Our article on the solemn statement by the Chinese foreign minister calling for an end to the massacre in Gaza has provoked a flurry of polemical reactions, often violent. We choose two that, put together, perhaps condense the “arguments”, if arguments they can be called, hurled against our interpretation of that statement, and against our analysis of the relationship between today’s China and the Zionist state and economy.
- “This article says a lot of bullshit. In China there are Palestinian flags everywhere. China has recognized Hamas. There is no trade between China and Israel and another list of things for which you would be better off writing on Mickey Mouse.”
- “The article is full of inaccuracies. The first is that in China it is forbidden to carry Palestinian flags. They are everywhere. In markets, in shops and in the most institutional parts. There are even symbolic Palestinian embassies. Trade between the two countries began only in 2001 and has dropped drastically year after year until it stopped due to pressure from the United States. I don’t want to go on but it has been since the 1950s (when Mao declared that Taiwan and Israel were the two gates of imperialism to Asia) that the relations between China and Israel have never existed.”
Let’s see now whether the bullshit and inaccuracies are ours or our critics’. Later we will try to explain in broad terms why our critics have uttered such gross nonsense that it would be hilarious, if it were something to laugh about.
*On diplomatic relations between China and Israel
China and Israel have had regular diplomatic relations since January 1992. The Israeli embassy in Beijing is located at No. 17 Tianzelu, Chaoyang District, 100600 Beijing. The current Zionist ambassador is Irit Ben-Abba. If you want to get informed, and avoid saying other stupid things, here is the link:
https://new.embassies.gov.il/beijing/en/the-embassy
Since the beginning of the genocide, there is no record of any diplomatic move by China against the Zionist state, such as: withdrawing the ambassador for consultations. If you do, prove us wrong. Brazil made this move, but at the same time continued to supply its oil to the genocidal state. Does the diplomatic move count more, or the oil?
*On trade relations between China and Israel
According to one of our very informed critic (n. 1), “there is no trade between China and Israel”. According to data provided by the editorial staff of “al Jazeera”, who perhaps knows a little more than him, China is in 2024 (and has been for years) the leading exporting country to Israel – value of Chinese exports to the Zionist state: 19.097 billion dollars (absolute record), the United States, second in the ranking, exports 9.4 billion, Germany 5.6, Italy 3.6. In times of genocide, the greatest support for the economy and the “normal functioning” of Israeli society, and therefore of its war machine, comes from China, with an enormous mass of goods of all kinds – we have repeatedly specified that the weapons, instead, come from the great historical protectors of Israel: the United States and European countries (Germany and Italy in the lead). To carry out the genocide, both weapons and goods of all kinds are needed. If you can, prove otherwise.
Below is the link to the article from “al Jazeera”:
According to the other very well-informed critic (n. 2), however, “trade between the two countries began only in 2001 and dropped drastically year after year until it was stopped due to pressure from the United States”. Bullshit! Of course, the pressure from the United States was strong, but absolutely nothing was stopped. Trade between China and Israel actually doubled in the period 2013-2022. Zhang Shen claims (read it in Spanish in the original version, and not in the carefully purged version by “Contropiano”) that between China and Israel, in the period 2015-2020, there was even “a brief idyll of growing trade and investment” due to the convergent strategic interests of the two states. During his visit to China in 2017, Netanyahu (yes, that’s right) called the bilateral relationship between China and Israel “a perfect marriage,” showing interest in joining the New Silk Road project. China, in turn, announced that it would establish an “innovative integral association” with Israel. Not bad for non-existent relations, don’t you think?
However, however, another critic objects, since October 7, 2023, “everything has collapsed.” Bullshit! We have already recalled the data relating to 2024 – the key year of the genocide – provided by the research by “al Jazeera”: China is by far the largest exporter of goods to the Zionist state. That would be enough. But Zhang Shen tells us that Chinese exports to Israel fell by only 1.5% in 2024 compared to 2023. Would you call that a slump? Check it out.
