Chinese Roulette: Arab and Islamic Representatives in Beijing
by Jose Rosales — 20December2023
On November 20, China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, welcomed counterparts from “Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Indonesia, and the head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for a two day visit to the Chinese capital” — a trip that marks the start of the delegation’s expected tour of several world capitals.
Speaking to the media, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, said “The message is clear: the war must stop immediately, we must move to a ceasefire immediately, and relief materials and aid must enter immediately.” Similarly, a spokesperson for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “Egypt is making every effort to bring aid into the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing, but Israel’s policy of obstructing the entry of aid is a systematic policy aimed at pushing the Palestinians to leave the strip under the weight of bombing and siege.”
For Egypt, any such displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip is perceived as threatening peace and security in the region. Thus, among the most immediate reasons informing the joint delegations’ Beijing visit are China’s support for an immediate ceasefire and its apparent disinterest in weighing in on the discourse surrounding public denunciations of Hamas, prompting the now routine backlash from the senior official at the Israeli embassy in Beijing, Yuval Waks: “When people are being murdered, slaughtered in the streets, this is not the time to call for a two-state solution.”
During his meetings with the delegates, China’s Foreign Minister even went so far as to describe Israel’s ongoing siege of the Gaza strip as collective punishment: “China opposes any forced displacement and relocation of Palestinian civilians,” while adding that “Israel should stop collective punishment of the people of Gaza, open humanitarian corridors as soon as possible and prevent a larger-scale humanitarian disaster.” Collective punishment is prohibited under Article 33 of the Geneva Conventions and thereby illegal according to international law. As Article 33 states, “Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”
A little more than two weeks after the G7 issued a joint statement that “called for humanitarian pauses in the Israel-Hamas war to allow in aid and help the release of hostages, and sought a return to a broader peace process,” and after China’s successfully brokered agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March of this year, restoring diplomatic ties between the two countries severed since 2016. It would appear that China is emerging as the new guarantor of peace in the region in light of the US’ ‘full throated’ defense of the Israeli state and staunch opposition to the ceasefire.
Diplomacy or Duplicity?
That said, the degree of diplomatic unity the delegation expects to walk away with remains unclear; China’s history of sympathy toward Palestinian liberation is, at best, a contested issue. For example, when recently asked about the comments of a senior official at Beijing’s Israeli embassy, Mao Ning offered the following in response: “On the Palestine-Israel conflict, China has always been on the side of equity and justice. As a friend to both Israel and Palestine, what we hope to see is the two countries living together in peace.”
This comment suggesting a two-state solution, read in light of the letter of resignation authored by former top United Nations official in New York, Craig Mokhiber, and its public disclosure that “the mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people”, helpfully frames China’s “historic” support for Palestine as support for stability over instability rather than storied history of principled solidarity with Palestinian liberation.
Perhaps more worrisome for the prospect of China’s diplomatic role in brokering any peace deal in the region is Pan Yue who, in 2022, became the first non-ethnic minority commissioner of China’s National Ethnic Affairs Commission in the history of the People’s Republic of China and is tasked with developing China’s domestic policy concerning “the 55 officially recognized ethnic groups” that “collectively represent around 8.9 percent of the total population.” In 2002, Pan completed his doctoral thesis wherein he “proposed that a mass migration of 50 million Han people to Tibet and Xinjiang would simultaneously address three major problems confronting China: overpopulation, demand for resources, and the problem of ethnic and religious difference.”
Now, more than twenty years later, Pan has “called on China to learn from a trifecta of contemporary colonizers: the United States, Israel and Russia.” Such a bold appreciation of the violence and immiseration of marginalized social groups that is coextensive with the founding act of colonization, whether settler- or otherwise, is, to put it lightly, no immaterial thing. As Darren Byler, an Assistant Professor in International Studies at Simon Fraser University, helpfully explains, for Pan, the logic of Western expansion proper to the US and Russia ought to be combined with “the more contemporary example of Israel’s controlled deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian land.”
By promoting Pan to commissioner of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission, it seems that the Chinese Communist Party has heeded the lessons of these three histories of (settler-)colonization. And among the policies that Pan admires in the history of Israeli settler-colonialism are those predicated on the conflation of “demographic problems” with the socio-economic and political well-being of the state itself: just as Israel perceives the existence of 2.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza strip as posing a demographic threat to the existence of the Zionist state, Pan views the Uyghurs and muslims residing in Xinjiang province as a problem that, left unresolved, threatens civic order of the Chinese state.
Israel: a curious kind of blackmail
Written one year after Israel’s siege on Beirut (1982), and first published in the September issue of Revue d’études palestiniennes, Gilles Deleuze takes stock of the state of Israel and its thus far unimpeded advancement of a properly contemporary form of colonization distinct from its more illustrious, nineteenth-century, European cousin:
It was clearly a matter of colonization, but not in the nineteenth-century European sense: the local inhabitants would not be exploited, they would be made to leave. Physical extermination, though it may or may not be entrusted to mercenaries, is most certainly present. But this isn’t a genocide, they say, since it’s not the ‘final goal’: in reality, it’s just one means among others.
And yet, the Palestinians continued to resist despite the violence of the 1982 siege — or perhaps precisely because of the massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps at the hands of Lebanese Phalangists working in tandem with the Israeli army. For Deleuze, that almost forty years of massacres has done nothing to deter further moments of armed struggle “demanded a great historical character,” both on the part of the Palestinians and on the part of their political leaders among whom Deleuze finds no more perfect figure than Arafat — a great historical character, “who could have stepped out of Shakespeare.” Of Deleuze’s various descriptions of Arafat, he is at his best when comparing the courage of those nameless Palestinians who confront Zionism’s thirst for their annihilation with an armed resilience: “the Palestinians have run through all the infernal cycles of history: the failure of solutions each time they were possible, the worst reversals of alliance of which they bore the brunt, the most solemn promises not kept. And on all this their resistance had to nourish itself.”
What is more, writes Deleuze in a later essay reflecting on the First Intifada (1987–1993), “the hurled stones come from inside, from the Palestinian people, as a reminder that somewhere in the world — no matter how small it is — the debt has been reversed. The Palestinians throw their stones, the living stones of their land. Men are born out of these stones. [And] no one can pay his debt by murders, one, two, three, seven, ten daily, or by striking deals with anyone other than the people directly concerned.” The grandeur of Arafat, however, remained a “solitary grandeur” replete with scenes of “the physical presence of Arafat among his own” while surrounded in Tripoli in 1983. A solitary grandeur; a Shakespearean grandeur; this is a greatness that is less the signal of hope and more so the shadow cast by fate.
There is a truly solitary grandeur in China’s Foreign Minister’s ability to decry Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza as collective punishment while it is Israel, not Palestine, that continues to inspire China’s state planners. Thus, we cannot help but raise the question as to what China exactly envisions regarding its advocacy of “peace in the region.” For, today, “Israel is conducting an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries.” And precisely because “Israel believes that in the U.N. resolutions verbally condemning Israel in fact put it in the right. Israel has transformed the invitation to leave the Occupied [Palestinian] Territories into the right to establish colonies there.”
This is a “curious kind of blackmail from which the whole world will [seemingly] never escape,” since the “international community” seems to prefer every resolution and non-binding agreement to an actually free Palestine. Until then, the highest goal of every nation-state remains that of waging war so well they are given the right to participate in peace conferences.
