterparts. The One Belt, One Road program, moreover, has integrated Israel’s port of Haifa as a vital logistics hub. 

China’s contradictory role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict poses important questions about the nature of multipolarity as well as the ostensible new cold war. If the One Belt, One Road Initiative builds infrastructure in a settler-colonial U.S. client state on which it also relies on for research and development, to what extent can it be said to challenge imperialism? Cheerleaders for multipolarity have to accommodate their assumptions about independent non-imperialist blocs of capitalist powers with the reality of Sino-Israeli cooperation. China is seeking accommodation rather than challenging imperialism, and can be expected to offer opposition only insofar as U.S. policy directly targets Chinese economic interests and seeks to stifle China’s high-tech sector. Nonetheless, China is not favorably positioned to replace the U.S. as Israel’s military and diplomatic benefactor. Due to China’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, Israel is just one of its important trading partners. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are crucial sources of energy against which China’s relationship with Israel must be balanced. 

Unfortunately, there is a dearth of analysis of China’s historic ties to Palestine and growing economic links to Israel in popular left media. Promise Li’s recent piece in Jacobin worked as a corrective to uncritical cheerleading on the part of pro-China multipolarity boosters such as the Qiao Collective, but unfortunately lacked historical context and downplayed Maoist China’s material support for the PLO. Most misleadingly of all, it came close to implying that Israel is no longer dependent on the United States. Upon closer examination, the rise of a multipolar world order will not liberate Palestine, nor is China poised to replace the U.S. as Israel’s primary patron. The U.S. Left’s task is therefore to oppose our own imperialism without illusions regarding rival capitalist states.

1950-1956: Recognition Without Normalization

China’s Middle East policy in the early 1950s had two driving factors. Newly established, diplomatically isolated, and deprived of its U.N. seat, the PRC wanted normalization with any nation willing to establish an embassy. Secondarily, Mao’s China sought to strengthen ties with the Warsaw Pact and states which they perceived as anti-imperialist. China’s assessment of foreign affairs was framed in a discourse of class struggle in which the national bourgeoisie of the global south was depicted as an ally of the socialist camp. 

The former took precedence in the first half of the decade, interrupted only by the Korean War. Partly due to the influence of Soviet foreign policy and partly as a result of Mao’s efforts to find a secure international footing for the new regime, China sought to cultivate diplomatic and economic ties with Israel. All that would change in 1955 and 1956. The Bandung Conference deepened the PRC’s involvement in Middle Eastern affairs and drew China into closer cooperation with the newly-established Arab nationalist regimes in the region. In 1956, China supported Egypt against French, British, and Israeli tripartite aggression and subsequently ceased its outreach to Israel.

Palestine factored little in the PRC’s foreign policy during the formative years prior to Bandung. Before the founding of the PLO, China’s deepening relationship with Arab nationalism, rather than Palestine, proved to be the primary obstacle to Sino-Israeli normalization. The absence of Palestine from China’s diplomatic consideration most likely reflects the former’s political disorganization as well as Soviet diplomatic concerns. The USSR had joined the United States in endorsing the partition plan in a bid to weaken British influence in the Middle East.¹ Between the British repression of the 1936 general strike and the Nakba, Palestine was deprived of any united political representation. As Rashid Khalidi writes, following the British repression of the 1936 general strike and 1937 revolt, “most of the top Arab political leaders and thousands of other cadres, militants, and fighters were imprisoned, interned by the British in the Seychelles, in exile, or dead.”² Moreover, following the Nakba, all of historic Palestine was occupied by Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, none of which were willing to tolerate independent Palestinian political action.³

Having officially declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao’s government sought normalized diplomatic relations with any country that was willing to establish an embassy, while still maintaining a policy of “leaning to one side” and prioritizing relations with the Warsaw Pact and the emerging third world.⁴ Israel recognized the PRC in January 1950, but without establishing an embassy. Apart from absence of formal relations and embassies, Israel remained supportive of the PRC and voted to give the Republic of China’s UN seat to the People’s Republic.⁵ The outbreak of the Korean War forestalled further deepening of diplomatic relations, as Israel backed a U.N. resolution denouncing the Chinese People’s Volunteers as “aggressors.” Thus, diplomatic ties were confined to informal inter-embassy contact in third-party countries, especially Burma.⁶ 

