China Speaks for Palestinian Rights and Acts for Zionist Settlements

Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses

Wikimedia Commons: Chinese vessels dock at Haifa to celebrate 20 years of cooperation between the Israel Navy and the Chinese Navy

In the last two pieces I wrote on China, multipolarity, and Gaza Genocide, I argued that China was built up to be the next global hegemon to pave the way for a transition to a ‘multipolar’ global technocracy while doubling up as a convenient bogeyman for the West. As such, it would be naïve to think that a Chinese-led BRICS bloc would usher in a better world.

A recent article in the Middle East Eye caught my attention and I couldn’t resist giving it an airing because I think it underlines the arguments I tried to make.

The Middle East Eye (MEE) piece by Razan Shawamreh is titled “How China is quietly aiding Israel's settlement enterprise.” China is clearly playing a double game in Israel. While Chinese diplomats urge Israel to stop illegal settlement activity in the West Bank, Chinese state-run corporations are engaged in significant construction activity to build settlement infrastructure – a flagrant violation of international law. The MEE piece cites numerous examples of China’s concrete involvement in supporting and profiting from Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank. The point that Shawamreh successfully makes in her piece is that:

“While Beijing voices opposition to settlement activity, its economic ties with Israel strengthen the foundations of Zionist colonialism.”

Although Chinese corporations are not shy to deploy thousands of Chinese construction workers on projects in Israel, making their presence very visible, one of the more underhanded ways in which the Chinese state operates is to simply buy majority stakes in existing Israeli companies that build and support settler infrastructure.

I highlighted in my multipolarity pieces that China uses the same tactics in the DRC, where it wrested control of the Congo’s critical minerals, not with guns and tanks, but simply by buying up the shares in the mineral companies from the US. So rather like in Israel, you have a situation in the DRC where China quietly profits while the US fronts the dirty work. If you’ve studied the history of the Great Lakes region since 1994 in any depth, it becomes glaringly obvious that Rwanda is the US’s proxy thug in the Congo.

This entanglement of interests between Israel, the US and its supposed bogeyman, China, is confusing at first sight. I’ll say it again: the only way to make sense of it all is to accept that the apex of power is not national – it sits with the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC). The Chinese and US political systems are merely two of its senior managers. Sometimes they argue and trip over each other as they diligently strive to follow their boss’s instructions, but we shouldn’t mistake those arguments for ‘sovereignty’.

China and the US may even go to war, at which point some may counter my nil-sovereignty argument with something along the lines of: “Look, they’re killing each other now. The rivalry is real and people are dying.” Well, yes, people would die, but ‘They’ would not be killing each other. Ordinary people would be killing each other. War too is an instrument of finance, and a war between the US and China would not happen if it didn’t advance the interests of the parties at the apex of power. It would serve their purposes and they would come out stronger afterwards.

Returning to the China-Israel relationship: China is Israel’s second largest trading partner, taking into account both imports and exports. China ranks first on Israel’s imports chart, with Chinese imports dwarfing US imports by a factor of 2 ($19bn from China vs $9.4bn from the US). In Part 1 of the multipolarity series, I discussed Israel’s transfer of advanced military technology to China that began in the 1980s, with the then CIA director telling Congress in 1993 that this trade amounted to “several billion dollars”.

It is this mutual financial and military embrace that underpins China’s concrete support for Zionism, and its empty rhetoric in support of Palestine. The empty words represent the mood music of the BRICS soul train. Groove along to it if you like, but you might be disappointed when the rubber meets the road. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people don’t require any evidence that the talk has translated into action.

So, following the money is vital to distinguish facts on the ground from the hot air of diplomatic and press statements. China’s policy towards its own ethnic minorities on its own frontiers also sheds some light on its duplicitous policy towards Palestinians. A blog that chronicles China’s transformation “from an isolated state-planned economy into an integrated hub of capitalist production”, shines a light on the thinking of China’s head of the State Council’s National Ethnic Affairs Commission, Dr Pan Yue:

“In his 2002 dissertation, Dr. Pan Yue, the current commissioner of China’s Ethnic Affairs Commission, 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. Pan […] suggested that Han migrants should be considered “reclaimers.” The “backwardness” of the frontier, he suggested, had become a danger to national security, fostering terrorist and extremist activities. He called on China to learn from a trifecta of contemporary colonizers: the United States, Israel and Russia. Taking elements of each as a model of how contemporary China should further colonize Tibetan and Uyghur lands, he suggests that the Western expansion of settler colonialism in the United States and Russia’s imperial settlement of Siberia, should be combined with the more contemporary example of Israel’s controlled deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian lands.” [emphasis added]

The term “ethnic fusion” in CCP policy language denotes the assimilation of minorities through the adoption of Han customs, institutions, and language by other ethnic groups. Today, state-backed Han immigration into Xinjiang has caused serious unrest and tension between the majority Muslim Uyghur population and the Chinese state security apparatus. However, Pan, who is now also a full member of the CCP’s Central Committee, sees the problem as residing in Islam itself. He wrote in his dissertation:

“Even today, the exclusionary character of Islam, which has not undergone religious reform, remains extraordinarily fierce. They still believe in fundamentalism. From the spiritual to the material, from behavior to appearance, all the way to etiquette, diet, and so forth—their standards are completely based on ancient doctrines and admonishments. They are suspicious of everything, refuse to integrate with other cultures, and do not trust any foreign political authority or external collectivity.”

Had this Chinese history scholar dug into the archival records of Japanese and British colonisers in China, he might have found one or two diary entries expressing similar sentiments about stubborn Chinese people resisting colonisation a century or more earlier.

Pan went further in expressing his exasperation with Muslim recalcitrance towards Chinese state authority:

“Since the country’s founding [in 1949], the central government has extended extremely favorable treatment to minority nationalities; however, when it comes to Islam, no matter how many advantages it provides, and no matter how favorable its treatment may be, the results have been far from ideal, and ethnic separatist activities remain incessant. On the other hand, wherever Han people are concentrated in large numbers, there is little unrest, such as in northern Xinjiang; by contrast, wherever Muslims are concentrated in large numbers, unrest is greater, as in southern Xinjiang.”

Pan’s Ethnic Affairs Commission has now partnered with the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce to launch the “Private Enterprise Advances Toward the Frontier” initiative. Zoom in on this initiative and one can discern the arc from Pan’s dissertation to China’s colonial ‘frontier’ policy for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its support of illegal Israeli settlements.

As neo-colonial capitalism seeks to envelop the entire planet in its final diabolical revolution, is it any wonder that China, its latest convert and parvenu, has crudely cut its own policies at home from old colonial cloth, while underhandedly endorsing illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank?