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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The gates of the great continent: Palestine, China, and the war for humanity’s future (Part 3)</h1>March 13, 2024<img src="cid:ii_ltrpvvcw0" alt="Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104056 AM.png" width="395" height="197"><br><br></div>
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<p><strong>(Part <a href="https://mronline.org/2024/03/11/the-gates-of-the-great-continent/">1</a>, <a href="https://mronline.org/2024/03/12/the-fates-of-the-great-continent/">2</a>)</strong></p>
<h2>Part III: Smashing Walls, Building Firewalls, and Breaking the Digital Siege</h2>
<p>In the last section we explored the Axis of Resistance and its
pursuit of material self-sufficiency, as well as Basel al-Araj’s
incisive Mao-inspired analysis of asymmetric warfare against a
technologically superior enemy. Building on that foundation, we now turn
to two intentionally under- or misreported facets of the current
conjuncture:</p>
<ol><li>The sovereign technological innovations developed by the Palestinian
resistance under siege conditions in Gaza, particularly in the fields
of weaponry, counterintelligence and counter-surveillance, and
information warfare; and</li><li>How these are enabled, reinforced, and amplified by China’s own
project of sovereign technological development and delinking from
Western digital monopolies—a target of renewed opprobrium since the
start of the war.</li></ol>
<p>Both phenomena are manifestations, under vastly different circumstances, of what Max Ajl <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/22779760241228157">describes</a>
in the context of the Resistance Axis as “the dialectical relationship
between technological upgrading, defensive industrialization, and armed
defensive capacity to secure the space for expanded reproduction in
peripheral or embattled nation-states.”</p>
<p>Since October 7 the Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) have
released a near-daily stream of videos displaying an impressive range of
indigenously developed weaponry. Most feature their use in active
combat, while some actually show selected aspects of the development,
manufacture, and/or testing process. Perhaps the most paradigmatic
example—and by far the most visible from the privileged standpoint of
Israeli settlers, especially before October 7—is the vertiginous rise in
sophistication of Hamas’s rockets. These have <a href="https://twitter.com/jonelmer/status/1741626492960813306">evolved</a> from the first-generation Qassam Q-12, which had a maximum range of around 12 kilometers, to the recently <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/irans-rockets-palestinian-groups">unveiled</a> Ayyash-250 whose 250-kilometer range puts essentially all of occupied Palestine within reach.</p>
<p>Other indigenously produced weapons have made frequent appearances in
ground combat; most have been ingeniously adapted based on prior
designs from past and present allies of the Palestinian resistance. The <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/jon-elmer/how-gaza-made-weapons-are-impacting-battle-against-israeli-armored-vehicles">Yassin</a>
anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade, for example, is based on a modified
Soviet model and features in almost every Qassam combat video. The <a href="https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/hamas-unveils-groundbreaking-armor-piercing-efp-devices-in-j">Shawaz</a>
explosively formed penetrator, specially designed to penetrate Israeli
vehicles’ reinforced armor, is believed to be inspired by devices used
by the Iraqi resistance against the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation. And the
al-Ghoul sniper rifle, whose manufacture and testing feature prominently
in a <a href="https://twitter.com/AryJeay/status/1737537871966302685">Qassam video</a> from late December, is based on the Iranian AM50 Sayyad design.</p>
<div id="gmail-gallery-1">
<p><a href="https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-41-36-am/"><img width="395" height="226" src="https://f3b9m7v4.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104136%20AM-1024x587.png.webp" alt="| | MR Online" title="Screenshot 20240312 at 104136 AM | MR Online" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></a>
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<p><a href="https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-41-29-am/"><img width="395" height="224" src="https://f3b9m7v4.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104129%20AM-1024x581.png.webp" alt="| Qassam Brigades videos showing the Yassin 105 anti tank RPG in action top and the manufacture of the al Ghoul sniper rifle bottom via Bilibili military analyst 黑猫星球 Black Cat Planet | MR Online" aria-describedby="gallery-1-150910" title="Screenshot 20240312 at 104129 AM | MR Online" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></a>
