Chinese foreign policy on Palestine has reflected the disjunction of two eras: revolutionary Maoist support for Palestinian liberation vs. the more recent “balanced approach” accommodating Israel. The Gaza genocide, however, could prompt a new path.
Reviewing contemporary China’s foreign policy stance towards Palestine, one can clearly see the disjunction between two different legacies: The first legacy was tempered by the revolutionary and radical spirits of the Mao era, and 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 institutionalized since the late 1980s, and this legacy basically prompts the Chinese government to regard its relationship with Israel as neither a threat for China-Palestine relations nor an obstacle to China’s support for the two-state solution.
Just like in any other aspects, the current administration of China does not wish to pick a side between its Maoist past and post-Mao legacies and attempts to simply ignore the disjunction between two approaches by putting the differences aside and emphasizing common ground. As the result, China’s responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza tends 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 to use all available means, including armed struggle, against Israeli occupation. When almost all major Western powers are busy in physically suppressing pro-Palestine voices by delegitimizing them as “anti-Semitic,” the Chinese state not only tolerates, but also largely encourages and interacts with the Chinese netizens’ genuine expression of their sense of justice for Palestine.
Nevertheless, one can still remain cautiously optimistic about the future of China’s role in the solidarity movement for Palestine. At the state-level, the Israeli government’s hysteria since October 2023 has already made the Chinese government unhappy. China refuses to condemn the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and quarrels with Israel in 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 quibbles over the Haifa Bay Port, both states may be reluctant to cooperate with each other on similar large-sale projects in the future.
In terms of social culture, the war in Gaza prompted the ideologically increasingly anti-West Chinese youth to reconnect themselves with the revolutionary legacies of the Mao era. Through actively learning about Palestine from online sources and enthusiastically creating poems, songs, videos, paintings, and any other literary and artistic creations praising the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation, a generation of Chinese youth, whose impression of Palestine is largely shaped by the horror of current genocide in Gaza, is likely to become a generation that is the most sceptical of the Zionist narrative since the 1980s. With the young taking up more important positions in the Chinese government and society in the long-run, there is a strong hope that China will possibly (re)embrace its anti-colonial traditions in the 1960s-1970s and play a more active role in the global solidarity movement for Palestine.
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 bounds of both the hegemony of Western narratives and narrow-minded nationalism. Eventually Chinese youth will be inspired to rethink the role of contemporary China and to re-embrace their fellow Arab brothers and sisters.