To date – that’s what we’ve been talking about! – the essential economic relations between China and Israel have not been affected by the genocide in Gaza. Nor have they been affected by the ongoing ethnic cleansing that has taken place in the West Bank since 1992, or by the recurring reprisal operations against the population and resistance in Gaza, against the Palestinian uprisings from 1988 to 2021 [Intifada of the Stones, Intifada of al-Aqsa, Great March of Return, Intifada of Unity]. Indeed, this was precisely the period in which these relations developed to the maximum. So much so that in 2020 the alarmed US government contracted the infamous Rand Corporation to investigate Chinese investments in Israel in technology and infrastructure, and the implications for the security of both Israel and the United States – see how far the “non-existent relations” had gone… Check it out.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3176.html
*On the aid of Chinese companies to settlers in the West Bank and the Chinese-Indian management of the port of Haifa, essential for the supplies of weapons to the IDF
More criticism has been received by our assertion that important Chinese state-owned (note) and private enterprises have been and are directly involved in the construction of new settlements in the West Bank and in the operation of the port strategic port of Haifa (which by 2024 was handling the bulk of the genocide weapons supplies). If you don’t believe it, check with another credible source: “Middle East Eye”. Or, if you prefer, with an official Zionist source. The huge Chinese state-owned company involved is the Shanghai International Port Group. The agreement, which is valid for 25 years, is defined by the Zionist leaders themselves as aimed at building “a modern technological port, the opening of which will revolutionize the economy and will have an impact on all of us, from industrialists to consumers, as it will reduce the cost of living”, “one of the most important infrastructure projects for the future of Israel” – the future of Israel as a colonial state carrying the project of “greater Israel”, right? But it’s not just about the port of Haifa; even the expansion of the port of Ashdod, just north of Gaza!, has been entrusted to a large Chinese company, China Harbour (investment of 930 million dollars).
Link to the article by Razan Shawamreh on “Middle East Eye”:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/china-quietly-aiding-israels-settlement-enterprise-how
https://www.israele360.com/israele-inaugura-il-terminal-portuale-di-haifa
*On the help of Chinese technology in the surveillance of Palestinians
To make sure nothing is missing, others have still contested that China does not supply weapons to Israel – a completely empty contestation, because we have never stated this – and that it has “absolutely nothing” to do with the surveillance of Palestinians. Lie! The Chinese company Hikvision (Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd.), whose shareholding is majority state-owned, supplies the Zionist state and its army with facial recognition technology (very advanced in China) and for surveillance cameras: both in East Jerusalem and in the cities of the West Bank. This is documented in a 2023 Amnesty International report that accuses the Jewish state of having built a computerized apartheid, Automated Apartheid.
Another type of collaboration should also be remembered, that between Chinese and Israeli universities, precisely in the most advanced technological research which is by its nature dual, as everyone knows, that is, together, and inseparably, civil and military: in 2014, Tel Aviv University and Tsinghua University in Beijing created a 300 million dollar research center; in 2015, Peking University and Tel Aviv University signed a memorandum of understanding for the creation of a joint research institute. In the same year, Shantou University and the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel created the Guangdong Technion Institute of Technology. Anything to watch?
Click to go to Automated%20Apartheid.pdf
https://www.today.it/mondo/sorveglianza-digitale-israele-palestina-cina-hikvision.html
*On Palestinian flags and student protests for Palestine in June 2024
Our critics object: Palestinian flags are everywhere. A silly or bad faith objection, since we have never dreamed of saying that Palestinian flags are banned in China. We stated, instead, the following: “Until now in China it has been banned to demonstrate for Palestine – we have before our eyes two, two in number, students, whose Palestinian flag they were timidly waving was taken away by the police”. Don’t believe it? Look below on YouTube – the fact happened in Jiangsu, and also elsewhere, for example at a youth music festival in Shaanxi, where a Palestinian flag was confiscated by the police. The day is June 7, 2024, national day for the entrance exam in university colleges, when – perhaps due to some online agreement – in several cities some students showed up with the Palestinian flag.
Now, in 2023, the estimate of the Chinese population is 1 billion and 409.7 million people. You critics have a single frame of the number of street demonstrations that have taken place in China from October 2023 to today? Send it to us, and we will publish it.