</p>
Qassam Brigades videos showing the Yassin-105 anti-tank RPG in
action (top) and the manufacture of the al-Ghoul sniper rifle (bottom),
via Bilibili military analyst 黑猫星球 (Black Cat Planet)
</div>
<p>Great historical significance attaches to many of these weapons’
names. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the revolutionary cleric who initiated the
Great Revolt of 1936-39, gave his name both to the Brigades and to
several generations of their iconic rockets. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
co-founded Hamas in 1987. And Yahya Ayyash and Adnan al-Ghoul were both
leading engineers who pioneered the Qassam Brigades’ bomb and missile
development programs, martyred in 1996 and 2004 respectively. Indeed the
organization’s engineering prowess is no accident: as Abdaljawad Omar <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lc9S1HmNkU">points out</a>,
it was actually a product of their religious conservatism in a way that
may strike Western observers as paradoxical, given the strong
post-Enlightenment association of science and technology with
secularism. In the Palestinian context, Hamas regarded the humanities
and social sciences (with some reason) as vectors of Western influence
and bastions of the political left, and thus preferentially steered its
student cadres into engineering and the “hard” sciences.</p>
<p>This remarkably prescient decision preceded by decades the Hamas
takeover and Israeli siege on Gaza, which respectively enabled and
necessitated the development of such an expansive indigenous weapons
industry. In its logic and foresight we can find distant though
compelling echoes in the developmental strategies pursued by China in
recent decades. For example the Four Modernizations (in agriculture,
industry, defense, and science and technology), proposed by Zhou Enlai
in 1963 and officially adopted in 1977, set a technocratic direction of
travel for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after the “ultra-left” ideological
upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. More recently, we can observe an
intriguing parallel with the rising influence in Chinese online
discourse of the so-called “<a href="https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/a-study-of-the-industrial-party-and-the-sentimental-party">Industrial Party</a>,”
which advocates “pure” technological developmentalism as a nominally
non-ideological alternative to both the Maoist and New Left and the
liberal Right (both of which it categorizes pejoratively as the
“Sentimental Party”).</p>
<p>Another constant throughline in the history of Gaza’s homegrown arms
industry is the ingenious sourcing of materials repurposed from former
and current colonial foes. Specifically, a 2020 Al-Jazeera documentary <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200915-hamas-recycles-shells-from-british-ships-sunk-off-gaza-during-wwi/">revealed</a>
that the Qassam Brigades have routinely recycled unexploded shells left
over from previous Israeli bombing campaigns, and even from wrecked
British warships that were sunk off the coast of Gaza during World War
I. They have also produced rocket casings using pipes that were
installed during the pre-2005 occupation to siphon water into Israel
from Gaza’s heavily depleted aquifer. Per a recent report in the <i>New York Times</i>,
Israeli intelligence officials believe that “unexploded ordnance is a
main source of explosives for Hamas,” particularly those used to
devastating effect on October 7. Between this recycling and outright
expropriation from Israeli bases, they admit,</p>
<blockquote><p>we are fueling our enemies with our own weapons.</p></blockquote>
<p>In this respect too we can discern a historical irony reminiscent of
the Chinese experience. In the final phase of the civil war, the nascent
People’s Liberation Army captured billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.
weapons supplied to the KMT; one veteran <a href="http://gr.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/gyzg/">recalled</a>
that “nearly 95 percent” of the arms displayed in the 1949 victory
parade were of Western or Japanese manufacture. In subsequent decades,
China would rely on Soviet models as the basis for a domestic arms
industry that it eventually employed to defend against potential attack
from the Soviets themselves. With the vertiginous rise and equally
dramatic collapse in relations with the United States, this cycle then
repeated itself with Western prototypes—partially sourced from Israel
itself, as noted in Part I, due to reliable battle-testing against
Soviet systems.</p>
<p>These advances in resistance arms production—miraculous as they were,
