After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, there was a clear contrast in the reactions from the world’s two superpowers. In the following days, U.S. President Joe Biden condemned the attack as an act of terrorism. Chinese President Xi Jinping remained silent. In an initial statement on Sunday, China’s foreign ministry did not mention Hamas and instead called for “relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians.” On Monday, the foreign ministry added a general statement condemning harm to civilians and said that China is “a friend to both Israel and Palestine.”
Israeli government officials have been openly critical of China’s response. The foreign ministry’s deputy director for Asia and the Pacific, Rafi Harpaz, expressed “deep disappointment” toward China for its failure to condemn Hamas’s attack. That disappointment was echoed by Israeli China experts. “China says they’re a new regional player, but the initial response wasn’t in line with that new role,” Gedaliah Afterman, the head of the Asia Policy Program at Reichman University’s Institute for International Diplomacy, told Foreign Policy.
Fan Hongda, a professor of Middle East studies at Shanghai International Studies University, took a different view. He said the friction between Israel and China came down to a difference in framing. “Israel emphasizes the current specific conflict, while China emphasizes the fundamental path to resolve the Palestinian issue,” he said.
While opinions vary on China’s response, no one was surprised by it—the statements fit within a pattern of Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.
China has been a longtime supporter of Palestine; it recognized Palestine as a state in 1988. While it also went on to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, China has typically offered more support for the Palestinian cause. This solidarity has helped China win friends in the region. “China’s current approach to this this issue could resonate with the Arab world—it also could resonate with the broader Muslim-majority world,” said Dawn Murphy, an associate professor at the U.S. National War College, who has studied China-Middle East relations. “And there are many parts of the global south where China’s stance regarding the treatment of Palestinians over decades has resonated.”
This regional support has also helped China to distract from the human rights abuses against its own Muslim minorities, particularly in Xinjiang. The majority-Muslim nations in the Middle East have been largely silent about China’s treatment of the Uyghurs.
“On the surface, China and Israel appear to have a lot in common,” said Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, a research professor at Busan University of Foreign Studies, who studies China-Middle East ties. “Both are high-tech security governments that devote a significant amount of time and energy to regulating and persecuting a Muslim population that is viewed as a security danger. Geopolitics, however, often brings together oddballs.”
China’s interests in Middle East have historically been largely driven by economics—it seeks stability in the region to protect access to markets and critical resource flows. China is a top trading partner for the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and other countries across the region, and the Persian Gulf is the source of half of its oil imports.
But more recently, China has also sought to strengthen relations with Middle Eastern nations, and the global south more broadly as a counterweight to attenuating relations with Europe and the United States, Murphy said. “The Arab world, and in particular the Arab Gulf, is seen as a region of countries that share China’s interests, and that really have an ability to have a complementary relationship with China,” she said.
In March, China turned heads by hosting talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which resulted in restoring diplomatic relations between the two. The deal was widely seen as a major diplomatic breakthrough for China, a sign that it was willing to play a larger political role in the region.
However, despite China’s growing interest in the Middle East, experts said that it has little desire to get directly involved in conflicts. Murphy has argued that China, at least for the time being, does not want to contend with the United States for a larger security role in the region. Instead, China has tried to maintain a position of neutrality and serve as a mediator between countries, as it did with Saudi Arabia and Iran. With this context, China’s hesitancy to criticize Hamas, and its effort instead to appear neutral, are only in keeping with the trend line.
In this conflict, though, China’s neutrality has limits. Tuvia Gering, a researcher with the Israel-China Policy Center at the Institute for National Security Studies, compared the situation to China’s response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in which it has exhibited what Gering called “pro-Russia neutrality.” In the latest conflict, China has adopted pro-Palestinian neutrality. As fatalities have risen to 2,800 in Gaza and Israel prepares for a ground invasion, China has taken a stronger stance. In a call with his counterpart in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, “Israel’s actions have gone beyond the scope of self-defense” and called on it to “stop imposing collective punishment on the people of Gaza.” Rakhmat, the research professor at Busan University, noted that “China sees little advantage in siding with Israel in the current dispute given that Israel is a staunch friend of the United States.”
While China isn’t quite as neutral in the conflict as some of its statements suggest, experts say that its relatively detached position may allow it to serve a mediation role going forward. China has sought to play a role in resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict since the early 2000s, so it has some experience on the subject.
China’s special envoy to the Middle East, Zhai Jun, has had calls with Israeli, Egyptian, Saudi, and Palestinian diplomats over the past week. In his call with his Egyptian counterpart last Wednesday, Zhai said that China was willing to help coordinate a cease-fire. Wang also told the Brazilian president’s top advisor last week that China supported an “international peace conference” to help broker a two-state solution. Zhai will be traveling in the region this week, which the government has billed as an effort to promote peace talks.
Still, Middle East and China experts told Foreign Policy that they doubt China will play a central role in mediating the crisis because it doesn’t seek to actively pressure other countries. “China doesn’t like to have too much skin in the game,” Afterman said, and it lacks the regional experience and expertise to mediate alone. So far, Qatar is serving as a mediator, coordinating with the U.S., on the potential release of hostages. But China is well-positioned to play a role in negotiations among other countries—whether for the release of hostages or a broader cease-fire—given its network of partnerships including with Iran.
“One way in which China is uniquely positioned is that they potentially would have the ability to talk to all parties, and at least up to this point, they have a relatively balanced relationship with all the interested parties,” Murphy said. While the war in Ukraine is not a perfect analogy, China has also offered to play peacemaker there and has put some pressure on Russia, at least when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons.
To what extent Israel would be willing to work with China in negotiations after its response last week remains an open question. Israel may still see some benefit to liaising with China, though. “I don’t think Israel trusts China, but it needs help, particularly on the hostage release issue,” Afterman said. “Israel was surprised to see China’s success with Iran and Saudi Arabia, and so it earned some credibility there.”
