Wednesday, September 9, marked 50 years since the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese revolutionary leader whose long shadow is still cast over Asian and world geopolitics.
For almost three decades after proclaiming the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in October 1949, Mao stood at the center of a political transformation that altered China entirely and reshaped the balance of the Cold War.
Under his leadership, the world’s most populous country emerged from decades of civil war, foreign occupation and internal collapse as a Communist power determined to chart its own course, eventually challenging both the United States and, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union for influence across Asia, Africa and the developing world.
His domestic rule brought immense upheaval and suffering, from the Great Leap Forward to the violence and political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, which together inflicted enormous loss of life and upheaval on China. But abroad, Mao became something larger than the leader of China alone. To revolutionary movements from Vietnam to Africa and the Middle East, Maoism offered an ideology built around guerrilla warfare, peasant revolution and resistance to imperialism, while Beijing sought to present itself as the natural patron of peoples struggling against colonial or Western-backed powers.
Israel occupied a curious place within that worldview, because Mao’s China had not begun as its enemy.
A relationship with an extraordinary trajectory
In fact, the relationship followed an extraordinary trajectory. Israel was the first country in the Middle East to recognize the new Communist government, and the two countries briefly appeared to be moving toward full diplomatic relations, as Chinese officials spoke warmly of friendship with Israel and the Jewish people. Within little more than a decade, however, Mao was receiving the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beijing, supplying Palestinian terrorists and describing Israel alongside Taiwan as one of the West’s “bases of imperialism in Asia.”
A little over a month before Mao died in Beijing, then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin attempted a relatively uncomplicated gesture of international sympathy.
On July 28, 1976, an enormous earthquake had devastated the Chinese city of Tangshan, killing hundreds of thousands of people in one of the deadliest natural disasters of the 20th century. Rabin sent Chinese premier Hua Guofeng a cable expressing Israel’s sorrow over the loss of life and offering medical and other assistance to the Chinese people. Beijing sent it back.
Attached to the returned message was an explanation that, since the People’s Republic of China did not have diplomatic relations with Israel, the Chinese government could not accept the cable.
For a brief moment in the 1950's, full diplomatic relations appeared within reach
It was a final footnote to the relationship that a quarter of a century earlier had appeared capable of ending very differently. Israel had been the first country in the Middle East to recognize the People’s Republic, Israeli officials traveled through Maoist China as guests of the government, and senior Chinese officials had spoken openly of their friendship with Israel and the Jewish people. For a brief period during the 1950s, full diplomatic relations appeared within reach.
Mao, born in Hunan province in 1893, had risen from the son of a prosperous peasant farmer to become one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and, eventually, the dominant figure of the Chinese revolution. After decades of civil war, Japanese occupation, the Long March, and the final defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, Mao stood in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
On January 9, 1950, less than four months after Mao declared the People’s Republic, Israel formally recognized his government as the legitimate government of China. At the time, there was some Chinese sympathy for Zionism, which could be viewed through the lens of revolution and a national liberation movement that had fought British imperial rule.
The Korean War, which broke out later that year and eventually saw Chinese troops fighting American-led UN forces, complicated Israel’s efforts to develop the relationship. Israel was increasingly conscious of its close relationship with the United States, which continued to recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s government on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and viewed diplomatic engagement with Communist Beijing with deep suspicion.
Even so, the possibility never entirely disappeared, and several years later an unlikely Israeli diplomat in Burma began trying to reopen the door.
David Hacohen, Israel’s man in Rangoon, had become convinced that the young Jewish state could not afford to neglect Asia. Beginning in late 1953, he held discussions with China’s ambassador to Burma, Yao Zhongming, and later met premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai as the Chinese leader passed through Rangoon following the 1954 Geneva Conference.
The talks quickly became serious enough for trade to be discussed, and produced one of the stranger episodes in the story. According to Hacohen’s account, the Soviet ambassador in Burma joined the conversations and, confronted by the possibility that Washington might object to direct trade between Israel and Communist China, suggested simply sending the goods on a triangular route through Odesa and Siberia.