especially under Gaza’s extreme conditions of technological dependency
and de-development even before October 7—obviously could not come close
to matching the enemy. Indeed Israel has long distinguished itself not
only as the region’s only nuclear-armed state, and by far the world’s
largest recipient of U.S. military aid, but as a self-styled “startup
nation” at the cutting edge of high-tech surveillance, information
warfare, counterinsurgency, and the automation of mass death. Just as
crucial to the success of Al-Aqsa Flood as Hamas’s own capabilities were
their efforts to conceal them, and to neutralize Israel’s advantages by
cultivating a false sense of security in its own insuperable
technological dominance.</p>
<p>Nowhere was the Zionist regime more spectacularly humbled for this colonial hubris than in the simultaneous <a href="https://mronline.org/2023/11/27/gaza-2023-high-tech-war-revisited/">disabling</a>
of the Iron Dome and the Gaza “smart wall” on October 7. In a combined
arms operation executed simultaneously at over thirty distinct
locations, the former was overwhelmed by rocket fire, which “drowned out
the sound of gunfire from Hamas snipers, who shot at the string of
cameras on the border fence, and explosions from more than 100 remotely
operated Hamas drones, that destroyed watchtowers.” After the wall was
breached, so precise was the Qassam Brigades’ intelligence that within
an hour they had overrun eight military bases including the one housing
the elite signals intelligence Unit 8200. At every location their first
step was to cut off communications, in a poetic reversal of the
blackouts Israel has so routinely inflicted on Gaza before and since.</p>
<p>Those blackouts were just one manifestation of Israel’s near-total
control over and intentional de-development of Gaza’s communications
system. As Nour Naim writes in her essay “Artificial Intelligence as a
Tool for Restoring Palestinian Rights” (in <i>Gaza Writes Back</i>,
2021): “The dependence of the Palestinian infrastructure on Israel’s
infrastructure, whether that entail the internet, landlines, or cellular
communications, has given Israel as an occupying power enormous
monitoring capabilities.” In order to conceal the years of preparation
that laid the groundwork for October 7, the resistance adapted
accordingly in a way that exploited Israel’s own narcissistic
techno-solutionism. As the <i>Financial Times</i> <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/913d366e-0ace-4463-a004-d293aa49c673">reports</a>,</p>
<blockquote><p>Hamas has maintained operational security by going ‘stone
age’ and using hard-wired phone lines while eschewing devices that are
hackable or emit an electronic signature.</p></blockquote>
<p>Elsewhere in her essay, Naim notes that “while Israel uses 5G
technology and prepares for 6G, Israeli restrictions limit people in
Gaza to 2G.” This practice recalls the United States’ largely failed
efforts to thwart the large-scale deployment of 5G infrastructure by
Chinese firm Huawei, especially throughout the Global South. Its
parallel campaign to force Huawei out of at least Western smartphone
markets through sanctions and export controls proved rather more
successful. As with Israel—albeit with less extreme methods and more
global scope—both moves quite transparently aimed to de-develop an enemy
while preserving U.S. surveillance capabilities in its captive export
markets. (Amusingly, the resulting lack of direct Western experience
with Huawei phones led to unfounded <a href="https://stratnewsglobal.com/articles/were-alternative-communications-tech-used-during-october-7-attacks/">speculation</a> that Hamas had used them to evade Israeli surveillance—an incredible marketing pitch if it were only true!)</p>
<p>In the wake of the utter debacle suffered by the entire Israeli state
apparatus on October 7, various exculpatory narratives have arisen in
order to absolve key actors of responsibility. One <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html">floated</a> in the <i>New York Times</i>
by self-interested “dissident” officials, which nonetheless arguably
has some measure of validity, is that Benjamin Netanyahu intentionally
helped “prop up” the Hamas administration in Gaza for most of his time
in office. As the claim goes, he hoped to keep the organization “focused
on governing, not fighting,” entrenching the political divide with the
Fatah-led West Bank and foreclosing the possibility of a viable
Palestinian state. Hamas for its part was perfectly content to appear
“contained” while using the breathing room thus acquired to plan for
Al-Aqsa Flood.</p>
<p>Here again we see a loose though compelling parallel with China, in particular the decades-long U.S. strategy of “<a href="https://www.qiaocollective.com/articles/end-of-engagement">engagement</a>”
beginning with President Nixon’s rapprochement in the early 1970s.
