China presents itself and is often championed as a counterweight to US imperialism and touted the superiority of “an equal and orderly multipolar world” over a unipolar one.
This claim has been tested to destruction by Beijing’s response to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
The sun sets behind buildings that were destroyed during the Israeli ground and air operations in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Friday, August 8, 2025. [AP Photo/Leo Correa]
After the October 7 uprising, Beijing as usual rhetorically postured as the leader of the Global South, opposing imperialist hegemony. But China is Israel’s second largest trade partner, after the US. Moreover, Israel along with the Arab regimes are China’s strategic and economic partners in the Belt and Road initiative.
If China had stood in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians, it could have called the Gaza Genocide, which was backed by all imperialist powers and Arab despotic regimes, by its real name and imposed a trade embargo on Israel.
Instead, since late 2024, China has dropped its carefully calibrated criticisms of Israel and begun mending economic and diplomatic fences with Benjamin Netanyahu’s murderous regime. It did so after Israel emerged clearly victorious over its adversaries following the murders of Political Bureau Chief of Hamas Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the downfall of Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian regime.
China condemns Hamas from the right
Anti-Zionist scholar Norman Finkelstein noted how, as the Gaza Genocide had become undeniable, the European powers decided to “cover their ass.” They wanted to be seen “on record as opposing the second Nakba.”
China did quite the opposite. In May 2025, China’s ambassador to Israel Xiao Junzheng was asked by ILTV, an Israeli television channel, why China refused to condemn the October 7 attack by Hamas. He replied that China opposed the “barbarous attack by Hamas” and the “acts that harmed civilians” and that he “condemned violations of international laws.” The “atrocities” committed by Hamas were “inhumane, unforgivable and outrageous.” China “condemned what Hamas did on the 7th of October.”
Xiao Junzheng with Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry Nir Barkat [Photo: Xiao Junzheng/X]
Xiao then suggested politely that the two-state solution was the only viable way to break the cycle of violence. When asked how China could support “a Palestinian state” despite the fact that “Hamas” had been a terrorist organisation and “not a partner for peace,” Xiao replied that the Palestinian issue had been “complicated” for the past 80 to 100 years. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Global Security Initiative” had paved a path forward, advocating for the resolution of disputes and wars through dialogue and diplomatic means.
While the US and Israel continue to inflict imperialist mass murder in full view of the world, Xiao insisted that working people must pin their hope on Washington’s political fraud of the two-state solution and Beijing’s illusion of a “multipolar” world.
Notably absent from Xiao’s remark was any mention of the by now well-documented false flag operation conducted by Israel against its own citizens leading up to October 7. According to a New York Times exposé published on November 30, 2023, Israel’s military and intelligence apparatuses had acquired the battle plan of October 7 more than a year in advance detailing exactly where and how Hamas fighters would strike.
Israel not only choreographed a military stand down before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but also implemented the Hannibal Directive, which involved killing Israeli civilians and soldiers to prevent their capture by Hamas fighters during the attack.
Xiao made no reference to the US-Israeli campaigns to starve to death the remaining Palestinians in Gaza or Donald Trump’s actual plan to transform Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Nor did he show any concern over the role played by Chinese-made equipment in abetting the genocide and ethnic cleansing.
According to an investigative report published on July 10, 2025 in +972 Magazine, Israeli forces had been “enforcing Gaza evacuations” with Chinese-made drones initially developed for photography. Hand grenades affixed to quadcopters were detonated and dropped on Palestinians. Most Israeli military companies in Gaza utilised Chinese drones, the +972 report revealed. China has still not exercised any control over the shipment of the dual-use equipment deployed in Gaza.
China’s national road to “socialism”
China’s ongoing relations with Israel reflect the political realities of the capitalist state headed by President Xi Jinping. But they have older roots in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) nationalist reorientation to the retrograde Stalinist program of “Socialism in one country” after 1927.
Put simply, the Soviet state under Stalin refused to extend socialist revolution beyond its national boundaries and into the advanced countries. It was asserted that the Soviet Union was capable of a national path to socialism, provided there was a successful policy of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.
