In the 1970s, my father subscribed to a tabloid newspaper called Reference News. The newspaper has been run by the Chinese government, and for decades, has been the only official channel for the Chinese public to have a glimpse of the outside world and learn the news about foreign countries. Because the Chinese authorities control media and use propaganda to brainwash people, it is difficult for us to learn the truth and the real history of China as well as the world.
My father often used the newspaper to teach me reading when I was in elementary school. Because of the newspaper, Palestine, Hamas, and Israel were added to my vocabulary. As a child, I always wondered why a guy was wearing a handkerchief on his head and looked like someone who had run out of water while taking a shower. The Chinese government told us that Arafat “wore his keffiyeh in a unique way, carefully arranging it with only his left ear visible, which is said to resemble the map of Palestine.”
From childhood to college, I not only parroted, but also believed what the newspaper described — “Israel is the enemy of Palestinians,” “Arafat is a hero and China’s precious friend,” and “Hamas is fighting Israel to defend its nation.” Until one day I heard one of my colleagues — a Chinese professor who taught college students English in Beijing — said secretly, “Arafat and Hamas are the apple of discord; Palestine should never exist.” It picked my curiosity to learn what Israel really was, why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been siding with Hamas, and what were the issues between Israel and Palestinians.
In China, it is difficult to learn the truth because the government uses the world’s most notorious censorship to brainwash and enslave its people. The heavily censored Chinese social media are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. As a brainwash tool, social media in China have been flooded with antisemitic posts. At the same time, any comments on social media that support Israel’s right to defense have been quickly scrubbed by the government.
The Promised Land in the Bible: A suppressed message in China
When I was a college student in China, I secretly kept a copy of the Bible. In the Book of Exodus (3:8), God promises to take the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to a “good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” Thanks to God, I am living in the United States now and have the privilege of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other fundamental human rights. I can freely do research to seek truth.
The Jews’ link with the land of Israel and their love for it date back almost four thousand years. It began when God told Abraham to leave his homeland, Ur Kasdim, and go “to a land that I will show thee.” However, the Chinese government claims that “History has not been kind to the Palestinians” and the Jews took the land of Palestine. The truth is that the Chinese government hides the fact that the Bible says that Israel is the land that God promised to the Jewish people.
China has wanted Israel erased from the map since Mao’s time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Mao Zedong — the Chinese Communist Party leader and the founder of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — had strongly supported the destruction of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Arab State. “In those years, Beijing armed and trained the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and other Palestinian militant groups” (Palmer, 2023). Mao compared Taiwan with Israel and smeared both Taiwan and Israel by describing them as “bases of imperialism in Asia.”
“Our best friend is China,” declared the leader of a radical Islamic group — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1970, the radical Islamic leader said, “China wants Israel erased from the map because as long as Israel exists, there will remain an aggressive imperialist outpost on Arab soil” (Harris, 1977). In 1971, China became a member of the United Nations. Since then, the regime’s official policy has been one against Israel and in support of dictators and terrorist countries, such as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Russia.
In 1976, Mao died. China continued siding with radical terrorist groups in the Middle East and using Palestine as one of its steppingstones to control the world. In 2022, the Chinese government claimed, “Arafat devoted his whole life to the just cause of restoring the lawful rights of the Palestinians. Sadly, his vision for a State of Palestine remains unfulfilled.” Clearly, the evil Chinese regime has been working hard to have Israel erased from the map.
One real reason for Communist China to support Hamas is to cover up its crime against Uyghurs.
Not surprisingly, in the wake of the bloody weekend terrorist attack on Israel, the CCP has not even acknowledged the fact of an attack on Israel. The Chinese regime has said nothing about the atrocities inflicted by Hamas terrorists upon thousands of Israeli citizens. Instead, the regime has repeatedly called out Israel for alleged violations of “the basic human conscience and the basic norms of international relations.”
Ironically, the CCP has violated that very “basic human conscience” since 1949. When the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops marched into East Turkistan (i.e. Xinjiang), they were met with resistance across East Turkistan. Uyghurs’ resistance to Chinese occupation was brutally suppressed. In the first five years of Chinese occupation, 150,000 Uyghur people were killed.
After overtaking the land of Uyghurs, the CCP began to erase their culture, slowly but surely. The Chinese Communist ruler renamed East Turkistan as the Xinjiang (meaning “New Territory”) Uyghur Autonomous Region. However, the Uyghur people have never had autonomous governance promised by the CCP. In 1949, Han Chinese made up just 6.7% of the region’s population. By 1978, that number had jumped to 41.6%. In the 1990s, the CCP began to label Muslim Uyghur activists as terrorists.
In 2013, the Chinese regime adopted the Belt and Road Initiative to exploit underdeveloped countries and strategically store oil and other natural resources. In order for the project to be successful, the Chinese government officials believed that the westernmost province of Xinjiang had to be under tight control. The Belt and Road is marked with the blood and tears of the Uyghur people.
Since 2015, the Uyghur people have been subjected to genocide, from detainment to mass surveillance to forced sterilization. In 2017, China began building massive detention centers described by government officials as reeducation camps. The men and women detained in these camps are brought in accused of praying, attending religious weddings, and visiting a mosque. The CCP’s concentration camps have held between one and three million Uyghurs in total, making them the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority since World War II.
By and large, the Chinese Communist Party and radical terrorist groups like Hamas share many similarities. They are anti-religion and anti-humanity. To fulfill their evil ambitions, they sacrifice their own people, and kill innocent people that they see as “enemies.”
In conclusion, lies and empty promises are tactics that the Chinese regime uses systematically, as we witnessed in the case of Hong Kong. As a Chinese, I condemn the abhorrent Chinese government, which stands with criminal terrorists, and pray for those innocent lives lost in the brutal attacks by Hamas.
(Photo: Reference News, the title of the news is “The World is Listening to Xi Jinping’s Talk”)