Choosing Sides, Socialist Internationalism, and the Ideological Signification of China's Jewish Problem in the International Arena: "Wang Yi Holds Talks with the Delegation of Arab-Islamic Foreign Ministers"

 

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The perennial question for those who aspire to leadership of the new Communist International centers on the ways in which it may establish and maintain its position at the center of the International as its vanguard state-party. To that end, carefully choosing sides and sacrificing opportunities in the short term for greater aspirational goals, may be necessary.  It is always in the interests of the vanguard to sacrifice the less significant in the furtherance of loftier and more beneficial goals. The Communist Internationalist must translate its aspirations into the language of those who have to be brought on board gradually, or at least made dependent  pending the start of necessary and inevitable transitions to appropriate socialist dialectics--especially religious communities now organized as states. The operational mode was embedded in the "New Democracy" model that for a short time necessarily established the basis of the internal approach to Communist vanguardism within China. well established by Mao Zedong before 1949:

Third, it is likewise impossible for the Chinese people to institute a socialist state system at the present stage when it is still their task to fight foreign and feudal oppression and the necessary social and economic conditions for a socialist state are still lacking.  What then do we propose? We propose the establishment, after the thorough defeat of the Japanese aggressors, of a state system which we call New Democracy, namely, a united-front democratic alliance based on the overwhelming majority of the people, under the leadership of the working class. . . 

We Communists do not conceal our political views. Definitely and beyond all doubt, our future or maximum programme is to carry China forward to socialism and communism. Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendour. On joining the Party, every Communist has two clearly-defined objectives at heart, the new-democratic revolution now and socialism and communism in the future, and for these he will fight despite the animosity of the enemies of communism and their vulgar and ignorant calumny, abuse and ridicule, which we must firmly combat. As for the well-meaning sceptics, we should explain things to them with goodwill and patience and not attack them. All this is very clear, definite and unequivocal. . .

Some people are suspicious and think that once in power, the Communist Party will follow Russia's example and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and a one-party system. Our answer is that a new-democratic state based on an alliance of the democratic classes is different in principle from a socialist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Beyond all doubt, our system of New Democracy will be built under the leadership of the proletariat and of the Communist Party, but throughout the stage of New Democracy China cannot possibly have a one-class dictatorship and one-party government and therefore should not attempt it. We have no reason for refusing to co-operate with all political parties, social groups and individuals, provided their attitude to the Communist Party is cooperative and not hostile. (Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government (24 April 1945) (emphasis added))

This applies with equal force to the international situation, one in which the Communist International must inevitably displace the foreign imperial and feudal orders on which it was (to their mind) founded in 1945 as the necessary and peak achievement of feudal, imperial development now carried to its climax in and through the U.S. and its dependencies.  The Americans have become the pre-1949 Kuomintang in this era of globalization. The target is necessarily externalized and reified as forms of behaviors and sectors of international actors that can be excised in order to solidify a united front around the vanguard leadership of the center (the core of leadership of the Communist International) now centered in China and legitimated by its track record of success. 

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Within this dialectical framework of contradiction, one must divide the world into forces of opposition, and those of coalition (even if in the long term coalitions are to be subsumed within the leadership structures of the vanguard). China appears to have chosen to treat Jewish Israel as a running dog of its American nemesis (in the context of the battle for international normative supremacy). That choice exposes the complex consequences of the semiosis of naming (明名 (Míng míng) (Guiguzi: China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric (Hui Wu (trans); Carbndale: SIU Press, 2016), p. 59-60) that has been set in motion. Again, in the context  of the Jewish-Muslim ethno-religious wars (with the Christian communities as a sort of involved relative on the sidelines) centered on the territories of ancient Canaan-Israel-Palestine-etc. (the choice dependent on one's historical tastes and semiotic predilections), it is altogether too easy to re-invest the Jewish people with the characteristics of foreign-fascist-feudal oppressors in the style of Mao Zedong's brilliant characterizations that served as the discursive predicate for the (short lived) New Democracy and the longer lived United Front strategies.  That conflates a number of ancient discursive trajectories, some (ironically) borrowed from the fascists (20th century Germany) and others borrowed and repurposed from the historical determinism of certain intellectuals among Christians and Muslims desperate to ground their religious legitimacy on the constitution of the legitimacy of those whose covenant came prior in time, which then turned into an institutionalized system of apartheid that to some extent continues into contemporary space. It (ironically, and perhaps unintentionally) produces of semiosis of the dialectics of Marxism's origins in the European mythos of the "wandering Jew" whose permanent state of displacement is meant to serve as a necessary semiotics of the progress toward perfection in the return of the divine to earth or in the attainment of human perfection when religion itself would be overcome in the establishment of a communist society. And there one moves to the Jewish Marx, who acquires semiotic authority precisely because of his personification of the "wandering" type--the signification of humanity in diaspora without a place to which to return and thus compelled to overcome the contradictions of current circumstances and in that dialectical process to reach toward perfection--the perfect overcoming of himself (but not in the way that Nietzsche conceived it). he was the skeptical Jew who could find refuge  only amongst others.  And it was only in that state that it was possible for Marxism to be born as a theory of transcendence (see, e.g., famously here; of the person of Marx in the body of a Jew, of the the transcendence of ideology over religion and local custom), and in this way Marx's thought was able to wander into China and received as something other than a theory bound up in a foreign place and time. In Marxism, the trope of the "international Jew" has morphed into one built around the international Marx (and his progeny now embodied in the leadership core of the Chinese vanguard), forced to wander until (or to wander building the pathways leading toward) the perfection of is theory is realized by the Communists,

