Chinese policy on Jews, Zionism and Israel

Chinese policy on Jews, Zionism and Israel
Abbreviation
Type	Foreign policy
Formation
Predecessor
Purpose
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Chinese state policy on Jews, Zionism and Israel runs in three stretches. Before 1949 the relevant acts were refuge and a treaty-port Zionist movement, not a state position. From 1950 to 1992 Beijing recognised the People's Republic's non-recognition of Israel, then a secret military trade. On 24 January 1992 it opened diplomatic relations. Since 7 October 2023 it has kept the embassy and the trade, refused to treat the Palestinian armed groups as the aggressor, and used the two-state formula as its public line. Whether that makes China an ally or an enemy of the Zionist project is the argument between the schools below.

Before the People's Republic

The 1930s and 1940s were a refugee policy by default. Shanghai required no visa. European Jews entered in numbers put at about 18,000 after the start of the war in Europe, inside an existing Baghdadi and Russian population. The Japanese occupation confined stateless refugees to Hongkew in 1943. None of this was a Chinese state decision on Zionism. The political text cited for the period is earlier: a 1920 letter from Sun Yat-sen to N. E. B. Ezra of the Shanghai Zionist Association, calling Zionism one of the great movements of the time. Walid Abd al-Hay treats that letter as the origin of a Chinese misreading that lasted into the early People's Republic.

1950 to 1955

Israel recognised the People's Republic in January 1950. Beijing did not reciprocate. Abd al-Hay, drawing on Yitzhak Shichor, says Mao then treated Jews as having historical rights in Palestine and the Zionist movement as national liberation, and the Arabs as seeking the territory with British support. He calls that view inaccurate. The turn he dates to the Bandung Conference of 1955 and Mao's meeting with Gamal Abdel Nasser. After that, China placed Israel in the Western colonial system. Full relations waited until 1992. China was the last permanent member of the Security Council to open them.

The secret trade

The public freeze did not stop a military relationship. Shaul Eisenberg opened unofficial contacts around 1979–80, with the Israeli defence ministry behind him. The first shipment of tank shells is dated to 1981. Contracts covered shells, missiles and radar. The Chinese side would not come to Israel. In 1985 Beijing issued visas to nine Israeli agricultural executives, and Israel reopened its consulate in Hong Kong. Yitzhak Shichor reads the arms sales of the 1980s as begun with United States encouragement, to strengthen China against the Soviet Union. A Newsweek reconstruction calls the sequence arms diplomacy: Israel used weapons to become, in that writer's phrase, an ally. Foreign minister David Levy, in Beijing for the 1992 signing, told reporters that defence cooperation had been exaggerated. He did not deny it.

Why 1992

Shichor's account is the most precise on the timing. The decision, he says, had been taken in the late 1980s. Two later events fixed the date. In January 1991 Israel did not respond to the Iraqi missile attacks, which avoided a wider war that would have hit Chinese economic interests in the region. In late 1991 the Madrid conference set up five multilateral groups, on security, economic cooperation, refugees, the environment and water. China wanted seats. It could not take them without relations with Israel. The protocols were signed on 24 January 1992 by Levy and Qian Qichen at the Diaoyutai guesthouse. Qian said China would use its influence to narrow the gaps, and Beijing sat that week in the Moscow multilateral. Trade, on Shichor's figures, went from $50 million in 1992 to over $1 billion in 2001, over $8 billion a decade later, and near $15 billion in 2021.

The United States then capped the military side. In the early 1990s Washington forced Israel to drop the Phalcon early-warning aircraft for China and an upgrade of Chinese Harpy drones. The alliance that had tolerated the 1980s sales no longer did. A 2019 RAND report treats the later growth, in trade, investment, construction, universities and tourism, as useful to both sides and constrained by that alliance. China's interest was technology and a point on the maritime silk road. Israel's was a market outside the United States and Europe.

After 7 October 2023

Beijing did not close the embassy. It also did not treat the attack as the act that defined the war. On 9 October 2023 the foreign ministry said it was deeply concerned, condemned “acts that harm civilians,” and named the two-state solution as the way out. On 15 October, foreign minister Wang Yi told his Saudi counterpart that Israel's actions in Gaza were beyond self-defence and were collective punishment. The standing formula, repeated through November, is an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In July 2024 China hosted fourteen Palestinian factions and issued the Beijing Declaration on unity, a ceasefire, and “Palestinians governing Palestine.”

Dale Aluf, research director at SIGNAL Group from 2017 to 2024, noted a shift in tone by October 2024: Palestinian national rights should be realised, and Israel's “reasonable security concerns” taken seriously. An INSS note of November 2024 calls the change cosmetic. Beijing, it says, urges Israel to implement the ceasefire half of Security Council resolution 2728 and ignores the half demanding release of captives, and it did not condemn the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah or Israeli strikes on Iran. The gap, on that reading, is what China does not say.

Ally or enemy

The record does not support either label on its own. Relations, trade and technology links continue. So does a public line that gives the Palestinian claim the historical weight and treats Israeli force as the breach. The schools divide on which of those is the policy.

School	Claim	What it does not explain
Arms diplomacy	The 1980s sales made China an ally. Newsweek, via the Eisenberg channel. Recognition in 1992 was the public end of a military courtship	The Phalcon veto, and the post-2023 political line
Shichor, pragmatic timing	The decision was late-1980s. Madrid and the 1991 restraint fixed the date. China wanted the multilateral seats	Why the political line stayed with the 1967 borders
RAND, constrained opportunity	Growth is real and useful, and capped by the United States alliance	The narrative after 2023
Yang Meng, mutual misreading	Each side took the other as a market or a technology source. The “natural partnership” did not survive October 2023	The secret arms trade, which was not a misunderstanding
Abd al-Hay	Pressure groups and Israel-studies programmes complement diplomacy. China remains politically closer to the Arab states and to Palestine. October 2023 cooled the academic channel	The congregations, and the embassy that stayed open
Selective neutrality	Telos and the INSS notes. Rhetoric privileges the Palestinian frame. Practice keeps the relationship. Neutrality is a Global South position, not a break	How far the technology trade has actually been cut

On this division China is not an ally in the sense of the 1980s arms relationship, and not an enemy in the sense of a severed state. It is a permanent-member state that sells no public defence of Israeli force, keeps the economic link, and uses the two-state formula as the price of its mediation.

See also

• Jewish communal and Zionist organisations in China
• Israeli Pressure Groups in China
• SIGNAL Group
• Shaul Eisenberg
• Chabad-Lubavitch in China