Joseph Stalin in 1943 [AP Photo]
This programme was a rejection of the world socialist revolution for which genuine Marxists had struggled. Lenin declared unequivocally that socialism must be international rather than national in its outlook and that a real communist party’s national program must be based on a class-conscious understanding of the international development of capitalism in the imperialist era. He explained:
the Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too… first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions; second, on a clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class; third, on an equally clear distinction between the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations, in order to counter the bourgeois-democratic lies that play down this colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s population by an insignificant minority of the richest and advanced capitalist countries, a feature characteristic of the era of finance capital and imperialism.
Leading the struggle for proletarian internationalism, Leon Trotsky fought against the nationalist degeneration of the USSR under Joseph Stalin, insisting in The Permanent Revolution on the bourgeoisie’s inability to perform fundamental tasks of the democratic revolution, which could only be carried out by the proletariat.
The Comintern, under Stalin’s leadership, considered China to be too backward to build socialism. China must first build a bourgeois democratic republic under the leadership of the “progressive” national bourgeoisie before it can fight for socialism. This program was guided by the two-stage theory of the Mensheviks.
The Comintern instructed the CCP, which was inspired by the October Revolution, to join the “progressive” Kuomintang (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek and to cede revolutionary leadership to the KMT.
The KMT’s admission to the Comintern as a consultative voice was nearly unanimously approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with only Trotsky casting the “no” vote. He was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and from the party in 1927.
Moscow coined the deceptive phrases the “the bloc of four classes” or “general national united front” to justify the subordination of the proletariat to the interests of the Soviet state under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The bloc consisted of the national bourgeoisie, supposedly a distinct entity from the comprador bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the peasantry. This bloc or popular front must be led by the “progressive” Chinese bourgeoisie, in opposition to the leadership of the proletariat in alliance with the poor peasants.
In his March 1927 “Speech Delivered at the Fifth-Union Conference of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League,” Stalin reiterated that the CCP’s admission into the KMT in 1924 had transformed “the latter into a people’s revolutionary mass party.” The revolution in China could be divided into two stages. It must be led by “part of the big national bourgeoisie” during the first stage, which lasted between 1925 and 1927.
Armed and militarily trained by Stalin’s regime, “Comrade” Chiang Kai-shek’s army was able to disarm the working class and to execute the long-planned mass murder of CCP members and toilers who were suspected of supporting communism. [1]
Aleksandr Martynov, a Menshevik and a prominent spokesperson for the Stalinist bureaucracy, continued to advocate “the necessity of retaining the ‘bloc of four classes’” in Pravda on April 10, 1927, two days before Chiang Kai-shek’s regime unleashed its reign of terror.
Chiang Kai-shek
Martynov also argued against the toppling of the coalition government led by Chiang Kai-shek and against the “premature” imposition of “socialist tasks” upon China led independently by the proletariat and backed by the peasantry.
The Stalinist policy of class collaboration inevitably led to the catastrophic defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution.
On June 30, 1928, Zhou Enlai reported to the Chinese Communist Party’s 6th National Congress that the KMT regime slaughtered between 310,000 and 340,000 people including CCP members and Chinese toilers during this period.
According to an estimate made by the Institute of Party History and Literature of the CCP and published on the People’s Daily website, only 10,000 of the 60,000 CCP members survived the carnage during the Second Chinese Revolution.
KMT gangsters singled out short-haired women with naturally sized feet as suspected communists. It used the women with “shorn heads” and with “breasts cut off” for “public displays” to terrorise the Chinese population and thwart future opposition.
Stalinists within the CCP quickly reoriented themselves away from the proletariat and toward the peasantry, with Mao emerging as the leader of this Chinese Stalinist tendency.
Contrary to the Stalinist fiction, imperialism sharpened the divide between the comprador bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. In 1927, Trotsky alerted Chinese workers and the Comintern to the danger of placing a false emphasis on the distinction between “two sections of the bourgeoisie that stand incomparably closer to each other than the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants.