Zhang Shen recalls that in the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese support for Palestine was not limited to the diplomatic level, but there was a real intentional institutionalization of “discourses of support for Palestine in the culture of society. The first and most direct form was promoting mass demonstrations. As the propaganda documentary The Palestinian People Will Win, made by the Chinese government in 1971, shows, the Chinese state frequently organized mass demonstrations in front of the embassies of Palestine, Egypt and Syria in Beijing to express its solidarity”. The second form was to promote as much as possible the knowledge of the history of the oppression of the Palestinian people by the colonial state of Israel through the voice of the Palestinian militants themselves. During that period, the works of Ghassan Kanafani, for example, were widely distributed in China, and comics such as “Little Talal” and “Little Hero Qassam” for young and very young people had an even greater diffusion – at a popular level. The peak, on this level, was reached, of course, during the Cultural Revolution. It is worth remembering that the “worker theory group” of a heavy machine tool factory in Wuhan wrote, together with some history professors from the Central China Normal University, the book “Origin and Development of the Palestinian Question”, which was later published, in 1976, by one of the most prestigious state-owned publishing houses.
Exactly how things are today, don’t you think?
Zhang Shen’s text, carelessly cited by “Contropiano” (and therefore mutilated), documents how much sympathy for Palestine there is – on social media – on the part of many young Chinese Internet users, and how widespread the desire to know more about the struggle of the Palestinian people is. There is also the recognition of a parallel history, “Palestine resembles China 100 years ago” (the reference is to the ferocious Japanese occupation that lasted 14 years, and ended with the total defeat of the Japanese imperialists). But precisely this widespread sympathy on social media, which Shen attributes “to the historical inertia of the Maoist era”, clashes with the total absence of mass demonstrations for Palestine. Or not?
We invite critics to take note of what we wrote: it seems likely to us that the ban on street demonstrations for Palestine could – at this point – also be loosened for cynical reasons, of geo-political interests, of the power of the Chinese state, which however have nothing to do with the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.
https://jacobinlat.com/categoria/series/articulos-del-transnational-institute-tni
https://www.tni.org/en/video/zhang-sheng-why-chinese-netizens-call-palestinian-fighters-dandelions
https://en.haberler.com/river-to-the-sea-chinese-students-express-1966933
*But “it’s been going on since the 1950s (when Mao declared that Taiwan and Israel were the two gates of imperialism to Asia)”…
This, then, is the supposed “strong” argument – the continuity between today’s China and Mao’s China. Here, frankly, one does not know where to begin, so abysmal is the ignorance of the real facts. What is less remarkable is that the statement by Mao cited is not from the 1950s, but from March 1965, on the occasion of the meeting with the first PLO delegation to visit China. It belongs to the years of the greatest radicalization of Mao himself, including the radicalization in an anti-Zionist sense, which led high-ranking Chinese officials to affirm that the birth of Israel should be considered “an illegitimate colonialist project in the modern era“, and to boast of not having voted, unlike Stalin’s USSR, in favor of this birth (at the time China was represented at the UN by Taiwan).
We give you a clue: June 1989. A great workers’ uprising prompted, but certainly not led, by a strong student protest (very varied internally), and its crushing in blood. That is the dividing line between the history of the Chinese popular revolution, radicalized in the years 1966-67, with a subsequent, important proletarian upsurge in 1989, and the history of Deng’s China increasingly organically integrated into the process of global capitalist accumulation, to the point of becoming – in economics – the world’s leading power. Perfectly capitalistic, of course.
As for the Palestinian question, the Chinese state of today refers to the Oslo Accords of 1993, which all militant factions of the Palestinian movement consider an agreement to sell out the Palestinian cause. Furthermore, the Chinese state has preferential relations with Abu Mazen’s collaborationist PNA. It stubbornly refuses to adhere, in any of its institutions, to the BDS. Of course, it is now calling for an immediate end to the massacre in Gaza (it still does not use the term genocide), and we have explained that this is “fine” for us and in what sense. But it has been asking for this since October 2023, and so far it has never taken any truly useful step to obtain what it claims to want to obtain. Nor, let us remember, by pressuring its most closely allied countries belonging to the BRICS, from which the Zionist state receives important supplies of oil, oil derivatives, metals, etc. (see below). Are you aware of any pressure in this direction?