That sort of semiosis of ideology, and especially the trope of the rootless diasporic community tied only to themselves beyond the state, is quite useful in certain quarters (whether intentionally or in effect), but its subliminal repercussions continue to produce the most fascinating absurdities, even in Asia. See for example the 1917 pamphlet produced by Vajiravudh (Rama VI, King of Siam), "The Jews of the Orient," Siam Observer Press (January 1, 1917) (aimed at Chinese overseas communities).

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These two discursive tropes--the Jew as the post modern objectification of the foreign-fascist-feudal oppressors, on the one hand, and the Jew as compulsory wanderer, the predicate exemplar of a semiotics of progressive dialectical overcoming toward perfection--now appear to be usefully conflated as a Chinese Marxist "solution" to the Jewish problem in MENA. It provides the normative framework within which it is possible to identify with whom one ought to build a coalition in the style of what would become a united front structure, and against whom that coalition building ought to be targeted. That was the choice.  Every vanguard intend on reaching its goals must, in the short term, carefully construct both the foreign-fascist-feudal oppressors other, and at the same time, and with equal care, also constitute the coalition of the willing where the conditions for constructing socialist internationalism are not yet entirely possible. That was the key insight of Mao Zedong's "On Coalition Government" applied to the necessary international objectives of the vanguard. And to that end and in aid of that choice the semiotics of compulsion, along with its ancient tropes, made the choice seem positively natural under current historical conditions.

Pix credit here (Soviet 1920s 3rd International)

The rest follows. It is onto this set of converging discursive and pragmatic templates that certain sectors of high level functionaries in China have bet on a specific stance: sacrifice the Jews to increase the probability of attainment of some sort of vanguard leadership in MENA even if not under the banner of the Communist International but rather of the New Era Socialist Internationalism and its Belt & Road institutions, as they morph into whatever suits the times. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspect of the development of the united front (coalition governance) impulses from the 1940s has been both the ways in which it has blossomed in the seamless enmeshing of theoretical objectives and practical expression through the outbound strategies most evident in New Era projects. At the same time, its internal development has proceeded in parallel producing in its current manifestation the evolution of people's whole process democracy.  But just as people's whole process democracy requires oppositional elements (for whom the people's democratic dictatorship principles are deployed); so Communist internationalism requires its foreign-fascist-feudal oppressors. Generally, that is the role assigned to the United States in the New Era. That also accords with the underlying ideologies of the liberal democratic hard left and right both of whom also see in classical liberalism a rotten system the norms and structures of which must be swept away (especially in the current discursive rhetoric and semiotics of anti-"capitalism").  In the MENA, the Jews, it seems, will serve this role nicely in ways that accord with ancient tropes and modernizes them within the rhetoric of Zionism and settler colonialism. Muslim MENA states are necessary elements of united front work--the bourgeois and landed peasants of another era, useful today on the path to tomorrow.  All good--from the perspective of a vanguard committed ultimately to the use of these elements to further the (inevitable) march towards the establishment of a communist society. In the context  of coalition with religious groups (including eventually Islam), the underlying premises of Marx is never far from consciousness (again, see here).

One encounters the performance of these stances and the weaving of these tropes  in the recent meeting of Wang Yi with the delegation of Arab-Islamic Foreign Ministers, to which of course, the demon foreign-fascist-feudal Zionists (Jews) were not invited, though they were certainly the objec(ive) for the occasion. Underlying the fairly banal outer casing of this meeting--and its even more banal analysis by those who are content to look only to the surface of things--are quite interesting calculations and dialectics of discursive tropes that in ancient and modern form continue to shape, quite unconsciously at times, what appears to be a rational calculus that is itself not much more than the semiotic calculus of compulsion. 

The English language summary of that meeting follows: "Wang Yi Holds Talks with the Delegation of Arab-Islamic Foreign Ministers." In imagery, the picture above says it all. In substance the issue becomes much more subtle. The summary, thus, is less interesting as politics, and even less interesting for its diplomacy, which is well worn and unremarkable.  What is fascinating, though, is the way that the discursive threads and calculations around the New Era construction of Chinese Socialist Internationalism, and with its, the New Era Communist International, appears to shape the recent in a style closely aligned to the strategies of coalition building that brought the Communist vanguard to power in 1949 China. There is a price, of course, but the hope appears to be that it may not come due for quite sometime. 