Trotsky with his wife Natalia Sedova and son Lev Sedov in Alma Ata in 1928 [Photo: Unknown author – Троцкий Л. Д. Моя жизнь / Предисл. докт. ист. наук И. С. Розенталь. — М.: Вагриус, 2001]
He cautioned in 1928 that the doctrine that “socialism can be built on the basis of a national state if only there is no [imperialist] intervention” would inevitably lead to “a collaborationist policy towards the foreign bourgeoisie with the object of averting intervention.”
Toeing the line of the Soviet state under Stalin, the CCP branded Trotsky and Chinese Trotskyists as lackeys of imperialism.
International Jews or National Jews?
As a political heir of Joseph Stalin, the CCP’s support for Zionism also came from the adaptation of the party to bourgeois nationalism, its defence of Stalinism and conciliation with imperialism, which represented a reaction against the October Revolution.
According to Lenin’s “Critical Remarks on the National Question” of 1913, Marxists recognised the historical legitimacy of national movements such as the struggle against the feudal yoke and national oppression while opposing bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies that advanced the right to self-determination. He stated:
This task [of advocating self-determination] is largely a negative one. But this is the limit the proletariat can go to in supporting nationalism, for beyond that begins the “positive” activity of the bourgeoisie striving to fortify nationalism… go[ing] beyond these… definite historical limits in helping bourgeois nationalism means betraying the proletariat and siding with the bourgeoisie.
Lenin argued in the same article that the development of nationality, which took the form of a fight for “national development” and national culture, was “the principle of bourgeois nationalism… hence the endless national bickering.”
He emphatically defined “national culture” as being diametrically opposed to socialist culture, claiming:
The elements of democratic and socialist culture are present, if only in rudimentary form, in every national culture, since in every nation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and socialism. But every nation also possesses a bourgeois culture… in the form, not merely of “elements”, but of the dominant culture. Therefore, the general “national culture” is the culture of the landlords, the clergy and the bourgeoisie.
In this light, Lenin saw Jewish national culture as “the slogan of… the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies.” Likewise, Marxists’ support for socialist culture extended to Jews. The most defining aspect of Jewish international culture was its affinity with working-class movements. Lenin enunciated:
In advancing the slogan of “the international culture of democracy and of the world working-class movement”, we [Marxists] take from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements; we take them only and absolutely in opposition to the bourgeois culture and the bourgeois nationalism of each nation.
Lenin, then, denounced all those who propagated bourgeois nationalism under the guise of “national culture,” such as Great-Russian, Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian.
Vladimir Lenin
In Britain, Zionism, including the racial characterisation of Jews, was promoted as a political counterweight to Bolshevism and in pursuit of its imperialist interests in the Middle East.
Before becoming Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill’s article “Zionism vs Bolshevism” in February 1920 shed significant light on the political calculations that underpinned British imperialism’s backing for Zionism. He hailed Russia’s “national Jews,” especially bankers and industrialists, as the “staunchest upholders of friendship with [imperialist] France and Great Britain.” They played “an honourable and useful part in the national life” in Russia. He went on to condemn the “international Jews” as conspirators or terrorists, including Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Bela Kun, and Rosa Luxembourg, who specialised in plotting a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation.”
Churchill argued that “a negative resistance to Bolshevism in any field is not enough. Positive and practicable alternatives are needed.” Indeed, “building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine” would “from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
Britain had a “responsibility of securing for the Jewish race… a centre of national life,” and “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” Churchill argued.
The designation of European Jews as a “race” had grave political ramifications. It meant that Jews could never escape discrimination and/or persecution by converting to Christianity and other forms of assimilation, as many had done so in the face of medieval religious antisemitism.
It implied that, rooted in the Aryan race, antisemitism could never be eradicated through a struggle for the abolition of bourgeois states by the proletariat of the world. Consequently, European Jews could only seek sanctuary and salvation in “a Jewish homeland” in British Mandatory Palestine.
