The Cold War and Chinese Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1963–1975

The Cold War and Chinese Policy toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1963–1975 ✣ Gangzheng She Introduction After implementing the Great Leap Forward for close to four years starting in 1958, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gradually adjusted course. By 1962, the country had begun to recover from the disastrous consequences of this economic and social campaign. Along with the revitalization of the PRC’s domestic economy came the rehabilitation of Beijing’s interests in the world beyond the Communist bloc. Chinese officials reinterpreted the “Bandung Spirit” by arguing for the unity of African-Asian–Latin American peoples and their surging revolutionary struggles against imperialism to bring in “a new era of peace and social justice.”1 In contrast to Beijing’s earlier embrace of the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” before and during the Bandung Conference, the PRC’s militant turn demonstrated its will to fight against U.S. “imperialism” and also marked a conspicuous divergence from the diplomatic strategy of the Soviet Union, Beijing’s erstwhile ally turned bitter adversary. In seeking to increase the PRC’s diplomatic presence around the globe, Chinese leaders devoted particular attention to the Arab world, a region they had only sporadically dealt with in the 1950s, mostly during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Lebanon crisis of 1958. ThedesiretocompetewiththeSovietUnionfortheThirdWorldin general and for the Arab countries in particular, together with the radicaliza- tion of China’s domestic politics, eventually induced the PRC to become the first non-Arab major power that substantially supported the Palestinian national movement. An initial step was taken in May 1965 with Chinese diplomatic recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), roughly a year after its formation. Then, in the aftermath of the June 1967 Six-Day 1. “Chen Yi fu zongli juxing zhong wai jizhe zhaodaihui,” People’s Daily (Beijing), 30 September 1965, p. 1. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2020, pp. 125–174, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00928 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 125 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00928 by guest on 26 September 2021 She Arab-Israeli War, the PRC advocated a “people’s war” against Israel and stepped up its support to the Palestinians. The aim was to present China as the only genuine patron of national liberation movements and to help fos- ter the propitious conditions for revolution in the region, which would be an indispensable part of the coming world revolution. Although this radical de- sign failed, especially after the liquidation of Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan in 1970, it was among the first in China’s modern history that it tried to inter- vene politically, economically, and militarily in a region far from its immedi- ate vicinity.2 Although the PRC’s entry into the United Nations (UN) in the early 1970s was a direct byproduct of the Sino-U.S. rapprochement, China’s growing prestige among Third World countries at the UN stemmed from its overall position struggling against the dominance of superpowers in the world, including its seemingly unfailing support for the Arabs against “Zionist aggression.” China’s direct impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict was at best modest com- pared to the massive support the United States and the Soviet Union poured into the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the impact of Bei- jing’s involvement and rhetoric on decision-makers in both Washington and Moscow was far more complicate and has been widely obscured. Indeed, even now it is still poorly understood. Recently declassified documents have indi- cated that U.S. policymakers’ appraisal of Beijing’s interests in the Arab-Israeli conflict swung from underestimation to overestimation. Perhaps more signifi- cantly, Moscow’s actions in the region were limited not just by a desire to avoid direct hostilities with the United States but also by a desire to keep China from exploiting the situation. Sino-Soviet competition, first on the ground of the Middle East then at UN headquarters in New York, gave enormous impetus to the PLO’s visibility in the international arena. In addition to these international implications, the disproportionately large number of reports on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Chinese media, as well as the personal attitudes of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), indicate that China’s policy toward the Arabs and Israelis also served its domestic mobilization before and during the Cultural Revolution—another example of the close connection between domestic and foreign policy during China’s Cold War. 2. China developed broad interests in the Middle East and Africa from the late 1950s onward. Beijing’s support for the belligerents in the Algerian revolution and the Congo crisis predated its aid to the Arabs in their struggle against Israel. However, China’s involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict became the most complicated as well as the longest-lasting among all of its engagements in the Middle East and Africa throughout the Cold War, especially in the areas of diplomatic activity, domestic mobilization, and material support. 126 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00928 by guest on 26 September 2021 The Cold War and Chinese Policy toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1963–1975 The lessons of Beijing’s domestic politics and foreign relations have fea- tured prominently in recent studies of the Cold War. Over the past three decades, scholars in both the West and China have been reexamining China’s role in the Cold War. Chen Jian emphasizes ideology, instead of the pursuit of security interests, as the core motivator of China’s Cold War diplomacy.3 The works of Lorenz Lüthi and Austin Jersild reveal the underlying motiva- tion of China’s behavior in case studies of the Sino-Soviet alliance and split.4 From a broader perspective, Odd Arne Westad investigates how people in the Third World, including China and Middle Eastern countries, responded to the global interventions of the United States and the USSR by playing each superpower off against the other.5 Influenced by this new approach, Jeremy Friedman argues that the Sino-Soviet split and competition deeply influenced the historical trajectory of the development of the Third World and vice versa.6 However, although these authors together show that China’s emer- gence as a revolutionary country created an important connection between the Cold War and the decolonization of non-Western countries, they do not pay significant attention to China and the Arab-Israeli conflict. To be sure, this aspect of scholarship on the Cold War has not been en- tirely tabula rasa. Some works of political science and East Asian studies have addressed the issue. Yitzhak Shichor provides a seminal study of China’s ac- tivities in the Middle East and, in contrast to the popular critics who pointed out the failure of the PRC to gain material benefits from the region until the 1970s, Shichor argues that Beijing’s ultimate goal was to secure the Mid- dle East as an intermediate zone against foreign intervention.7 John Calabrese and Lillian Craig Harris have provided further discussion of China’s oppor- tunities and dilemmas in its changing relations with Middle Eastern countries during the Cold War.8 A distinct feature of these works is their focus on the international system, and Shichor notes that China’s policy in the Mid- dle East “reflected primarily its perception of the global situation, rather than 3. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 4. Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 5. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 6. Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 7. Yitzhak Shichor, The Middle East in China’s Foreign Policy, 1949–1977 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 8. John Calabrese, China’s Changing Relations with the Middle East (London: Pinter Publishers Limited, 1991); and Lillian Craig Harris, China Considers the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993). 127 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00928 by guest on 26 September 2021 She the local one.”9 In general, that policy was deeply influenced by the PRC- U.S.-USSR triangle—especially in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, changes in Sino-PLO relations and in Beijing’s anti-Israel campaign were clearly connected to the twists and turns in Beijing’s relations with both Moscow and Washington in 1965. Assessments of China’s policy in the Middle East through the prism of Beijing’s interaction with the superpowers have their virtues but also some notable shortcomings. To analyze any international problem, one must con- sider three major levels of action (in the spirit of Kenneth Waltz and J. David Singer): first, the key individuals; second, their societies and states; and third, the international system.10 Because most Chinese primary source materials were inaccessible during and immediately after the Cold War, most scholars reasonably focused on the international settings of China’s policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. This emphasis on the third level of analysis may have led them at times to neglect the roles of the second level and, to a larger extent, the first level.

Load more