Beijing subsequently invited an Israeli commercial delegation to China, and in early 1955 Hacohen led a group that spent several weeks touring the country, visiting cities, factories, industrial plants and villages before holding talks in Beijing.
The reception appears to have been extraordinarily warm. A Chinese undersecretary of trade told the delegation that “the Chinese people and their government are great friends of Israel and the Jewish people,” while Hacohen returned convinced that China wanted commercial ties and would respond positively if Israel moved toward diplomatic relations.
There were discussions behind the scenes about what formal relations might look like, yet Israel hesitated. Hacohen later complained of what he called “friendly American pressure,” while Israeli diplomats in Washington worried that moving too quickly toward Mao could damage the country’s increasingly important relationship with the United States.
By the time of the Bandung Conference in April, 1955, China was moving in another direction.
Bringing together 29 Asian and African states in Indonesia, Bandung became a defining moment in the emergence of what would later be called the Third World. Israel was kept away following opposition from Arab participants, while Zhou used the gathering to cultivate governments emerging from colonial rule and to align China increasingly with their causes.
Another blow to Sino-Israeli relations was Israel's participation alongside Britain and France in the 1956 Suez Crisis against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, which proved particularly damaging in Beijing, where Mao’s China was attempting to present itself as one of the foremost opponents of Western imperialism. Whatever the Chinese had once made of Israel’s own struggle against British rule, the image was now of Israeli forces fighting beside two former European imperial powers against perhaps the most celebrated Arab nationalist leader of his generation.
During the following decade, that perception only hardened.
PLO greeted warmly by China's leadership
The transformation was unmistakable in March 1965 when Ahmad Shukeiri, then chairman of the recently established PLO, arrived in Beijing at the head of a Palestinian delegation. He was given the sort of welcome usually reserved for the representatives of a state, greeted amid flags, drums and crowds before meetings with China’s most senior leadership, including Mao himself.
During his conversation with Shukeiri, Mao offered perhaps the clearest explanation of where Israel had come to sit in his conception of the world.
“Israel and Formosa (Taiwan) are bases of imperialism in Asia,” Mao said. By then, he had come to see Israel and Taiwan in much the same light: as Western-backed footholds in Asia, Israel positioned against the Arab world and Taiwan against Communist China.
Taiwan was among the defining obsessions of Mao’s foreign policy. Chiang Kai-shek and the remnants of the Nationalist government had fled there following their defeat in 1949, surviving under American protection as Mao remained determined that the island would eventually come under Beijing’s control.
China provided PLO with arms, money, military training
China’s support for the Palestinians soon extended well beyond rhetoric. The Chinese provided money, small arms, expertise and military training to Palestinian organizations, although the scale was considerably smaller than was sometimes claimed at the time. Small groups of Palestinian terrorists traveled to China during the late 1960s, where their instruction included guerrilla warfare alongside immersion in Maoist political doctrine and visits to factories, agricultural communes and revolutionary sites.
Some returned to the Middle East as instructors themselves, carrying with them an ideology then reaching the height of its global influence. Even Mao’s Little Red Book found its way onto the battlefield; following an Israeli operation against Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon in 1972, Israeli troops were reported to have found an Arabic edition of Mao’s sayings among captured propaganda material.
Even during the years of Maoist hostility, however, Israel maintained the position it had taken in 1950 - that Beijing, rather than Taipei, was the government of China.
In October 1971, despite China’s support for Palestinian terror groups and years of bitter rhetoric against Zionism, Israel voted in favor of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, which transferred China’s seat at the United Nations to the People’s Republic and expelled the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. Israel was among the 76 countries voting in favor.
Five years later came the Tangshan earthquake and Rabin’s returned message.
Mao died several weeks afterward, on September 9, 1976. In the years that followed, China gradually moved away from the revolutionary foreign policy of the Mao era, as Deng Xiaoping placed more emphasis on economic modernization and pragmatic relations abroad. Quiet contacts with Israel developed behind the scenes, and on January 24, 1992, the two countries finally established full diplomatic relations.