Building on Lenin’s understanding of national and colonial questions, emphasising that “The real meaning of the demand for equality consists in its being a demand for the abolition of classes,” Trotsky cautioned in 1940:
The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. […] The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.
None of his assessments of the Jewish question, “socialism in one country,” and the class nature of the Chinese bourgeoisie have lost their relevance.
Maoist China and Israel
Stalinism’s accommodation to the “democratic” imperialist bourgeoisie exemplified the former’s increasing adoption of political and economic nationalism.
In response to the occupation of Manchuria by Japan and its plan to annex China, Mao, as Stalin’s disciple, declared in December 1935 that the CCP-led revolution had been “bourgeois democratic” in character. It was first and foremost directed “against imperialism and feudalism, not against capitalism” and was based on the Stalinist line of the bloc of four classes.
Mao (second left) and Stalin in 1949
Mao asserted that there was a substantial distinction between the comprador bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. The former served as an instrument of imperialism against which the CCP fought, while the latter was a progressive “anti-imperialist” social force with which the party aligned.
It was considered unproblematic to “build socialism in stages.” Chinese Stalinists began with a bourgeois democratic revolution based on the peasantry and with the proletariat on the sidelines while postponing a “premature” socialist revolution indefinitely. The bourgeois democratic character of the revolution was constantly invoked to justify the transformation of an originally working-class party into a nationalist one encompassing the petty-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie.
Backed by Moscow and guided by the programme of “socialism in one country,” the CCP refused to take a revolutionary internationalist stance against Zionism and to struggle for the unity of Arab and Jewish workers.
After World War Two ended, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees had remained in displaced person camps in Europe. Working people in North America and Europe who were shocked and outraged by the Holocaust tended to support the founding of the State of Israel out of sympathy for the plight of Jews.
Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, May June 1944, during the final phase of the Holocaust [Photo: Bernhard Walter – Yad Vashem: “Jews undergoing selection on the ramp. Visible in the background is the famous entrance to the camp. Some veteran inmates are helping the new comers.”]
The US, European powers and the Soviet bureaucracy backed the establishment of Israel for purely cynical reasons, however. Washington did so and blocked Jewish immigration or their return to European countries because the colonisation of Palestine in which Arab people had already lived would inevitably transform the land into a military garrison state for US imperialism, undermining British influence.
The Stalinist bureaucracy’s support for Zionism was rooted in its overarching goal of securing “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist powers, as well as the expectation that a newly formed Zionist state would align itself with Moscow.
Against this backdrop, on May 25, 1948, Xinhua News Agency, a CCP mouthpiece, portrayed the establishment of the State of Israel as a necessary response to “two millennia of humiliation and slaughter,” rather than an ethno-nationalist movement propped up in turn by British imperialism, given succour by Nazism, and then backed by Washington and Moscow in the late 1940s.
Xinhua additionally hailed “the division of the Near East into a Jewish state and Arab states as the road to peace” in the region.
In June 1948, Xinhua described forces from Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as “British imperialism-backed invaders” with the intention of “overthrowing the State of Israel”. The latter had been “fighting a just war against Arab regimes.”
In contrast to the lies and distortions propagated by Stalinist parties around the world, the Fourth International, in 1948, counterposed the unity of the international working class in anti-colonial struggle to the division of the world into rival states, declaring:
The Fourth International rejects as utopian and reactionary the “Zionist solution” of the Jewish question. It declares that total renunciation of Zionism is the sine qua non condition for the merging of Jewish workers’ struggles with the social, national and liberationist struggles of the Arab toilers. It declares that to demand Jewish immigration into Palestine is thoroughly reactionary just as it is reactionary to call for immigration of any oppressor people into colonial countries in general. It holds that the question of immigration as well as the relations between Jews and Arabs can be decided adequately only after imperialism has been ousted by a freely elected Constituent Assembly with full rights for the Jews as a national minority.
This serves as an indictment of the reactionary Zionist project and of the betrayals of Stalinism and its Maoist variant.