In the aftermath of the Korean War and throughout the early 1950s, China and Israel maintained informal ties with the occasional trade delegation and tentative discussions regarding establishing an embassy. Both parties expressed interest in economic ties, but the U.S. intervened to isolate China and persuaded Israel to rebuff China’s offer of a trade agreement.⁷ Two months prior to Bandung, in February 1955, another Israeli trade delegation visited Beijing, after which China’s Under-Secretary of Trade said over Radio Beijing, “The Chinese people and their government are great friends of Israel and the Jewish people.”⁸

Two events would intervene to halt their gradual outreach. As a result of the Conference of Afro-Asiatic States, or, as it is more widely known, the Bandung Conference, along with the wave of bourgeois-nationalist revolutions in the Arab world, China prioritized relations with rising Arab nationalist states over normalization with Israel. Shortly after Egypt’s July 23rd Revolution in June 1953, the new regime officially decided to recognize the People’s Republic of China, incurring a formal protest from the U.S. for this “unfriendly action.”⁹ As with Israel, Egypt’s recognition of the PRC was not followed up with normalization. Trade delegations, however, expanded China and Egypt’s volume of trade from 1.7 million USD in 1951 to 25.4 million USD in 1955, mostly from Chinese imports of Egyptian cotton.¹⁰ Economic ties preceded diplomatic ties, which would not result in normalization until after the Bandung Conference. Developing ties with Egypt would not impede Sino-Israeli informal relations until Bandung. 

The Bandung Conference came at a time when China sought to strengthen its’ role in the politics of the eastern bloc as well as expand its influence in the postcolonial world. As a result of China’s participation in the Bandung Conference, China drew closer to the emerging bourgeoise-nationalist regimes of the postcolonial world at Israel’s expense. Israel was excluded from the Bandung Conference while a Palestinian delegation was given an unprecedented platform to popularize their cause. Ahmad Shuqairi, the future secretary-general of the PLO, not only publicly raised the issue of Palestine but privately lobbied Zhou Enlai. The Chinese foreign minister appeared moderately supportive as he asserted that  “the problem of Arab refugees from Palestine remains to be solved,” and expressed support for a resolution to recognize the demands of Arab refugees.¹¹ However noncommittal Zhou Enlai’s comments may appear, they came as a pleasant surprise to the Arab delegates, who were already disappointed by Nehru’s indifference.¹² More consequently, Bandung signaled a shift in China’s foreign policy towards the nascent Arab nationalist movements. Having decided to prioritize relations with the Arab world, Beijing suspended its efforts to normalize relations with Israel.¹³ 

Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal was seen as a great achievement for the emerging third world and even warranted a mention in the CPC’s Eighth Party Congress. In his opening address, Mao said, “We firmly support the entirely lawful action of the Government of Egypt in taking back the Suez Canal Company, and resolutely oppose any attempt to encroach on the sovereignty of Egypt and start armed intervention against that country.”¹⁴ In reaction to the tripartite aggression against Egypt, China decisively broke off inter-embassy contact, effectively freezing Sino-Israeli relations for the remainder of the Mao era.¹⁵

1956-1964: Deepening Ties Arab Revolutionaries

Between the Bandung Conference and the founding of the PLO, China’s policy in the Middle East centered around support for Arab nationalism and opposition to reactionary states in the Middle East. In this context, China’s foreign policy did not directly impact Palestine except via China’s ties to states which had come into conflict with Israel. Before the founding of the PLO, the Suez crisis galvanized China’s opposition to Zionism. Although Palestine’s revolutionary movement had yet to coalesce into a united front, Israel’s participation in the tripartite aggression against Nasserist Egypt convinced China to suspend Sino-Israeli informal third-party embassy-based contacts. China’s relationship with Nasser’s Egypt and United Arab Republic was not unconditional, however, and it was undoubtedly harmed by Nasser’s repression of Egyptian communists.