There the intent was to further entrench the already terminal
Sino-Soviet split within the socialist camp, directly enlist the PRC
into a U.S.-led anti-Soviet bloc, and contain it for the foreseeable
future to the periphery of the capitalist world system. China,
conversely, appeared to accede to this plan while conscientiously
pursuing a complementary strategy of “hiding its strength and biding its
time” (韬光养晦)—with results that are now plain for all to see.</p>
<p>Incidentally, per the aforementioned <i>New York Times</i> story, one
concrete form of assistance allegedly rendered by Netanyahu was to
cover up a “money-laundering operation for Hamas run through the Bank of
China.” This was an early-2010s instantiation of what has since October
7 become a veritable cottage industry of Western media narratives
accusing China of direct material support for the Palestinian
resistance. For the anti-imperialist left such stories may serve as a
form of wish-fulfillment, but we must of course recognize their
primarily Sinophobic function in an ideological environment that
normatively and legally equates resistance with “terrorism” of a
distinctly “antisemitic” nature.</p>
<p>On the more substantive end of the spectrum, there are strong <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/israel-s-advanced-defenses-are-pierced-by-makeshift-hamas-drones-in-gaza-war">indications</a>
that many of the relatively inexpensive drones used to disable the Gaza
“smart wall” on October 7 were sourced from Chinese commercial
manufacturer DJI. If true, as seems highly plausible, this simply
testifies to China’s economies of scale and the transformative leveling
effects of asymmetric drone warfare in general—also on prominent display
in Ansarallah’s celebrated <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/19/missile-drone-pentagon-houthi-attacks-iran-00132480">use</a> of $2000 drones, each of which the U.S. Navy requires a $2 million missile to intercept. A similar dynamic is at play with <a href="https://www.thedefensepost.com/2024/01/02/chinese-weapons-found-gaza/">reports</a>
from Israeli TV channel N12 claiming that the occupation army had
discovered a “‘massive’ cache of Chinese-made weapons being used by
Hamas militants in Gaza.” Even this highly questionable source admitted
that the origin of this alleged arsenal was most likely the large
second-hand and/or black market rather than direct provision approved by
the Chinese state.</p>
<p>More speculatively, the notorious Israeli “China watcher” Tuvia Gering has <a href="https://twitter.com/GeringTuvia/status/1736742111754461521">suggested</a>
that Ansarallah’s anti-ship ballistic missiles are based on a
decades-old Chinese design, the HQ-2, adapted by Iran into the Fateh-110
and supplied to Yemen in modified form as the Khalij Fars-2. (He
derives this assessment from a self-described Chinese “military analyst”
on Douyin whose actual qualifications are in question.) Whatever the
case may be, the U.S. navy has <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240221-houthis-first-entity-in-the-history-of-the-world-to-use-anti-ship-ballistic-missiles/">claimed</a> that Ansarallah is the first entity ever to use such missiles in combat. If so, this would join the “first known instance of <a href="https://gizmodo.com/israel-houthi-missile-first-battle-in-space-1850999081">combat</a>
occurring in space” as a most unlikely technological milestone by
Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab region and one of the only <i>de facto</i> state governments in the world acting fully on its obligations under the Genocide Convention.</p>
<p>Other reports in Israeli media highlight the growing perceived
“security threat” from the country’s extensive economic entanglement
with China, an ironic consequence of the latter’s drive toward full
normalization starting in the 1990s. One such <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/b1ze7rrda">story</a>
claimed that Israeli electronics firms have since October 7 faced
significantly heightened “bureaucratic obstacles” from PRC-based
suppliers: “The Chinese are imposing a kind of sanction on us. They
don’t officially declare it, but they are delaying shipments to Israel.”
A co-founder of Shin Bet’s cyber unit has also <a href="https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/y68ajpeml">warned</a>
that “when it decides the time is right, China may be able to stop the
operations of critical infrastructures in Israel,” such as the
Chinese-operated port of Haifa.</p>
<p>Within the repressive domestic political environment of the United
States, on the other hand, a more insidious narrative has emerged that
sees a controlling Chinese hand behind the vast and sustained outpouring
of popular solidarity with Palestine. This has included innumerable
campus walkouts and sit-ins, dramatic traffic stoppages, direct actions
targeting weapons manufacturers and other institutions complicit in
Zionist genocide, and mass mobilizations including two marches in
Washington, D.C. that drew 300,000 to 500,000 people. As early as
October 2023, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy
Pelosi was recorded telling pro-ceasefire protestors to “go back to
China where your headquarters is”—referencing a notorious <i>New York Times</i> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html">hit piece</a> from August which smeared numerous anti-imperialist organizations as CPC front groups, including protest organizers Code Pink.</p>
<p>Pelosi’s almost cartoonishly McCarthyist jibe hewed closely to what
has been probably the most enduring genre of Sinophobic narratives since
October 7. These are specifically directed at China’s remarkably
successful project of safeguarding its digital sovereignty by building
the so-called “Great Firewall,” delinking from Western platform
monopolies, and carefully cultivating its own domestic platforms