Israel, an ally of western powers, became the first Middle Eastern country to recognise the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1950.
The impact of Stalinism on post-revolutionary China
The Korean War broke out in June 1950, less than a year after the PRC was founded. The Truman administration not only deployed US troops into the Korean Peninsula and the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s fascist dictatorship, what US imperialism referred to as the sole legitimate government of China. It also expanded military aid to the French occupation forces to quell the communist-led anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam.
Mao Zedong viewed those moves as US attempts to “reverse the communists’ victory in the Chinese civil war,” according to Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy. The Chairman had every reason to believe that “if he did not stop America in Korea, he might have to fight America on Chinese territory.
Chinese troops crossing Yalu River during Korean War
Despite the fact that the Third Chinese Revolution ended the imperialist subjugation of toilers in Mainland China and overturned capitalist property relations, and that Chinese soldiers fought courageously against US imperialism during the Korean War, Chinese workers were subjected to a Stalinist leadership that denied them any genuine political independence.
The Socialist Workers Party, then the Trotskyist party in the United States, adopted a resolution in 1955 that classified the People’s Republic of China as a “deformed workers’ state” in the sense that agrarian reform and the liberation of workers came from the top.
As David North explained in The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International:
The use of the term deformed places central attention upon the crucial historical difference between the overthrow of the capitalist state in October 1917 and the overturns which occurred in the late 1940s in Eastern Europe: that is, the absence of the mass organs of proletarian power—Soviets—led by a Bolshevik-type party. Moreover, the term itself implies the merely transitory existence of state regimes of dubious historical viability, whose actions in every sphere—political and economic—bear the stamp of the distorted and abnormal character of their birth.
This political prognosis applied to the Third Chinese Revolution and the historical viability of the nationalist path to “socialism” guided by Stalinism.
China’s Stalinist caste established a household registration system in the 1950s. This system provided essential social services only to those who were granted non-agricultural status (e.g., public sector workers in cities), while peasants were assigned agricultural status and thus denied access to social benefits such as subsidised housing, health care and pensions.
The purpose of this system was twofold. First, it gave the Chinese Stalinist state a socialist veneer. Second, it created a divide between the more privileged workers and the disadvantaged peasants, isolating the former from the latter. This, in turn, entrenched the subordination of working people to Chinese Stalinist leadership.
The CCP’s switch to supporting the Palestine Liberation Organisation
Internationally, the CCP under Chairman Mao Zedong had no interest in addressing the question of Palestine through appeals to working people in the Middle East or the building of independent working class parties anywhere. The CCP saw guerrilla warfare and the formation of popular fronts as alternatives to a socialist revolution in backward countries.
Against this backdrop, the partnership between the CCP’s bureaucratic strata and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was to become mutually beneficial. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, who saw armed struggle as a means of forcing a settlement on Israel and US imperialism, was keen to promote the CCP’s methods of guerrilla warfare and the “wisdom” of the Little Red Book to acquire funding and resources.
Yasser Arafat in a Southern Lebanon refugee camp. Damour, 1978 [Photo by Hans Weingartz – Hans Weingartz/ Randi Crott: Auf nach Palästina! / CC BY-SA 3.0]
The CCP, in turn, flaunted its “socialist” credentials by nominally backing the PLO, while legitimising rejection of the revolutionary and leading role played by the proletariat in anti-imperialist struggle.
Similarly, under the tutelage of the CCP, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) under Chair D. N. Aidit promoted the subordination of the Communist Party to the national bourgeoisie led by President Sukarno as the way to social reform. Both the PLO and the PKI inevitably ended in catastrophic and tragic defeat.
Backed by the US, the mass killings of members of the PKI and suspected communists in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966, as part of a campaign of mass murder of up to three million people, were reminiscent of the tragedy of the Second Chinese Revolution, but on an even larger scale.
China’s rapprochement with the US
Since the 1970s, China has gradually dispensed with anti-imperialist posturing as it moved towards policies for the restoration of capitalism.