Prior to Deng Xiaoping’s promulgation of the Three Worlds Theory in 1973, the Chinese foreign ministry analyzed the various post-colonial states of Africa and the Middle East in terms of their social formation and class power. In the PRC foreign ministry’s assessment, Nasser was a rightist whose reactionary tendencies were held in check by a rising tide of regional nationalism. The ministry’s conclusion was that China should support the United Arab Republic’s struggle against imperialism “while at the same time avoiding endorsement of Nasser’s anticommunism.”¹⁶ In 1958, Iraq’s monarchy, once a mainstay of the anticommunist Baghdad pact, fell to the July 14 Revolution. Faced with a regime which not only repudiated imperialism, but also cooperated with the Communist Party, China’s foreign ministry immediately intensified criticism of Nasser’s repression of Egyptian communists and invited a delegation from the Syrian Communist Party, in a deliberate slight to Nasser’s United Arab Republic.¹⁷ While China’s relations with the UAR fluctuated, Algeria emerged as a significant ally. Prior to independence, China’s foreign ministry estimated the Algerian working class to number 1.6 million, and was therefore in an advantageous position to lead the national liberation struggle.¹⁸

1965-1977: PLO’s Ally

In the period between the Sino-Soviet split and Nixon’s visit to China, Sino-Soviet competition drove China to give generous support to foreign revolutionary movements. The PRC not only supported the PLO, but also gave military aid to Oman’s People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG). During a brief period following the Cultural Revolution before 1972, China provided more aid to South Yemen than the Soviet Union.¹⁹ Nonetheless, the PRC’s foreign policy saw the struggle for national liberation and the struggle for socialism as two discrete stages. Thus, local communist parties were to be subordinate to the national bourgeoisie, at least until Arab unification.  

In the wake of Lin Biao’s botched coup and Nixon’s visit, the PRC’s foreign policy took a sharp right turn. Revolutionary internationalism gave way to a discourse of non-interference which was followed by diplomatic rapprochement with an array of pro-American regimes, most importantly, Anwar Sadat’s Egypt. Nonetheless, Mao’s China did not recognize Israel even after promulgating the three worlds theory and trade remained negligible until 1979. All the while, Chinese support for the PLO maintained the leadership of its bourgeoise-nationalist wing. In subsequent years, its capitulation would give China an avenue towards normalization.

1965, the year the PLO was founded, was the high water-mark of China’s revolutionary foreign policy. Before the Three Worlds Theory and the rapprochement with the U.S., China’s foreign policy still aimed at undermining imperialism and consolidating the socialist camp, notwithstanding the incipient Sino-Soviet split. At the Afro-Asian Economic Seminar in Algiers in February 1965, the Chinese delegate Nan Han-Chen outlined the purpose of China’s foreign aid:

The starting point of our aid to foreign countries is: in accordance with the spirit of proletarian internationalism, first to support the fraternal countries of the socialist camp to carry out their socialist construction so as to increase the might of the whole socialist camp; secondly to support the newly independent countries in developing their national economies through their own efforts so as to strengthen the forces of the peoples of the world in their united struggle against imperialism and, thirdly, to support those countries which are not yet independent in winning their independence.²⁰ 

China’s support for revolutionary Algeria provided an avenue for the PLO to establish contacts with the PRC. China’s first contact with the PLO came when Fatah’s representative in Algeria, Khalil al-Wazir, joined an Algerian delegation to Beijing.²¹

Palestine took on increasing importance to China’s foreign policy objectives not only because of their struggle against imperialism, but because of Israel’s role as an outpost of the West. When Ahmad Shuqairi, Yasser Arafat’s predecessor, visited Beijing in 1965, Mao Zedong framed the Palestinian struggle in terms of a worldwide struggle against imperialism and for the liberation of Asia. Taiwan and Israel were both, in Mao’s view, proxies of the United States, and therefore the defeat of both were essential to the independence of Asia:

Imperialism is afraid of China and of the Arabs. Israel and Formosa are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate of the great continent, and we are the rear. Their goal is the same. . . Asia is the biggest continent in the world, and the West wants to continue exploiting it. The West does not like us, and we must understand this fact. The Arab battle against the West is the battle against Israel. So boycott Europe and America, O Arabs!²²