especially for social media. (Indeed the University of Bonn’s Center for
Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies ranks China second
only to the United States in its “<a href="https://digitaldependence.eu/en/">Digital Dependence</a>”
index.) In mainstream Western media these features of the Chinese
internet are almost universally derided as the creations of a paranoid
and totalitarian surveillance state, with an all-encompassing censorship
apparatus that enjoys near-total control over online public expression.</p>
<p>In fact this narrative stems from seething resentment that China has
created a media and information environment for over a billion internet
users that is relatively insulated from Zionist hasbara and entirely
free from Western platform censorship. (Admittedly, and inevitably given
the size of its user base, the Chinese internet does have its own share
of pro-Israel influence operations. But their actual <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/class-and-intellectual-divide-how-israel-s-war-on-gaza-has-split-china-its-social-media/3081564">impact</a>
has been sharply delineated along class lines, and largely restricted
to an increasingly embattled stratum of “rightist” intellectuals still
enamored with the civilizational discourses of Western liberalism.) This
general phenomenon also manifests to some extent outside China, with
Palestinian resistance factions like the Qassam Brigades and Saraya
al-Quds enjoying relatively unrestricted access to Russia-based Telegram
as a platform for their communications. The contrast with, for example,
Meta’s censorship of even “moderate” pro-Palestinian content—so extreme
as to draw harsh <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship-palestine-content">rebukes</a> even from Human Rights Watch—is painfully obvious.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_150911" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img title="Screenshot 20240312 at 104112 AM | MR Online" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-150911" src="https://f3b9m7v4.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104112%20AM.png" alt="| Side by side comparison of Google and Baidu Maps representations of Palestine and its surroundings | MR Online" width="311" height="395" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-150911" class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Side-by-side comparison of Google and Baidu Maps’ representations of Palestine and its surroundings.</p></div>
<p>Especially in the fevered early months of Western coverage regarding
the war, a number of absurdly overblown stories in this vein gained
traction and then rapidly faded away. One of these in early November
alleged that two of China’s largest homegrown mapping apps, created by
Alibaba and Baidu, had <a href="https://www.pekingnology.com/p/did-china-recently-remove-israels">removed</a>
Israel’s country name from regional maps in the aftermath of October 7.
(The viral claim seems to have originated with a Falun Gong-linked
Twitter account and then spread like wildfire to supposedly “reputable”
Western media outlets.) The truth was that owing to Israel’s own illegal
occupation of the territories seized in 1967, and its calculated
refusal to define its own borders, its name had not been visible on
either app since at least May 2021. Interestingly, Baidu Maps displays
the 1947 UN Partition Plan boundaries in addition to Israel’s much more
expansive <i>de facto</i> borders after the Nakba of 1948—possibly an oblique acknowledgment of the latter’s manifest illegitimacy.</p>
<p>Looking instead at the dominant Western (and global) rival to Alibaba and Baidu Maps, Yarden Katz has <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/how-google-advances-the-zionist-colonization-of-palestine/">shown</a>
that a totalizing Zionist settler ideology is firmly embedded in
Google’s mapping operations at all levels. In 2013 the company paid $1.1
billion to acquire Waze, which directly “emerged from the Israeli
army’s Unit 8200.” Even more consequentially,</p>
<blockquote><p>Google Maps similarly gives a Zionist view of the land.
For Google Maps, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and the terms ‘West
Bank’ and ‘Gaza’ have in the past been replaced with ‘Israel.’ Google
Maps has also displayed large swaths of the West Bank as blanks,
reminiscent of Google co-founder [Sergey Brin]’s sense that what isn’t
Israel is ‘just dirt.’</p></blockquote>
<p>Around the same time, the fallout of October 7 reignited the ongoing
Sinophobic witch hunt directed at TikTok due to its ownership by
China-headquartered company ByteDance. In an op-ed entitled “Why Do
Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok,” Republican U.S.
Representative Mike Gallagher <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-gallag">cited</a>
a Harvard/Harris poll indicating that a remarkable 51% of Americans
aged 18 to 24 believe that the October 7 Palestinian resistance
operation was justified. For this “morally bankrupt view of the world,”
he placed the blame not on younger generations’ extraordinary political
maturity in the face of the Zionist propaganda offensive, but squarely
on TikTok: a vector for political socialization supposedly “controlled
by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests
or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” In a measured but
laconic riposte, the company itself was forced to <a href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/the-truth-about-tiktok-hashtags-and-content-during-the-israel-hamas-war">respond</a> by pointing out that “attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed.”</p>
<p>Interestingly, Gallagher extended a backhanded compliment of sorts to
China’s attainment of digital sovereignty elsewhere in the article: “We
know of TikTok’s predatory nature because the app has several versions.
