ZHANG: The Truth Behind China’s Gaza Silence

China’s partnership with the Palestinian cause, Zhang Sheng says, reaches back to the era of anti-colonial struggles rather than the diplomacy of Oslo. Zhang, a Non-resident Visiting Researcher at Turkey’s KUASIA (Koç/Coach) University, describes “a very long history of solidarity and camaraderie” between China and the Palestinian national liberation movement, traceable at least to the 1960s, while China’s ties to left-leaning Arab nationalist movements date to the 1950s. 01:16 From the beginning, Beijing backed what he calls the Palestinian “struggle for liberation,” and Zhang insists that—even today—that line remains China’s formal political position. 01:31

In the 1960s and 1970s, Zhang recalls, China held its “most radical stance” of any permanent member of the UN Security Council on the Palestinian question. 02:16 But Egypt’s peace with Israel, the Oslo process, and China’s expanding economic ambitions pushed Beijing toward a “much more moderate” approach in the 1980s. 02:58 Politically China remained pro-Palestinian, he notes, but economically it “started to become closer to Israel,” with investment rising sharply over the past decade until the Gaza war forced a reckoning. 03:11

Zhang identifies 2016—when Netanyahu visited Beijing—as the moment China “fell to the trap” of Israeli diplomacy by investing in the Haifa Bay port, a decision he bluntly calls “a very bad deal.” 04:04 After the Gaza war began, Zhang says, Israel tried to pressure Beijing to condemn the Al-Aqsa Flood operation by name, but China refused, instead issuing an intentionally ambivalent formula condemning “any violence against all civilians committed by any actors.” 04:52 The result: Israeli outrage, calls to cancel China’s 25-year port contract, and the first significant drop in China-Israel trade since 2013. 06:03 Inside China, meanwhile, the Gaza war has pushed younger generations back toward Mao-era interpretations, leading Zhang to argue that today’s youth hold “the most negative perception of Israel” since the 1970s—setting up a clash between China’s cautious diplomacy and a younger public rediscovering Mao-era thinking on Palestine. 17:37