Shuqairi’s delegation to China arrived in Beijing on March 17th, where he met Zhou Enlai for the first time since the Bandung Conference ten years prior. This time, their meeting would result in military aid in addition to rhetorical and diplomatic support. According to Shuqairi’s memoirs, Zhou Enlai promised free small-arms shipments to be routed through Egypt.²³ The Soviet Union may have supported Nasser, but did not provide material aid to the PLO and backed the land-for-peace framework of U.N. resolution 242, which the Beijing review denounced as “humiliating.”²⁴

As the only major power willing to support the PLO, China’s aid was a significant factor in the PLO’s ability to establish itself as the de facto leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Israeli intelligence estimates that Chinese arms shipments to various PLO factions totaled $5 million, or $33 million adjusted for inflation, and included small arms and training for PLO officers in a military academy in Nanning.²⁵

Although Fatah was the recipient of a majority of Chinese support, the PFLP also benefited. But, aid to the PFLP came with one condition. They had to accede to the leadership of the PLO, regardless of the class character of Yasser Arafat’s faction of Fatah. Arab unification and the overthrow of imperialism’s outpost in the Middle East was a necessary requisite to building socialism. In China’s view, Palestinian unity behind the PLO was crucial, even if it meant that the two largest Marxist parties in Palestine would have to cede leadership to the national bourgeoisie. Although the PFLP and DFLP shared more ideological similarities with the CPC than Fatah, China’s foreign ministry encouraged all Palestinian revolutionaries to unite behind Yasser Arafat’s faction of the PLO, consistent in their belief that Palestinian liberation and Arab unification had to precede the struggle for socialism.²⁶ China’s foreign ministry had expressed similar views to a delegation from Yemen’s revolutionary government and stressed that the national democratic revolution had to precede socialism.²⁷

Although exact numbers are hard to find, and those that are available come by way of Mossad estimates, interviews with Fatah and PFLP spokespeople indicate that the PRC consistently provided military aid with few strings attached. In the words of a PFLP spokesperson, “the Chinese do not always give what you ask for, but you discuss with them and they give you what they think you need. They have no powerful intelligence service in the Middle East, but they know what to give us because we are comrades.”²⁸

The Sino-Soviet split may have led China to normalize relations with South Africa’s apartheid regime and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, but Palestine remained the cornerstone of China’s Middle Eastern policy. Throughout the Middle East, China drastically reduced support for revolutionary movements and built connections to pro-U.S. comprador regimes, cutting support for the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf in Oman, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, and revolutionary Yemen, while establishing ties to Ethiopia and Sudan.²⁹ Despite the mid-70s softening of China’s foreign policy, the PRC continued to disappoint Israel by insisting that “without a settlement, including a full restoration of Palestinian rights and a complete withdrawal from all occupied territories… there would be no relations with Israel.”³⁰

Following the Sino-Soviet split, China’s relationship with Fatah waxed and waned as the latter’s relationship with the USSR developed. The PFLP, not Israel, was the primary beneficiary of Sino-Soviet tensions. In 1974, a PFLP delegation was received by the chairman of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and the following year the Chinese ambassador to Lebanon visited George Habash in a PFLP camp.³¹ Fatah’s outreach to the Soviet Union never resulted in a split with China, and China’s foreign policy still subordinated the Marxist factions of the PLO to the national bourgeoisie.

After the ascension of Anwar Sadat to power in Egypt, China’s anti-Soviet inclinations led them to hail Sadat as a fighter against Soviet hegemonism.³² This could have, in principle, lead to tensions with the PLO. Nonetheless, China balanced renewed outreach to Egypt with an invitation to a PLO delegation in April 1976, in which the PLO’s Political Department Chief was received by Vice Premier Li Xiannian.³³ This indicates that, despite warming relations with most U.S.-backed states and declining support for foreign revolutionary movements, Palestine retained Chinese support. As will be seen in the 1980s, China’s cooperation with Anwar Sadat paved the way for normalization, coupled with increasing economic ties to Israel.

1977-1991: Outreach Resumes, Efforts Towards Normalization Pick Up

Although Mao’s post-1972 foreign policy was marred by compromises with apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile as well as the abandonment of revolutionary Yemen, the PRC nonetheless delivered material aid to some revolutionary movements, including the PLO. Under Deng Xiaoping, China’s foreign policy took a further rightward swing. The enemy was, on paper, both U.S. and Soviet hegemonism. In practice, the Soviet Union was seen as the main enemy. Anti-Soviet hegemonism furnished the ideological basis for post-Mao China’s support of Anwar Sadat as China resumed informal ties to Israel. Resumption of ties proceeded quietly and gradually, and without explicitly repudiating the PLO. Where once the PRC had excoriated the USSR for its tacit approval of a two-state settlement, the Deng-era foreign ministry would hail the 1978 Camp David accords as a great advance.

Following Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to power after Hua Guofeng’s brief interregnum, China and Israel quickly resumed informal contact. This time, communication took place through a corporate intermediary. Shaul Eisenberg, the founder of the Israel Corporation with ties to Israel’s finance ministry, had decades of experience doing business with Japan and Korea.³⁴ He contacted the Chinese embassy in Vienna, after which the Chinese Council of International Trade issued a formal invitation. His Eisenberg Group sold a wide variety of industrial and agricultural products to China, and his investment company United Development opened 20 offices in China at its height.³⁵ When the Sino-Vietnamese war broke out, Eisenberg brokered the entry of Israel’s arms industry to China. In February 1979, Eisenberg organized a delegation to China which included the CEO of Israeli Aircraft Industries. In an era in which the United States was still skeptical of China’s new direction, China welcomed their support.³⁶

As economic relations moved forward covertly, the Camp David accords and the PLO’s reformism paved the way to an eventual establishment of full diplomatic ties. Following the death of Mao Zedong, China pivoted away from the PLO and the PLO pivoted towards the Soviet Union. As China explored new avenues of trade, the PRC’s formal diplomatic position initially remained unchanged, while material aid to the PLO dried up.³⁷ China warmly welcomed the PLO’s 1988 Algiers Declaration, in which the PLO leadership endorsed a reformist path and repudiated armed struggle.³⁸

Although China’s state media did not explicitly celebrate the Camp David accords, a shift in the PRC’s foreign ministry’s behavior was evident in their acceptance of the international conference as a means by which the conflict could be solved. This would, of course, require official diplomatic channels. In 1986, Chinese and Israeli delegates met in New York. Israel’s U.N. delegate Avraham Tamir regularly met with his Chinese counterpart in 1987.³⁹

Eisenberg’s activities in China signaled a shift in the latter’s foreign policy from anti-imperialism, albeit marred by knee-jerk anti-Sovietism. The near-total collapse of Arab nationalism and socialism in the Middle East and the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution provided a path towards overt normalization through multilateral diplomacy. In 1991, Reuven Merhav, Israel’s foreign ministry general director, arrived in Beijing to negotiate with Chinese vice foreign minister Yang Fucheng, and normalization was officially announced on January 24, 1992.⁴⁰

1992-present: Normalization, Economic Cooperation

As the Cold War subsided and China increasingly depended on foreign oil, the Middle East no longer signified a site of struggle against imperialism. The initial impetus behind China’s rapprochement with Israel was access to Western technology. By the 1990s, the impediments of Arab nationalism had also faded away while the importance of Israeli technology to China’s ruling class had only grown. The pragmatism implied by the Three Worlds Theory was no longer burdened by residual anti-imperialism and the absence of  Soviet competition allowed economic interests to take the lead. 

Of equal importance, the restoration of capitalism in China coincided with the virtual disappearance of Arab nationalism. In the era of Nasserism, expanding ties with the Middle East necessitated a rejection of Israel. From the 1990s onward, diplomatic pronouncements substituted for action. Officially, China today supports the two-state solution according to the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.⁴¹ In practice, however, China’s diplomatic support for Palestine is coupled with rapidly-increasing investment in Israel, including a key Belt and Road port.

