Last year I had the honor to write an introduction for Professor Wen Yang’s book The Logical of Chinese Civilization. An abridged version appeared in China Daily. How has Chinese civilization endured for 5,000 years while all the civilizations of Europe and Western Asia disappeared?
China, Professor Wen argues, created a sedentary culture thousands of years ago while the West still incorporates the characteristics of its hunter-gatherer ancestors.
China “assimilated peoples representing six major and 300 minor language groups,” I observed. Unlike Europe, which forced the conversion of its peoples to Christianity as a condition of entry into Western civilization, China unified its disparate peoples through a common system of characters and riparian infrastructure, while local spoken languages, religion and culture flourished.
But assimilation failed sometimes. In the 3rd century BCE, the nomadic Xiongnu threatened the Han dynasty. The Han paid tribute to the barbarians, and married Chinese princesses to Xiongnu chieftains the Han Dynasty tried many different means of coping with northern nomads, including offensive and defensive wars, paying tribute, marrying Chinese princesses to Xiongnu rulers, and encouraging the adoption of Chinese culture.
Ultimately the Han Dynasty was compelled to fight the Xiongnu. Not until 124 BCE did General Wei Qing’s army defeat a large Xiongnu force. The barbarian threat persisted. More than a thousand years later the Mongol and Manchu barbarians conquered all of China.
The resilience of Chinese civilization was so strong that it ultimately assimilated the barbarian invaders, but not without enormous suffering and loss. The Tang and Song dynasties invented all the key technologies of Europe’s Industrial Revolution. Historians ask why the Industrial Revolution did not emerge in China. The answer might be that barbarian invaders so disrupted China that its innovations were not able to flourish.
Despite China’s unprecedented economic growth and impressive military strength, the barbarian threat has not disappeared. In many visits to China during the past ten years, I heard Chinese scholars assert that the United States deliberately incubated jihadists to destabilize China. I do not believe that the United States did this deliberately, but American missteps in the so-called Global War on Terror surely created problems for China.
In 2008, the Bush administration in its last year gave a blank check to General David Petraeus to contain the Sunni insurgency against the American-sponsored Shi’ite majority government in Iraq. Petraeus paid US$16 million a month in salaries to former Sunni military officers.
Many Sunni fighters paid for and armed by the US later formed the nucleus of ISIS. America’s support for Sunni jihadists in Syria fostered the emergence of ISIS, as a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report warned in 2012.
The Associated Press reported in 2017, “Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China.” The AP report stated:
Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters as the six-year conflict nears its endgame.
But the end of Syria’s war may be the beginning of China’s worst fears.
“We didn’t care how the fighting went or who Assad was,” said Ali, who would only give his first name out of fear of reprisals against his family back home. “We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.”
Hamas is part of the same anti-civilizational jihad that trained terrorists to murder Chinese.
As a board member of an Israeli foundation concerned with Israel-China relations, I had the privilege to hear the views of leading Chinese scholars and military strategists during visits to China. The threat of spreading jihad in Southeast Asia has been a continuing concern. The Chinese scholars emphasized that China has close relations with many Muslim countries as well as a Muslim population that sympathizes with the Palestinian cause.
China has its own reasons to maintain a neutral position on Israeli-Palestinian issues, and I do not propose to advise China on how to conduct diplomacy. However, some dimensions of the problem may not be adequately appreciated.
Israel’s policy towards Hamas during the past several years emulated the Han dynasty’s initial efforts to placate the Xiongnu. Israel encouraged Qatar to provide $$40 million a month in subsidies to Hamas. In 2020 the head of Mossad reportedly traveled to Qatar to promote such subsidies. During the past year, Israel opened the Gaza border to 20,000 Arabs working in Israel to improve economic conditions.
As I explained in an October 11 essay for the American website Law&Liberty, “The Netanyahu government thought that it had all strategic bases covered, and that it could bribe Hamas to remain on the sidelines as it negotiated diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. It lulled itself into a complacent haze that obscured the recalcitrant elements of the ancient world that opposed the modernizing impulse of the Abraham Accords.”
That is the origin of the “intelligence failure” that allowed thousands of Hamas terrorists to infiltrate Israel and murder more than 1,300 Israelis, including hundreds of children and teenagers. The atrocity reports from Israel are not an instrument of Western propaganda. We know about most of them from videos posted online by Hamas itself, which wants to terrify the Israelis and the Western world.
