China after October 7: Selective Neutrality and the Politics of “Principle”
by Felix Brender 王哲謙
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, China cast itself as an ostensibly neutral advocate of peace. In its initial Foreign Ministry response, Beijing condemned acts harming civilians, called for restraint, and presented the two-state solution as the fundamental way out of the conflict. In subsequent diplomatic contacts, it urged both parties to remain calm and said that China would promote “impartial conciliation and mediation.”
Yet the language of impartiality sat uneasily with Beijing’s account of the war. China neither severed relations with Israel nor openly endorsed Hamas, but its terminology, legal interventions, and convenor diplomacy consistently gave greater historical and moral specificity to Palestinian claims while stripping Israeli victimhood after October 7 of comparable historical and moral specificity. Palestinian suffering was situated within a developed account of occupation, dispossession, and failed statehood; Israeli suffering was more often absorbed into general language concerning civilian harm, escalation, and instability.
What is at stake is how October 7 itself is understood. It was not simply another episode in an undifferentiated cycle of violence. Israel suffered a deliberate mass assault against civilians and deserved the sympathy and solidarity ordinarily extended to a society subjected to such violence. Much of the international response, including China’s, moved almost immediately from the attack itself to the historical structure surrounding it. Context did not simply supplement moral judgment; it frequently became a means of withholding it.
China’s claim to neutrality should therefore be assessed not only against its formal relations but against the categories through which it allocated agency, victimhood, legitimacy, and responsibility. Beijing preserved pragmatic relations with Israel, but in the narrative and diplomatic struggle that followed October 7, it consistently privileged pro-Palestinian framings. That preference was not improvised after October 7. It reflected a much longer investment in Palestinian national claims and in China’s cultivated role as an authoritative voice of the Global South.
A Longer History of Alignment
China’s posture after October 7 did not emerge from nowhere. It drew on a much longer history of support for the Palestinian national movement, articulated through the political vocabulary of national liberation, anti-colonial struggle, and the restoration of legitimate rights.
The People’s Republic was among the first states to support Fatah and permitted the Palestine Liberation Organization to establish an office in Beijing in 1965. China recognized the State of Palestine in 1988, has consistently endorsed the Palestinian people’s “just cause of restoring their legitimate national rights,” and upgraded the relationship to a strategic partnership in 2023. China’s own account presents this as a history of sustained support for Palestinian national liberation.
This language also supports China’s effort to present itself as an authoritative voice of the Global South—an important source of influence in institutions such as the United Nations, where formally equal voting rights give developing states considerable collective weight. Beijing depicts its own experience of foreign domination and struggle against hegemony as the basis of a natural affinity with postcolonial societies, and has repeatedly described itself—despite being the world’s second-largest economy—as a “natural member” of the Global South.
The Palestinian cause is especially useful within this political imaginary. It allows Beijing to connect support for self-determination with opposition to colonialism, Western hegemony, and the unequal application of international law—an accusation China levels readily at others, even as it has itself disregarded adverse legal rulings.
Beijing has not, as far as the public record shows, explicitly described Hamas as a “freedom-fighting” organization. Yet it has placed Hamas within a larger Palestinian diplomatic and ideological field already framed through national liberation and anti-colonial justice. In the Beijing Declaration, China framed reconciliation among Palestinian factions as part of the overarching national liberation project. This preexisting interpretive alignment made it easier to treat Hamas as one Palestinian faction among several, rather than first and foremost as the perpetrator of October 7.
Condemning Harm without Naming Its Author
China’s initial response established the basic pattern. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ regular press conference on October 9, 2023, the spokesperson said that China was deeply concerned by the escalation, opposed and condemned “acts that harm civilians” (反对和谴责伤害平民的行为), and called for an end to hostilities and the implementation of the two-state solution.
At first glance, this appeared to be a conventional appeal for restraint. Yet when directly asked whether Hamas’s actions constituted terrorism, the spokesperson avoided the label and returned to Beijing’s general position on de-escalation, civilian protection, and political settlement.
This omission was politically consequential. China did not merely decline to support every Israeli response to October 7; it declined, in the attack’s immediate aftermath, to recognize the event in terms commensurate with its particular character. The deliberate killing and abduction of civilians were translated into a broader category of harm within an escalating conflict, allowing the attack’s agent, intention, and ideological character to recede behind its humanitarian effects.
This was not solely diplomatic caution, but exposure management. The formulation remained acceptable to pro-Palestinian publics, Arab governments, and wider anti-hegemonic constituencies, while allowing Beijing to avoid the costs of openly defending Hamas. Israel’s experience of October 7 was acknowledged through generalized, depoliticized humanitarian concern rather than direct recognition of perpetrators and victims—much to Israel’s express frustration.
Notably, this caution persisted despite Chinese nationals having themselves been affected: four Chinese citizens were killed, while others were missing or injured. This did not require Beijing to endorse Israel’s subsequent campaign, but they did warrant an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators. Even this was withheld. The inference is difficult to avoid: the strategic value of Beijing’s broader diplomatic posture outweighed the pressure to give its own citizens’ deaths moral and diplomatic specificity.
This withholding of acknowledgment is especially notable given Beijing’s own insistence, especially in relation to Xinjiang and Hong Kong, that terrorism and extremism be named without ambiguity and that Chinese counterterrorism not be subjected to “different yardsticks.” China has demanded that others take its security concerns seriously even as the policies justified in those terms have produced mass arbitrary detention, pervasive surveillance, and severe restrictions on Uyghur religious and cultural life, in part constituting crimes against humanity: Beijing expects threats directed against the Chinese state to be interpreted through clear categories of agency and terrorism, while declining to extend comparable recognition to Israel after October 7.
From Atrocity to Structure
China’s response also shifted the scale on which October 7 was interpreted. The attack could be treated first as a discrete moral and political event involving the deliberate targeting of civilians and hostage-taking, or reframed through a broader narrative of occupation, blockade, statelessness, and dispossession. That larger context is relevant to understanding the conflict, but it does not deprive particular acts of their independent moral character.
Beijing’s rhetoric moved rapidly from the particular event to the larger historical and political structure. Within days of October 7, Chinese officials were identifying the conflict’s “root cause” as the failure to resolve the Palestinian question justly. In this framing, the attack was not denied but re-situated as a manifestation of a longer injustice.
The scale of explanation determines the visibility of guilt. Foregrounding the act keeps Hamas’s agency central; foregrounding the structure can relativize or displace it. The attack is thereby reduced to an eruption produced by an unjust order, rather than judged as an act in its own right.
Much of the international response did not deny that October 7 occurred. It denied Israel the right to have the event understood first as an atrocity against Israelis. By immediately translating the attack into the language of occupation, resistance, and root causes, contextualization did more than withhold sympathy: it elevated that refusal into a token of moral seriousness.
China did not invent this discourse. It recognized its utility and placed itself within it. In doing so, Beijing aligned itself with a familiar political grammar: colonizer and colonized, oppressor and victim, state power and resistance, Western hypocrisy and postcolonial authenticity. Within such frameworks, moral status may be assigned structurally before particular actions are examined. Recognizing Palestinian political rights does not require accepting this hierarchy, in which Palestinian suffering supplies the conflict’s primary moral meaning while Israeli suffering appears mainly as an unfortunate complication of it.
Vocabulary as Policy
The political work performed by Chinese language becomes especially visible in the terminology used for those taken hostage. A recurring formulation in Chinese official and semi-official discourse was “被扣押人员,” which may be translated as “persons held,” “detained persons,” or “people being held.” In Chinese reporting on a December 2023 Foreign Ministry response, the term appeared in connection with an Israeli request that China assist in relation to the hostages. The official answer called for the release of all “被扣押人员.”
The expression is elastic enough to encompass civilians abducted from their homes, soldiers captured in combat, Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, and persons detained through formal legal procedures. These categories are not interchangeable. Civilian hostage-taking is a distinct form of coercion, while state detention raises separate questions of legality, due process, and treatment. Placing all such persons within one category of being “held” produces a degree of equivalence, making the distinction between hostage and prisoner less visible and release appear as a reciprocal humanitarian exchange.
This is not semantic pedantry. Political language decides which distinctions survive. Where hostage-taking is not named as such, the specific obligation to release civilians abducted during an attack becomes less distinct. China did not explicitly declare Israeli hostages equivalent to Palestinian prisoners; it chose a vocabulary within which such equivalence could readily be sustained.
Universal Principle, Selective Application
China’s approach was more systematic than simple opportunism. It practiced a form of strategic universalism: invoking civilian protection, international law, national self-determination, and humanitarian restraint while distributing agency, recognition, and responsibility unevenly.
China’s position at the International Court of Justice illustrates this process. On February 22, 2024, Foreign Ministry legal adviser Ma Xinmin presented Beijing’s stance during proceedings concerning the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The proceedings concerned serious questions of occupation, self-determination, and international law. Yet China’s intervention also fitted its wider discursive architecture. The Palestinian cause was articulated through developed categories of occupation, self-determination, and legal entitlement, while Israeli demands for recognition, security and justice arising from October 7 remained comparatively abstract.
The same pattern became visible in July 2024, when China hosted talks bringing together fourteen Palestinian factions, culminating in the Beijing Declaration emphasizing Palestinian unity, a ceasefire, “Palestinians governing Palestine” (巴人治巴), and progress toward a two-state settlement.
Palestinian reconciliation may be necessary for a sustainable settlement, but convenor diplomacy is never just procedural: it determines who is treated as a legitimate interlocutor. By hosting Hamas alongside other factions, Beijing helped reposition Hamas from the perpetrator of October 7 to one political actor among several participating in a future Palestinian order.
China accrued mediator credit at relatively low cost. Al Jazeera described the war in October 2024 as an opportunity for Beijing to display diplomatic influence while accepting limited risk. The Beijing Declaration did not merely mediate; it conferred standing.
Selective Postcolonialism
China’s anti-colonial framing also contains an unresolved historical selectivity. By the mid-twentieth century, the Palestinian cause had been incorporated into the twentieth-century political world of decolonization and national liberation. Yet Zionism, too, understood itself as a movement of national restoration among a persecuted and stateless people, and its dominant early institutions were substantially shaped by Labor Zionism and socialist organization.
Beijing resolves this ambiguity not through a consistent historical principle, but through contemporary geopolitical classification. Palestine is positioned as colonized, dispossessed, and part of the Global South; Israel is cast as powerful, Western-aligned, and occupying. The anti-colonial category is therefore allocated according to a simplified, politically convenient reading of present geopolitical configuration rather than applied consistently to competing histories of national liberation.
This apparent contradiction is less a diplomatic mystery than a division of function, allowing Beijing to maintain relations with Israel while lending its rhetorical weight to the Palestinian cause, a tension noted explicitly in Arabic-language commentary: Israel remains useful as a partner in trade, technology, and diplomacy. Palestine performs a different office, serving as a vehicle through which to speak the moral language of anti-colonial justice and Global South solidarity. The former supplies material advantage, the latter moral standing.
The Choice behind the Claim to Neutrality
China’s continued engagement with Israel did not vindicate its claim to neutrality; it revealed only the limits of the costs Beijing was prepared to incur, not proof of evenhandedness.
Its choice was not simply between Israel and Palestine as diplomatic partners. It concerned which suffering would be named, which agency obscured, and which history permitted to organize the moral meaning of the war.
China preserved its relationship with Israel but denied Israel the recognition owed to a society attacked on October 7. A genuinely universal politics would have recognized Palestinian political rights without subordinating Israeli victimhood to another people’s historical narrative. China’s claim to principle failed because its universalism was universal only where politically convenient.
Felix Brender 王哲謙 is the incoming Hou Family Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his fieldwork-based doctoral research examined Chinese relational approaches to security in Juba, South Sudan.