Against this the liberal democracies appear both clueless and helpless, and the Israeli's more so--perhaps in part because of the years long cultivation of ideological fellow travelers in the West (one of the great innovations of Soviet strategic engagement that continues to pay dividends). But you be the judge of that. The lessons for Ukraine are painfully obvious.

 

Wang Yi Holds Talks with the Delegation of Arab-Islamic Foreign Ministers

2023-11-20 20:44

On November 20, 2023, Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with the delegation of Arab-Islamic foreign ministers consisting of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki and Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Hissein Brahim Taha in Beijing.

Wang Yi said the fact that the delegation chose China as the first leg of their tour for international mediation shows deep trust in China and embodies the fine tradition of mutual understanding and support between the two sides. China is a good friend and brother of Arab and Islamic countries. China has always firmly upheld the legitimate rights and interests of Arab and Islamic countries and firmly supported the just cause of the Palestinian people to restore their legitimate national rights and interests. In regard to this conflict, China has firmly stood on the side of justice and fairness, has been working hard to de-escalate the conflict, protect civilians, expand humanitarian aid, and prevent humanitarian disasters, and has been calling for a return to the two-state solution and the early settlement of the Palestinian question. Today marks the 35th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Palestine. China appreciates Arab and Islamic countries for their active mediation efforts for peace, and stands ready to work with them to make unremitting efforts for an early ceasefire in Gaza, the easing of the humanitarian crisis, the release of the detainees and an early, comprehensive, just and enduring settlement of the Palestinian question.

The foreign ministers of Arab and Islamic countries present briefed Wang on the Joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit. Noting the large number of civilian casualties and continued humanitarian disasters in Gaza, the international community should take responsible actions as soon as possible to promote an immediate ceasefire and cessation of hostilities, ensure unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid and supplies to Gaza, protect innocent Palestinian civilians and prevent the forced relocation of civilians in Gaza. Arab and Islamic countries spoke highly of China's long-standing just position on the Palestinian question and appreciated China's efforts as the rotating presidency of the United Nations (UN) Security Council to facilitate the adoption of the first Security Council resolution since the outbreak of the current Palestine-Israel conflict. They look forward to closer coordination with China to prevent the crisis from spreading, restart the peace talk process, promote the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the basis of the two-state solution, avoid a vicious cycle of violence for violence, and achieve enduring peace and stability in the Middle East. Arab and Islamic countries expect China to play a greater role in ending the Palestine-Israel conflict, resolving the Palestine-Israel issue and achieving fairness and justice.

Wang Yi said, China firmly supports the diplomatic efforts of Arab and Islamic countries. He put forward China's proposal on addressing the current crisis in Gaza and resolving the Palestinian question:

The pressing task now is to fully implement relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly and achieve an immediate ceasefire and cessation of hostilities. A ceasefire should not be a diplomatic rhetoric. It is a matter of life and death for the people in Gaza. A ceasefire should be achieved as a top priority. This is the pressing need of the people in Gaza, the wish of the overwhelming majority of countries, and the unanimous voice of all peace-loving people around the world.

Parties concerned should earnestly abide by international law, especially international humanitarian law. China opposes any forced displacement and relocation of Palestinian civilians. Israel should stop its collective punishment of the people in Gaza and open humanitarian corridors as soon as possible to prevent a wider humanitarian disaster.

Wang Yi stressed that any arrangement concerning the future and destiny of Palestine must be based on the consent of the Palestinian people and accommodate the legitimate concerns of regional countries. Any solution to the current situation should not deviate from the two-state solution and should be conducive to regional peace and stability.

The UN Security Council should heed the call of Arab and Islamic countries and take responsible actions to de-escalate the situation. As the rotating presidency of the Security Council, China will continue to strengthen coordination with Arab and Islamic countries to build consensus and push for further meaningful actions by the Security Council on the situation in Gaza.

Wang Yi said the fundamental reason for the cycle of conflict between Palestine and Israel is that the Palestinian people's right to statehood and survival and their right of return to their homes have been ignored for a long time. The way out is to implement the two-state solution and establish an independent Palestinian state. China calls for an early convening of an international peace conference with greater scale, scope and effectiveness, and a timetable and roadmap for this purpose. The Palestinian question is at the heart of the Middle East issue. Without a just settlement of the Palestinian question, there will be no enduring peace and stability in the Middle East. China will continue to stand firmly on the side of Arab and Islamic countries and on the side of international fairness and justice, and continue to make positive efforts to promote peace between Palestine and Israel and peace and stability in the Middle East.