We will observe future developments, and we do not rule out that for its own geopolitical calculations Xi’s China finds it convenient to strike other blows after Wang Yi’s declaration. For now, however, do not come and tell us that “China recognized Hamas”. Of course, Chinese government also summoned Hamas to Beijing, but for what purpose? To force it to make peace with Abu Mazen. But this man, who has always had excellent relations with Beijing, later called Hamas and all the resistance fighters in Gaza “sons of dogs,” had young Palestinian resistance fighters shot in Jenin and Tulkarem, continued to arrest fighters, to demand their disarmament in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon – exactly what the Zionist state demands. And – an insulting decision – he suspended the payment of compensation to the families of the resistance fighters who died in the war of liberation from Zionism. Do you call this policy “standing on the side of the Palestinian people”? Go ahead.
*On the BRICS countries’ relations with Israel
https://www.globalresearch.ca/genocide-brics-regimes-nurture-israel-economically/5870849
https://www.globalresearch.ca/brics-nations-israel-hype-hope-helplessness/5886973
*Are we perhaps “fundamentalists” and “anti-Chinese”? Neither one nor the other. Ever heard of revolutionary internationalists?
Such and so great is the mass of real facts on which we base our analysis and our position – the ground of reality, after all, is our ground – that some of our critics, in evident difficulty, take refuge in the ideological accusation: you are “fundamentalists”, and (perhaps) “anti-Chinese”. Missed target: neither one nor the other.
Fundamentalists? We are simply Marxists, revolutionary internationalists, who have at heart and in mind like few others the national and social liberation of the Palestinian masses, for whom we have a deep feeling of solidarity and gratitude for the great lesson in dignity, courage, organization, anti-imperialism, that they are giving to all the exploited and oppressed of the world, even in their most tragic hours. The history of a hundred and more years of Western-Zionist colonialism and a hundred and more years of extraordinary Palestinian resistance has taught us that the liberation of the Palestinians, and more generally the liberation of the proletarians and proletarians of the world, cannot happen with the help of any of the states existing in the world today, including China, because the social nature of these states is capitalistic. It can and must happen only and exclusively thanks to their battle against the capitalist social system.
Decades and decades of history, and finally these 20 months of extreme destruction and death, demonstrate beyond any doubt that all the great powers, China included, have helped the state of Israel to consolidate its colonial function in the Middle East, its economy, its infrastructure, its surveillance systems. Some more, some less – obviously. In fact, we have always distinguished the great protectors of Israel as suppliers of weapons, from the great suppliers of goods and investments. And we have always put in first place the denunciation and the fight against Meloni-Mattarella’s Italy, its war logistics, its cooperation agreements with the Zionist state, the Italian mass media, the EU, NATO. But, at the end of the day, the Zionist state is still standing, with the help of both types of suppliers (of weapons and goods). And with the help of both it devastates the world, the present and the future of the Palestinians.
Are we anti-Chinese? It would be grotesque since we are anti-capitalists, firmly convinced that only the proletariat – which has its largest contingent in China in the world – will be able to settle accounts with this now rotting social system. We are against Chinese capitalism, of course, as an increasingly central part of global capitalism. But when – in the times of the pandemic – a vile anti-Chinese state propaganda was raging here, we fought it with all our strength, however small, without giving a fingernail to the Italian-European-Western chauvinism that we detest. We were resolutely against “the dirty hunt for the dragon”. Check:
*(Provisional) Conclusion
It is possible that among our critics there are militants and activists who hope in the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist function of China, and that for this reason they have instinctively reacted negatively to our analysis based on a sequence of verifiable data of reality (verifiable, if you study things – and you have to study them, since these are intricate issues). But theirs is a truly vain hope, as we believe we have demonstrated.
In addition to reasoning about what we have argued, we invite them to reflect on this: if China had really opposed the ongoing genocide and Zionist colonialism with real determination, you would not be forced into painful attempts to defend Beijing’s actions, trying to demonstrate the unprovable through unsustainable statements; you would be intent on propagating the positive actions that this State carries out in support of the Palestinian resistance. Not related to the times of Mao and the cultural revolution, however. And not even to what young Chinese say to each other on social media, “in private” – the object we are discussing is the state and the capital of today’s China. The fact that you were unable to do so is the best demonstration of the validity of our thesis.
Let’s talk about it again. Because the question of the arrival of capitalism in countries where a proletarian revolution (Russia) or popular revolution (China) has taken place is a question of great importance. And we will not be able to contribute to the historical revenge that we “dream”, and which is possible, without having understood it thoroughly.