youtai ren and laobaixing

Here’s something odd from a review of a Chinese TV documentary in Gaza:

The reporter heard that Israel will surround and clean up a certain refugee camp. So he entered the refugee camp beforehand and tried to find a good spot to take photographs from. Two locals came over and said, "Hi, Japanese?" "No, Chinese." "Okay, let's come to my house and have a cup of coffee." This is the typical way to treat guests, so the reporter went with them. Once they turned around the corner, the two Palestinians turned around, pulled out guns and pointed them at the reporter's head. One of them said something in Hebrew. Later on, the reporter found out that the phrase was "Kill him." According to the reporter's analysis afterwards, they did not shoot because he had no idea what the phrase meant.

I don’t know what that was all about. But Chinese public opinion is quite engaged with the Israel/Palestine issue, probably more than it is with Iraq, for instance. This is why a provincial TV channel found it worthwhile sending a team over there in the first place. The reporter was from Henan, which has a large population of ethnic Chinese Hui Muslims, and that may also have something to do with it.

And unlike Iraq, it’s also a “safe” issue as far as the Chinese government is concerned. Unlike in Iraq, It doesn’t have to worry about the public seeing a successful regime change exercise on a dictatorship followed by a successful insurgency. Both, after all, have unwelcome suggestive potential.

Anyway, here’s a Chinese view on the issue:

I am presently in Paris attending an international scientific committee conference called by the Israel-Palestine Scientific Organization. This conference enabled me to re-visit the tragic histories of Israel and Palestine and I am deeply touched. The Israelis and Palestinians are peoples with glorious histories that are filled with tragedies. Over the decades, these two peoples have been immersed in hardship but they never abandoned their quest for their ideals and they each made terrible sacrifices. They committed serious mistakes, but they were willing to reflect and repent continuously and then re-start to move towards even loftier ideals. The fates of the Israelis and Palestinians are inseparable, and together they weave a magnificent epic poem laden with blood and tears.

The histories of the Israelis and Palestinians have stayed deep in my heart since when I was young.

…by a Taiwanese Nobel Laureate, Lee Yuan-tseh. The thing to note here is the characterization of the conflict as a “quest for ideals” and a “magnificent epic poem” along with the general conviction that the issue is absolutely worth fighting for. That’s not the case in the West, generally speaking. Here public sentiment is in favour of peace as soon as possible partly out of a kind of generalized exasperation and partly from the conviction that the conflict is a driver of terrorism. Aside from amongst active partisans, questions of justice tend to be subsidiary to the desire that the whole thing just end. That’s why the Palestinians came under so much international pressure to accept the manifestly unjust Oslo treaty. And if the tide turns and the Palestinians get the whip hand, Israel can expect the same sentiment to turn against it, which gives the Israelis an additional motive for pursuing maximalist policies while the going is good.

I think the Chinese tend to take the national question more seriously. There’s a pretty strong streak of philosemitism amongst the Chinese public, as Jonathan Ansfield explains here. That’s not too surprising, really. China has its own history of diasporas and pogroms. And in Chinese law, custom and popular sentiment (outside parts of Taiwanese public opinion), China is regarded as the motherland, and its status as such is bound up intimately with questions of identity and justice. Just as this makes the Chinese public sympathise with the youtai ren as they fight to maintain a homeland, so it also generates sympathy with the Palestinian struggle to establish one. Neither side is in the wrong and both are condemned to fight for a worthy cause. Hence professor Lee’s ability to detect poetry where others might just see endemic violence and moral squalor.

I don’t know whether China will get involved directly in the Israel/Palestine issue. The idea still seems quite hard to get used to. But then a year ago, no one would have thought it possible that there would be a PLA battalion on the Litani. I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if a year from now there were another one or two in Gaza. If so, it will have been put there by public interest as well as national interest. And it’s not as if China could do any worse than Britain, the US or the rest of Europe if it took a more active role.

Comments

[Chris Williams]

"Over the decades, these two peoples have been immersed in hardship but they never abandoned their quest for their ideals and they each made terrible sacrifices."

There's no ROC(T) / PRC subtext going on here, is there?

[jamie]

I think there may well be, but I don't know enough about Prof Lee to be able to tease it out.