As China under President Xi Jinping has suppressed solidarity with the Palestinians, Chinese workers and youth who had been outraged by the Gaza Genocide have subsequently turned to the literature, reports and films produced during the Mao era.
But there should be no nostalgia for Mao’s “support” for Palestine. With the social interests that the Chinese Stalinist regime serves as a guide, it should be no surprise that the restoration of capitalism in China, the promotion of multipolarity and an alliance with the genocidal Zionist entity are a continuation of what has come before.
On December 7, 1956, Mao stated, “as long as there is a social need, we can do a state-run or a privatised system.” Moreover, “we can go capitalist after the elimination of capitalism.” He asserted, “we have to safeguard capitalists” since “the [Chinese] state needs them.”
Mao with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a state visit in Peking, photograph distributed by the United Press International, 1957 [Photo: Unknown photographer at the source. Photo distributed by United Press International from files. – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c11093]
Phrased differently, the defence of the interests of this extremely thin social layer of the Chinese bourgeoisie was inextricably linked to the defence of the Chinese state.
Just two decades after the Third Chinese Revolution, in the early 1970s, it was under Chairman Mao that China began rapprochement with the United States. The CCP then justified its nationalist political outlook on pragmatic grounds. This policy was not an aberration from Stalinism, but rather an inevitable outcome of it.
While it was Chairman Deng Xiaoping that initiated capitalist restoration, Mao was the one who made the conditions favourable for an alliance with imperialism and the liquidation of the social conquests of the Third Chinese Revolution, which the fascist KMT regime under Chiang Kai-shek had longed for but failed to achieve.
China’s external relations with oppressed nations followed a similar trajectory. China was the first Stalinist state to recognise the US-UK-backed junta led by General Augusto Pinochet, who instructed fighter jets and tanks to bomb La Moneda Palace and ordered the murder of democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.
Henry Kissinger, then National Security Adviser to President Richard Nixon, infamously said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
When the South African apartheid regime invaded Angola in 1975 at Washington’s behest, China rushed to solidarise itself with the invaders and the US-backed National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA).
With the Carter administration’s approval, China under Deng Xiaoping sent Chinese troops to Vietnam in 1979 to punish the country for its incursion into Cambodia, which had been ruled by the China-backed Khmer Rouge. Deng infamously stated that the Vietnamese “Children who don’t listen have to be spanked,” abandoning any pretence of resisting US imperialism.
When the Carter administration gave the USSR “its Vietnam war,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the President’s National Security Adviser, put it, Beijing, along with London, Riyadh and Cairo, participated in Operation Cyclone, a US-coordinated covert plan to arm and finance “freedom-fighting” mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to bleed the Soviet Union white.
The list could go on. The Chinese state supported US imperialism because it was in line with the concept of “national interests,” namely the interests of the Chinese national bourgeoisie and the party and state apparatus that was becoming its representative.
China’s rapprochement with Israel
Similar to its relations with US imperialism, the Chinese Stalinist regime’s relations with Israel are a malignant expression of its opportunist manoeuvrers and class interests, antagonistic to proletarian internationalism.
China and Israel have forged economic ties since the 1980s, a decade before they established official diplomatic relations in 1992. Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Israel sold China technologies and weapons that Beijing could not obtain from the West.
It is not difficult to see why Israel and the CCP share a natural affinity. In 1982, Israel used its proxy, the fascist Phalange, to carry out the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Benjamin Netanyahu once lamented, “Israel should have exploited the repression of the [Tiananmen Square] demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”
Despite the fact that Zionism’s collaboration with Nazism had already become public knowledge, China continued to propagate the antisemitic lies that European Jewry was a race alien to Europe and that the State of Israel represented world Jewry.
In 2000, Chinese President Jiang Zemin spoke at an event hosted by Israeli President Ezer Weizman, claiming, “Both the Chinese and Jewish nations… have made outstanding contributions to the progress of human civilisation” and “the Jewish nation… has produced such giants as Karl Marx and Albert Einstein.”