In China, there is a safely sanitized version called Douyin… Put
differently, ByteDance and the CCP have decided that China’s children
get spinach, and America’s get digital fentanyl.” Putting aside the
absurd and racist invocation of a reverse “Opium War,” this line betrays
a fundamental unease among Western ideologues—tied to the mast of a
rapidly crumbling Zionist hegemony—that the Chinese internet remains, by
design, maddeningly beyond their grasp.</p>
<div id="gmail-gallery-2">
<p><a href="https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-40-56-am/"><img width="395" height="197" src="https://f3b9m7v4.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104056%20AM.png.webp" alt="| The Great Flood 大洪水 by Chinese web artist 羊咩咩衣JY posted to Weibo on October 17 2023 | MR Online" title="Screenshot 20240312 at 104056 AM | MR Online" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></a>
</p>
<p><a href="https://mronline.org/2024/03/13/the-gates-of-the-great-continent-2/screenshot-2024-03-12-at-10-40-45-am/"><img width="343" height="395" src="https://f3b9m7v4.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-104045%20AM.png.webp" alt="| Top The Great Flood 大洪水 by Chinese web artist 羊咩咩衣JY posted to Weibo on October 17 2023 Bottom Tribute by Chinese web artist Wuheqilin 乌合麒麟 to US airman Aaron Bushnell | MR Online" aria-describedby="gallery-2-150913" title="Screenshot 20240312 at 104045 AM | MR Online" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a>
</p>
Top: “The Great Flood” (大洪水) by Chinese web artist 羊咩咩衣JY, posted to
Weibo on October 17, 2023. Bottom: Tribute by Chinese web artist
Wuheqilin (乌合麒麟) to U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell.
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<p>Another contribution to this genre came from the U.S. state-owned propaganda outlet Voice of America, which in late December <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/chinese-vloggers-glorify-hamas-with-cosplay-and-posts/7405159.html">reported</a>
that “over the past two months, netizens in China have cheered for
Hamas and shared cartoons featuring Hamas fighters on Bilibili and other
Chinese social media platforms.” The story conveniently neglected to
add that said cartoons originated on English-language <a href="https://twitter.com/nationaljuche">Twitter</a>,
where they received an equally rapturous response before propagating
across the Great Firewall. That said, it did acknowledge the growing
community of Chinese armchair military analysts who enthusiastically
dissect combat videos from the Palestinian resistance for domestic
audiences, such as Bilibili user <a href="https://space.bilibili.com/11146869">黑猫星球</a>
(Black Cat Planet) whose work has already graced this article. In this
author’s personal estimation, they are every bit the equal of Jon
Elmer’s excellent resistance dispatches for the Electronic Intifada.</p>
<p>What such stories actually convey to bona fide anti-imperialists (not
VOA’s target audience of course) is just how little fundamentally
separates us across national, linguistic, and technological divides.
Other examples over the past months include a veritable tidal wave of
translations of “If I Must Die,” a poem by martyred Gazan writer and
English professor Refaat Alareer, into other languages beginning with <a href="https://twitter.com/blkpaws/status/1732954318657974669">one in Chinese</a>.
More recently, Chinese netizens saluted the sacrifice of U.S. airman
Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in
Washington, D.C. on February 25, 2024 in protest of the genocide, with
an outpouring of <a href="https://twitter.com/magne_toes/status/1762219467507945956">heartfelt</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/nellodee/status/1762229686271348956">tributes</a> and striking <a href="https://twitter.com/wuheqilin/status/1762991686672908307">visual</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1762857407489986941">art</a>.</p>
<p>And try as they might to propagate a narrative of rampant online
antisemitism, even Voice of America could not obscure the real
historical basis for ordinary Chinese people’s enduring solidarity with
the Palestinian cause. “In the comment section of these videos,” the
aforementioned story notes,</p>
<blockquote><p>netizens left messages praising Hamas. They compared
Hamas’s attacks on the Israeli army to the Chinese Communist Party’s
counterattack against the Japanese during World War II. One highly liked
comment read, ‘It can be said that in them, we can see the figures of
the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army fighters among the white
mountains and black waters in the old days.’</p></blockquote>
</div><p><i>Monthly Review</i> does not necessarily adhere to all of
the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to
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