On March 21, 2017, China and Israel formally upgraded their relationship to an “innovative and comprehensive partnership.”⁴² While largely symbolic, formal upgrading of relations put an official stamp on a deepening economic relationship, coming on the heels of the 2015 “Creative Cooperation Summit” which inaugurated 50 high-tech cooperative projects over the subsequent three years.⁴³

Palestine and Xi Jinping’s Middle East Policy

To assess the limits of today’s asymmetric multipolarity, we should situate China’s investment in Israel in terms of the perspective on the Middle East as outlined by China’s major policy think-tanks. China’s leading research institutes, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Shanghai International Studies University’s Middle East Studies Institute, see China’s role in the Middle East as that of a guarantor of stability, in order to both contain threats from extremism and to secure a supply of energy. In official discourse, this is referred to as a “win-win” foreign policy, by which trade, stability, and non-interference will propel all parties’ economic growth. 

China’s outlook on Palestine remains firmly rooted in the Oslo framework, as confirmed by many post-October 7th declarations in the U.N. China seeks to use Israel as a hub of the One Belt, One Road Initiative and a source of technology. Nonetheless, the unresolved Palestine question and U.S. interference threaten to upend Sino-Israeli ties and upset regional stability. Thus, the Chinese government places its hopes in the resumption of the peace process, long since abandoned by its architects, and the eventual implementation of the two-state solution. 

Officially, China’s Middle Eastern policy flows from a need to assert itself on the world stage within a framework of mutual non-interference. The Communist Party’s 18th party congress, which marked the end of the Hu Jintao administration and Xi Jinping’s rise, put forward a new framework for China’s foreign policy which promised a more active foreign policy to the benefit of all nations regardless of ideology. Officially, China’s new foreign policy is based on “win-win cooperation” and non-interference.⁴⁴

The three main points are: China will defend its interests on the world stage as a world power, promotion of mutually-beneficial development, and cooperation without alliances and rejecting confrontation in favor of dialogue. Applied to Palestine and the Middle East, China’s new framework implies neither an open competition with the U.S. for hegemony nor a return to supporting Palestinian liberation. Moreover, CASS researcher Tang Zhichao has cautioned against the temptation to fill the vacuum of U.S. retreat  by using the Middle East as a platform to resist the latter’s hegemony.⁴⁵ Rather, China’s strategic concerns with the Middle East are threefold: maintaining China’s territorial integrity, containing extremism emanating from the region, and ensuring the sustainability of China’s economic growth.³²

According to CASS, the Middle East requires China’s active engagement due to its role as a crucial supplier of energy and source of instability along China’s borders. China’s role, in this context, should be as a stabilizing force by establishing good relations with all regimes regardless of internal policy. Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are all considered key partners. 

Tang Zhichao, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, justifies China’s relationship with Israel while maintaining rhetorical fidelity to China’s anti-imperialist history. In the past, the Palestine question forced China and Israel apart. The peace process and the two-state solution provide an ideological justification for China to reach out to Israel. Ties to Israel are not seen as unconditional, however, and the role of the U.S. complicates China’s attempts to import technology.

Israel was founded on May 14, 1948. Nonetheless, China and Israel did not formally establish embassies until January 24, 1992. For a long period, Sino-Israeli relations faced two severe obstacles. One of them was the Palestine question. China had no choice but to choose sides. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, China firmly sided with the just cause of the Palestinian people and firmly stood by the Arab world. As the peace process advanced, Sino-Israeli relations could advance. As the peace process retreats, Sino-Israeli relations retreat.⁴⁶

In the context of the gradual slide towards normalization in the 1980s, it might be more accurate to say that as Israel’s relationship with other Middle Eastern states advances, Sino-Israeli ties develop. When Israel clashes with its neighbors, Sino-Israeli relations deteriorate. 

Although U.S. pressure has not dissuaded Israel from accepting Chinese investment or joining One Belt, One Road, the U.S. has successfully pressured Israel into canceling trade deals with China due to a perceived risk to national security, or, more likely, to restrict technology transfers. In 2000, less than a decade after China and Israel normalized relations, Israel bowed to U.S. pressure and canceled a deal to provide China with the Phalcon Airborne Early Warning control system. Israel took a similar position again in 2005, when Israel’s IAI canceled an agreement to maintain Harpy assault drones.⁴⁷ In the latter case, the U.S. pressured Israel into signing a Memorandum of Understanding “establishing that US approval was requisite for any defense and dual-use exports to China.” 