“Our two nations have gone through… the unyielding struggles.” Jiang asserted but, “Eventually, backwardness, ignorance and evils in all forms will be conquered and… justice will prevail.”
Jiang (right) with President of Russia Vladimir Putin at APEC summit in Shanghai (2001) [Photo by Kremlin.ru / CC BY 4.0]
Without naming Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, Southern Lebanon and the Golan as well as continued sanctions against Iraq under the guise of UN Security Council resolutions since August 1990, Jiang went on to tout the superiority of multipolarity over unipolarity, claiming, “With the collapse of the… colonialist system… it has become increasingly difficult for… very few big powers or blocs of big powers to monopolise international affairs and control the fate of other countries.”
The world had been moved toward multipolarity. Jiang asserted, “Political multipolarity serves world peace and development and conforms to the aspiration of all.”
This speech shunned the questions of why the US imperialist bourgeoisie would sit on its hands and watch the demise of the unipolar world? Which class would rule in a “multipolar” world and at whose expense? And how would a rising Chinese Stalinist state relate to oppressed nations in a “multipolar” world?
One must also ask if the seizure of Arab lands, the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq by imperialist powers and the subsequent death of one million Iraqi children, to which China had little opposition, represented “the collapse of the colonialist system,” along with the historical end of great power rivalry and of the hegemony of US imperialism, would the Orwellian slogan “justice will prevail” mean “peace” through ethnic cleansing and genocide in full view of the world?
Both Marx and Einstein would turn in their graves had they known the CCP used them as a camouflage to conceal its betrayals of socialism, as well as its political and economic alignment with the reactionary Zionist state.
Following the Deir Yassin massacre in Palestine perpetrated by the Stern Gang and the Irgun in April 1948, one month before the founding of Israel, Einstein wrote:
When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine, the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.
Among the criminals were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Former Israeli Prime Minister Begin (1977–1983) was a member of the Irgun and the founder of Likud, whereas Israeli Prime Minister Shamir (1986–1992) was a member of Begin’s Irgun before joining the Stern Gang.
Israeli military forces receiving a briefing at Deir Yassin [Photo: Beit Gidi Exhibits]
In 2022, on the 30th anniversary of China-Israel diplomatic relations, Cai Run, then Chinese Ambassador to Israel, explained why Beijing was partial to Israel and its association with Zionist gangsters.
He indicated again that both the Chinese and Jewish people had been renowned for “their enormous contributions to world civilisation, their great sufferings in history,” but above all “their ceaseless pursuit of national rejuvenation and development.”
Their differences never stood in the way of amicable exchanges between China and Israel. Cai said, “There is no direct and fundamental conflict… between China and Israel, nor are there any outstanding historical issues.” The second largest economy had massive “manufacturing capabilities and a huge market,” whereas Israel had “advanced technology and strong creativity.” Their interests were “complementary.”
During his ambassadorship, Cai said nothing about the Zionist regime’s relentless assaults against Palestinians and avowed genocidal intent, including referring to them as “human animals,” “Hamas terrorists,” and “cockroaches,” and invoking the Biblical term “the seed of Amalek” to encourage the extermination of the Palestinians.
He did not blink when Israel deployed Ezra Yachin, a Zionist veteran murderer of the Deir Yassin massacre, to “motivate” the genocidal “defence” forces.
Since taking office in late 2024, China’s current ambassador to Israel, Xiao Junzheng, has begun to emphasise the “shared common value” between China and Israel, as well as why cooperation is in the best interests of both countries. China must cozy up with the winning side, if the Chinese national bourgeoisie is to continue to contribute to “human civilisation,” “national development,” “national rejuvenation” and the realisation of an “equal and orderly multipolar” capitalist system, to use China’s official phraseology.
None of China’s official pronouncements or policies contradict the CCP’s position as established in the late 1920s, when the party deliberately subjugated the working class and toiling masses to the national bourgeoisie. This official stance also does not contradict the nationalist outlook of the 1930s, which held that the CCP fought primarily against imperialist domination over China, but not against capitalism itself.
