Photo: Jerusalem Post
I been thinking lately about this. While Iran, an bourgeois state, can willingly choose not to trade with Israel, the PRC continues to trade with them. Why does this occur? Also, why did China recognize Israel in the first place?
The People’s Republic of China has deliberately made a decision after its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979 that they are willing to help broker peace but will no longer intervene in any nations’ business. Sure, we’d like them to be more actively on the good side but China just doesn’t get involved.
But they still actively support settlements with labor and trade. I mean they could at least withdraw, especially if they believe it’s an active genocide. This has really been a great disappointment for me lately.
what is more disappointing is that they are among israel’s top 3 trade partner. even if they don’t want to completely isolate or appear aggressive, they could’ve reduced trade. when it’s the 2nd largest trade partner the defense of “they are just maintaining a pragmatic position” doesn’t work in my opinion.
Israel gets all of the US’ top shelf goodies, and China gets access to them via Israel.
Israel is actually in HUGE trade deficit with China. So it is not just that
I disagree. China did interfere in the Sri Lankan Civil War, on the government’s side, who were doing a genocide against the Tamil people.
China traded with the government as usual. Intervention would mean China had sent troops to aid the government or train government forces.
It wasn’t just regular trade. They sold guns to the Sri Lankan government. And they defended the government at the UN.
Chinas official policy is not to export revolution and not to interfere in countries internal matters. I feel like their goal is simply to outlast everyone else.
This is of course frustating but it is the path they chose. It’s not just a matter of foreign policy but the direction of the country as a whole. The Soviet economy was decoupled from the west and existed as a parallel system for countries to break free from western hegemony, which is why they could support national liberation movements everywhere. It’s also why after the USSR fell countries across the world dropped Marxism-Leninism for social democracy or worse. China on the other hand is wholly integrated into the global economy and does not have that same capacity.
Revolutionary Iran is explicitly against American-Israeli influence in the Middle East and they have been punished for it with crippling sanctions.
didn’t they try and fail to sanction china anyway?
I imagine it’s because China is trying to play nice with the US as long as possible. The longer they can put off aggression from them, the wider the gap in power between the two when aggression comes. China doing anything to impede Israel might cause tensions to escalate.
this makes the most sense to me… war is all but inevitable and they want to ensure the largest advantage possible
if i had to bet its gonna be over taiwan anyway
It’s because China is selling itself as impartial. They are selling themselves as an alternative to the US who is well known for using sanctions against countries who displease them, countries who do things they don’t like, countries run by people they dislike.
China’s idea for peeling the world away from US hegemony is offering a better deal. To do that they feel a need to be consistent so that the US has absolutely no examples it can point to of them violating their policy of being impartial and neutral, of not conditioning trade ties on obeying Chinese edicts on domestic policy, on basically trading with everyone fairly and letting countries set their own policies and leaving it to be their internal business.
This kind of selling point is very attractive to many global south countries, some of which may be run by people who are oppressive, the gulf monarchies for example are a group China would like to at least pull closer to their corner.
The second they break this rule for any reason, people start asking questions about why they won’t break it for reason x or for country C doing bad things and it becomes a hammer to hit China with from two fronts: 1) That they like the US will try and use their might to influence your domestic policy, that you risk becoming a vassal to China like with the US if you side with them 2) they start getting hammered for doing it in this instance but not in another instance and the US does it in that instance and they start comparing themselves and China starts looking badly and can either buckle and risk significant real-politik consequences being lured into a trap of sanctioning whoever the US pleases or having to weather that storm.
This is a consistent position that places them beyond the morality of individual nations. They believe they need to build their strength first and for US hegemony to cease before they can even conceive of using power that way because any early use and they risk people fleeing from them. Let’s remember most nations are capitalist and already have a built-in wariness of siding with or being with a communist power like China over a capitalist one like the US.
Due to having generally weak and pragmatic foreign policy, It’s been this way for at least the last few decades.
If Israel is an outpost of Western colonisation and imperialism then you could make the same argument with the whole of the West especially the US; clearly isolationism is detrimental and to be avoided where possible as the PRC learned from USSR mistakes not withstanding slowing down the path to a hot WWIII.
Addendum for anyone still lurking - the West has orders of magnitude more death on its hands including every single death due to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing from Nakba onwards. If you wanted to choke Israel’s material ability to commit crimes against humanity then you need to choke the West; China has made great strides in tech and warfare but it is a tall order to ask accelerate WWIII, fight it and win it with minimal loss of life for China and the Global South. However, this reality makes a solution of ending more deaths immediately more bleak (10s of 1000s of children are being purposely starved to death as we speak). It makes the work and fight of the Palestinian resistance and others like Yemen even more commendable. You can’t fight sociopaths with placards and rallies alone.
They only cut trade ties with those who recognize Taiwan.
Israel doesn’t recognize Taiwan.
That said, Israel used Taiwanese pager to deploy their terrorist attack on lebanon. https://www.reuters.com/world/exploding-pagers-got-attention-taiwan-bilateral-ties-strong-israel-envoy-says-2024-10-07/
I’d imagine that China’s foreign policy is severely constrained by it being one of the few socialist states in a world filled mostly by capitalist and reactionary regimes, and that they likely fear that breaking their non-interventionism could cause of chain reaction of countries they need economic partnerships with getting spooked.