In Professor Wen’s framework, Hamas is a remnant of the nomadic, pre-civilizational world that refuses to be assimilated. Hamas does not want a two-state solution. Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the erection in its place of an Islamic state. This is not an ordinary ethnic conflict that can be settled by splitting things down the middle.
Hamas’ Charter states, “The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” adding, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
As I noted in a December 2022 commentary in guancha.cn, per capita income on the West Bank, where Israel remains the ultimate authority, is twice that of Gaza, where Hamas seized power in a 2007 coup after Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory. Its random butchery of innocent civilians, including infants, is identical to the methods of ISIS.
No state that permits a neighbor to murder thousands of its civilians can survice. Israel has no choice but to destroy Hamas. Hamas, as I explained in the cited commentary for guancha.cn, tries to maximize casualties among its own civilization population in order to gain sympathy from the world. Hamas claims that it is fighting Israeli “occupation.”
In fact, Israel unilaterally ended the occupation of Gaza in 2005 and handed the territory to the Palestine Authority. In 2007 Hamas overthrew the Palestine Authority government. Since then, jihadi terrorists have fired more than 20,000 rockets at civilian targets in Israel. Many of these were crude devices.
As I reported in my 2022 comment, many fell back into the densely populated Gaza Strip and killed many more Arabs than Israelis. The destruction of a Gaza hospital on October 17 is one of numerous cases of terrorist rockets killing Gazans rather than Israelis.
Israel’s actions in its own defense inevitably will cause civilian deaths, because Hamas employs the civilians of Gaza as human shields. This will enflame Muslim opinion in many parts of the world. China’s cautious public stance is not surprising. Nonetheless, China should consider carefully where its interests lie in the Gaza conflict.
In the short term, China is concerned about the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, which in 2022 provided 54% of China’s oil imports. China’s trade success in the Persian Gulf has matched its diplomatic achievements, with exports to Saudi Arabia nearly tripling between 2018 and 2023. Iran is the main provider of weapons to Hamas and supports Hamas in the present conflict. I am sure that China’s advice to Iran will be to avoid escalation.
But China’s interest in the conflict is broader than energy security. China’s economic future depends to a great extent on its exports to the Global South, which have doubled since 2019, and now surpass its exports to developed markets.
As I reported in my 2020 book: You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, and in many subsequent articles, China is bringing digital and physical infrastructure to billions of people now at the margin of the world economy, integrating them rapidly into global markets.
As its domestic labor force declines, China exports capital and technology to harness the efforts of young people in the Global South. That is not only an economic necessity but a civilizational imperative: China wants to replicate its infrastructure-driven model of development around the world.
China is a modernizing force around the world. The Belt and Road Initiative has raised China’s standing in the Global South, where public opinion about China is strongly positive. But this will not happen without opposition. Anti-modern impulses from pre-civilizational elements in society remain and constitute the biggest obstacle to China’s ambitions.
Terrorist attacks by Hamas-like jihadists in Pakistan have killed dozens of Chinese citizens, and press reports claim that security problems are slowing Chinese investment in a country where China has invested $65 billion.
If Hamas survives the present war with Israel, anti-civilizational elements around the world will take heart and look for new targets. Israel is now the front line of civilization. It is in China’s fundamental interest for the barbarians to be expunged from Gaza.
The path of least resistance points toward a global division around pro- and anti-American lines. Israel became an American ally after the 1967 War due to the calculations of the Cold War.
It is not, however, an American puppet. Israel was at pains to avoid involvement in the Ukraine War and to maintain good relations with both China and Russia. In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would visit China.
In the present crisis, America has no choice but to support an ally that has been attacked in a heinous way, and America’s detractors are lining up against its ally. That can only lead to further confrontation and eventual widening of the conflict.
Iran is not likely to get involved for the time being, but it will attempt to encircle Israel in the future. Israel has a large number of nuclear warheads and will use them if its existence is at stake. I do not believe that we are on the brink of world war, but the hardening of lines for and against Israel could lead to a catastrophe in the future.
If China wants stability in the region and the flourishing of civilization, it should hope that Israel succeeds in destroying the barbarians who threaten Israel’s existence in the short term, and threaten civilization itself in the long term.
Asia Times Deputy Editor David P Goldman is a member of the Advisory Board of SIGNAL (Sino-Israel Government Network and Academic Leadership).
The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent any organization with which he is affiliated.