China’s increasing interest in the Gaza conflict

With US firmly aligned with Israel, China sees an opening for its already significant influence in the Middle East

While Washington is working to build alliances in the Indo-Pacific region, the Chinese are turning towards the Middle East to advance their global ambitions. As Ben Hubbard and Amy Qin pointed out in their assessment of China’s Middle East interests, in January 2022 alone five senior officials from oil-rich Arab monarchies visited China to discuss cooperation in energy and infrastructure. “As the United States, fatigued by decades of war and upheaval in the Middle East, seeks to limit its involvement there, China is deepening its ties with both friends and foes of Washington across the region,” they wrote in an analysis for The New York Times of developments in the region. Arab leaders appreciate that China – which touts the virtue of ‘non-interference’ in other countries affairs – won’t get involved in their domestic politics or send its military to topple unfriendly dictators. And each side can count on other to overlook its human rights abuses.”

China is giving the Middle East a great deal of attention by promoting President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, a trillion-dollar investment programme that would open the region to the Chinese economy. It has already spent billions of dollars in Pakistan building the deep-water port of Gwadar on the Balochistan coast. The port would be connected with China’s Xiinjiang Autonomous Region by three highways. Chinese state-backed companies are investing in developing the port of Chahbahar in Iran not far from Gwadar. They are financing an industrial park in the port of Duqm, Oman and to build and operate a container terminal in Abu Dhabi as well as two ports in Israel.

While the US was firmly and openly aligned with Israel in the latter’s war against Hamas, China saw an opening for its already significant influence in the Middle East. China’s top diplomat called his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts on October 23 urging restraint in their current quarrel. A Chinese senior diplomat went to the Middle East pledging to help avert a wider war. Beijing was also active in the UN. It vetoed a resolution on the war presented by the US in the Security Council that did not call for a cease-fire.

Beijing came under pressure from the US and Israel for its refusal to condemn Hamas for its October 7 attack on Israel. At the same time, anti-Semitic sentiment was taking hold of public opinion in China. In a widely read post, an influencer with 2.9 million followers on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, said he would prefer to call Hamas a “resistance organization” instead of a “terrorist organization” which was the preferred nomenclature in Israel and the US. He went on to accuse Israel of being a terrorist organisation given the way it was conducting the Gaza war which had claimed the lives of thousands of women and children.

“If China felt that it was dangerous and problematic to allow anti-Semitic comments to flourish, the censors would stop it. Clearly, the government is conveying the message that it’s tolerated,” said Carice Witte, the executive director of SIGNAL Group, an Israeli thank tank focusing on China. She says that China might see the spread of anti-Semitic sentiment as well as hostility toward the US over the Hamas conflict as geopolitically useful as its works to build stronger ties with Arab nations and deepen its foothold in the Middle East. It already has strong ties with Pakistan where it is financing a multi-billion-dollar programme of improving the country’s energy and transport infrastructure. Through Pakistan, the Chinese are accessing Afghanistan which has large mineral deposits Beijing would like to exploit. Afghanistan has been called the Saudi Arabia of lithium, a metal that is critical for developing electric batteries. Energy-short China is also a candidate for using the natural gas deposits of Qatar which, upon being liquefied, could be transported to China through a pipeline which is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Program of investment. Qatar has plans to make a large investment to build a gas liquefaction plant at Gwadar. The port is planned to be the end point of the highways planned to link Arabian Sea with the Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang.

In June 2023, Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, met with Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, and endorsed a two-state solution for the Palestinian problem in the West Bank. “This is likely to reduce Israel’s willingness to trust China as an ‘honest broker’ in the current war,” said Gedaliah Afterman, head of the Asia Policy Program at the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy and International Relations at Reichman University in Israel. He added that China seemed to be using the Gaza war as a way to “shape an anti-American narrative among the Chinese public”. That said, when it comes to state security, China regards Israel as a model. The National Police Academy of China, in research paper published in 2014, discussed the “success story” of Israel’s anti-terror strategy. A Chinese official now holding a senior government position in charge of ethnic affairs had written in 2002 dissertation that China should take lessons from the Israel’s deployment of West Bank settlers and infrastructure in Palestinian lands for its own campaign in dealing with 11 million Uighur Muslims living in Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities consider anti-Zionist speech – when made by Muslims in China – as extremist, said Darren Byler, a professor and anthropologist studying Uighur culture and Chinese surveillance at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Chinese courts used anti-Zionist texts as evidence in a 2018 trial involving a Kazakh Muslim in Xinjiang. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison over extremism charges. Historically, Chinese have tended to see Jews and their religion as possessing positive attributes according to Mary Ainslie, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham’s campus at Ningbo, a city near Shanghai. She has done research on anti-Semitism in China. She said that the Jewish people were often depicted as hard-working, influential and financially savvy. For example, the Talmud is translated into Chinese and marketed as a text that gives good financial advice. But in recent years, she said, the stereotypes have turned increasingly anti-Semitic because of rising nationalism, a growing mistrust of the West and a worsening economy.

With Israel now declaring that it will remain in Gaza for a long time to ensure that Hamas is supposedly weakened by its operation and does not regain in strength, this raises the question: how would China react to this move by Israel? We will watch for an answer to this question as the Gaza crisis unfolds.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2023.

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