The One Belt, One Road Initiative relies on Chinese state-owned enterprises, but remains firmly within the logic of capital, and the One Belt, One Road’s inauguratory Vision document outlines a market-driven process scaffolded by state intervention. The market will play a “decisive role” in resource allocation.⁴⁸ Its absence of binding mechanisms comparable to the IMF and World Bank, its vague framework, along with indifference to the internal affairs of any constituent states, are the sources of its success. In 2017, during Netanyahu’s meeting with Xi Jinping, it was announced that Israel and China would advance their economic cooperation under the framework of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, officially bringing Israel into the One Belt, One Road Initiative.⁴⁹

Liu Zhongmin of the Shanghai Foreign Languages University lays the blame for the current conflict on the way in which the Abraham Accord sidelined Palestine. Nonetheless, he remains confident that Israel’s assault on Gaza won’t lead to a regional war. In an interview with Guangming Ribao, he said:

… the root of the problem lies at the marginalization of the Palestine problem, among those are both Israel and Palestine, due to many complicated internal contradictions, and the United States, especially the Trump administration, circumventing the two-state solution in order to implement the Abraham Accords which one-sidedly advance normalization of the Arab states and Israel.⁵⁰ 

Although regional tensions have been exacerbated, he remained confident that the Houthis could not intervene beyond the occasional drone strike, and that the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel might intensify, but won’t escalate into a full-scale war.

China’s Economic Interests in the Middle East

Sino-Israeli volume of trade had been steadily growing from $3 billion dollars in 1992 to $10 billion dollars in 2013.⁵¹ Although China’s ties to Israel are conditioned on its relationship with the wider Arab world, Israel’s status as the “Global Silicon Valley” incentivizes both the Chinese state and private firms to invest. Tang Zhichao notes that Israel has the world’s highest number of technology startups per capita.⁵² High-tech manufacturing comprises over 50% of Israel’s industry.⁵³ Since normalization, Sino-Israeli cooperation has expanded to include counterterrorism, water desalination, data management, software development, and finance. Most notably, China’s flagship tech company Huawei outsources much of its research and development to the Israeli company Toga Networks.⁵⁴ Not limited to Huawei, many Chinese firms eye Israeli cooperation for research and development. In 2015 alone, Israeli startups received $500 million dollars from Chinese investors.⁵⁵ Private sector investors in Israel include the Giant Interactive Group, which bought the Israeli software company Playtika for $4.4 billion dollars, and the appliance company MIDEA, which invested $170 million dollars in the Israeli firm Servotronics Motion Control.⁵⁶

As it had been when Deng Xiaoping first courted Israeli investors, technology transfers remain a key motive for Chinese policy-makers. For Israel, Chinese trade brings with it infrastructure construction, both from China’s private sector and from Belt and Road projects. In China’s view, Israel’s role as a “science and technology power,” as well as its geostrategic location, gives it influence disproportionate to its population. The One Belt, One Road initiative sought to integrate Israel in a network of ports and high-speed rail which would link China to western markets, and potentially bypass the Suez Canal.⁵⁷ Israel, for its part, sought to resolve transportation bottlenecks resulting from its dependence on maritime trade.⁵⁸ In 2015, after Israel signed on to One Belt, One Road, the Shanghai International Port Group won a $1.7 billion dollar contract to operate the port of Haifa for 25 years.⁵⁹

Amidst a private sector eager to take advantage of Israel’s IT sector, China’s economic ties to Israel have grown exponentially while Palestine languishes on the margins. As of 2021, China and Israel’s total volume of trade reached $18.24 billion. China’s volume of trade with Palestine, on the other hand, only reached $248 million.⁶⁰ China’s trade with Palestine, moreover, consists almost entirely of Chinese exports. Taken in isolation, Palestine would appear to exert little influence over China’s Middle East policy. However, as in the 1980s, China’s Palestine policy is mediated by the need to maintain good relations with the surrounding Arab states. Today, even more than in the 1980s, energy is the overarching factor in China’s relationship with the wider Middle East.

The expansion of Chinese capital, highly dependent on foreign oil, brings with it changing priorities in the Middle East. When the Bandung Conference gave a platform to the future PLO leadership, China’s interest in the Middle East was primarily political, notwithstanding small purchases of Egyptian cotton. Both for bolstering an anti-imperialist bloc and to regain the U.N. seat occupied by the Republic of China, politics was in command of China’s Middle Eastern diplomacy. Today, as the world’s largest importer of crude oil, the Middle East signifies resource security for China. Middle Eastern oil in 2014 accounted for 52% of China’s crude imports.⁶¹ Although China has somewhat diversified its sources of petroleum imports, Saudi Arabia remains its number one supplier, providing 18.4% of China’s crude oil.⁶²

China’s relationship with Israel takes place in the context of a diplomatic balancing act between Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, with Palestine factoring into the equation only insofar as other Middle Eastern states make an issue over it. The calculus of Maoist China prior to the Three Worlds Theory, in which class struggle formed the basis for its assessment of each Middle Eastern regime, has been replaced by the self-interest of China’s bourgeoisie, which seeks cooperation with Israel’s high-tech economy, and the state’s need for resource security, for which good relations with the Arab world are an imperative. Tang Zhichao frankly writes that China’s priority in the Middle East is resource security, which, unlike IT investment, is defined as a core interest.⁶³ Both goals can be simultaneously pursued only insofar as the Arab world remains under the heel of comprador regimes.   

China’s role in the repression of Palestine is not comparable to the United States, however. While Haifa may constitute an important transit hub on the Belt and Road, China’s ties to its oil suppliers are of greater concern. Some analysts, such as Tariq Kenney-Shawa, have claimed that U.S. support is no longer necessary for Israel to maintain its military advantage over regional threats.⁶⁴ Recent events have amply demonstrated that Israel remains dependent on the U.S. for sustained military operations. Operation Al Aqsa Flood commenced on October 7, 2023. The IDF needed U.S. munitions on October 10.⁶⁵ Ansar Allah’s blockade of the Red Sea is already delineating the limits of China’s support for Israel. Although the Shanghai International Port Group continues to operate the port of Haifa, the Chinese state-owned shipping company COSCO has suspended shipments to Israel.⁶⁶

However naïve Mao-era China’s faith in the national bourgeoisie of the Arab world may have been, the PRC succeeded in providing meaningful support to the Palestinian cause. It is evident from the trajectory of Fatah, China’s ties to Anwar Sadat, and the slow but steady slide towards normalization in the 1980s, that a two-stage approach to national liberation and socialism paved the way for capitulation. The pragmatism of the Three Worlds Theory marks the first stage in China’s disengagement from revolutionary movements in the Middle East. By the mid-1970s, Maoist China had already abandoned the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen and the PFLOAG in Oman. When Deng Xiaoping came to power, resuming economic ties to Israel did not require formal normalization, but could function via informal inter-embassy contact and outreach to individual capitalists, the proximate cause of which was a war of aggression against a socialist country recovering from a devastating war. 

However, China’s ties to Israel are extremely fragile when compared to the PRC’s need to maintain energy security. COSCO’s suspension of shipments to Israel demonstrates, moreover, that China’s bourgeoisie is willing to cut its losses when regional instability threatens profits. China’s support for Palestine has, until now, taken the form of low-cost, low-impact diplomatic gestures in the United Nations, in which they have merely reiterated their long-standing support for the two-state solution. If regional instability threatens China’s energy supply, China could quietly divest from Israel. Sino-U.S. rivalry bears little resemblance to traditional inter-imperialist rivalry, as China deliberately avoids using its leverage in the Middle East to harm U.S. interests. Today’s multipolarity is, therefore, far more limited than either its proponents or third-campist opponents would believe. Rising semi-peripheral capitalist powers are not advancing a new political or economic framework, nor do they seek to challenge the IMF, World Bank, or U.S. regional proxies. Capitalist China will neither provide material aid to the Palestinian cause nor endanger its energy supply or profits on Israel’s behalf. For supporters of Palestine in the United States, the main enemy is still at home.

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2. Ibid, 153.
3. Ibid, 181.
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