Indeed, these policies and pro-Zionist talking points dovetail with the Chinese Stalinist line of the 1940s, which saw Jews as a race that could only find refuge in the State of Israel, rather than in a proletarian struggle to abolish bourgeois states based on class societies and capitalist relations of commodity production.
Emancipation through a revolutionary overturn of capitalism
Many Chinese students overseas have been hesitant to participate in protests against the Gaza Genocide in Western countries for fear of being persecuted and expelled by the imperialist bourgeoisie, as well as fear that their solidarity with oppressed nations and repudiation of Chinese official policies would leave them unemployable in China. Sadly, some Chinese students, workers and youth have turned to Mao as an alternative, the very figure who laid the groundwork for an alliance with Israel and the liquidation of the deformed workers’ state.
But the return to Maoist literature to support Palestine does not solve the fundamental theoretical and political issues. Decades before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Stalinist regime in Moscow had rejected the unity of the proletariat of the world and its fight for emancipation, led by a revolutionary party of the conscious vanguard.
In line with “Socialism in one country” the Chinese Stalinist state has been guided by bourgeois nationalism. The CCP has justified and will continue to sanctify its opportunist twists and turns to serve the interests of the bureaucratic caste of the state and the Chinese ruling class.
Under capitalism, working people will not be free of national oppression and class exploitation until Palestinians as well as toiling masses throughout the Middle East are free.
A genuine struggle against the Gaza Genocide, fascism and war cannot be waged with wishful thinking and half-measures. The fight requires not only a struggle against opportunism, Stalinism and all sections of the ruling classes, but also a struggle against all accomplices of the US-Israeli genocide. Above all, the fight must be directed against their root cause, capitalism.
Leon Trotsky
As Trotsky explained to workers in 1928, defeating imperialism requires the abolition of capitalism by the proletariat guided by an internationalist programme and led by its revolutionary vanguard. He declared:
In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country. This also holds entirely for the party that wields the state power within the boundaries of the USSR. On August 4, 1914, the death knell sounded for national programs for all time. The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only upon an international program corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the highest development and collapse of capitalism.
Trotsky further underscored:
The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. In the present epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow from a world orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism.
Trotsky’s warning was fully vindicated by history. Despite the fact that the third Chinese Revolution ended the imperialist subjugation of the toiling masses in Mainland China, capitalism has been restored. The Stalinist CCP has no qualms about colluding with the imperialist bourgeoisie and the most repressive ruling classes on the planet.
The United States and Israel have falsely justified the Gaza Genocide as a “defensive” war. China’s defence of this “defensive” genocide speaks to the political bankruptcy of the CCP, the dead end of Stalinism and the delusional project of multipolarity.
The continued slaughter and starvation of the Palestinians, as well as Washington’s aim to reverse its decline through the creation of “the New Middle East” by increasingly savage means, have vindicated the Trotskyist movement’s struggle for international socialism since the 1920s.
We urge workers and youth in China, the Middle East and beyond who aspire to real peace and equality among nations to contact the International Committee of the Fourth International and join the fight for proletarian internationalism, that is real peace and equality among toiling masses of the world.
Thanks to Chris Marsden for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. The usual disclaimer applies.
Footnotes
[1] Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed in his book, Soviet Russia in China: A Summing-up at Seventy, that Mikhail Borodin, the representative of the Comintern in China, fully agreed to the rules that Chiang proposed, including “The Chinese Communist Party should deposit with the Kuomintang a complete roster of its members in the Kuomintang. […] No member of the Kuomintang [including communists within the party] could participate in any unauthorized organization or take any independent action. […] The Chinese Communist Party and the Communist International should submit to a joint conference of Kuomintang members and the Communists for approval any instructions or directives intended for Communists in the Kuomintang.”
Chiang appointed Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying as Deputy Director of Politics and Deputy Director of Course at the Whampoa Military Academy in 1926.
Zhou served as the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China between 1949 and 1976. Ye was later elevated to one of the PRC’s 10 (founding) Marshals.
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