by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Screenshot

THE TERM “AH Q SPIRIT” originates from the short story “The True Story of Ah Q” by the Chinese leftist writer Lu Xun. Ah Q, the protagonist of the story, is the village idiot with delusions of grandeur during revolutionary times. “Ah Q Spirit”, then, has come to refer to the spirit of self-delusion–at one point in the story, after being beaten, Ah Q next decides to beat himself–so that he can at least feel a sense of being a winner in beating someone. Of course, that somebody is himself.

The Qiao Collective’s latest could be said to embody the Ah Q Spirit. After China and Russia refused to veto the US’s plan to assume control of the Gaza Strip and instead only abstained from the vote, many on the left–including campists–felt a sense of betrayal. Not so with Qiao, which instead leaned into a full-throated defense of China’s actions. Qiao’s slavish apologia for the actions of the Chinese government is in itself telling.

For one, Qiao’s argumentation rests on the stance that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to the proposal. As such, the claim goes, the Chinese government was in the right to back the proposal.

Qiao is rather quick to acknowledge that the PLO is a flawed entity, stating that “Palestinian civil society and resistance groups rightly condemn the PLO in its current form as unfit for purpose, having been captured by Mahmoud Abbas’ collaborationist wing of Fatah.” However, Qiao also claims that “they challenge his personal claim to authority, not the PLO’s institutional legitimacy,” and goes on to say that, “All resistance groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP officially aim to reform and democratize the PLO as a national unity government, not to abolish or replace it.” In this sense, China’s actions are, in fact, principled in keeping with its support for Palestinian self-determination and its principle of non-intervention.

Qiao Collective’s X thread defending the Chinese government on Palestine

It is, of course, ironic but also telling that Qiao resorts to a legalistic and statist argument to claim the authority of the PLO over Palestine’s future. The Palestinian people are, of course, not reducible to the PLO, the Palestine Authority, or any other state that administers or claims to administer. For self-proclaimed radicals, the logic is altogether quite liberal in asserting the primacy and continuity of states in their justification to govern over peoples.

But this is, more broadly, reflective of Qiao’s worldview. Qiao, of course, also has a statist view of China, in which it cannot distinguish between the will of the Chinese people and the interests of the Chinese state. Qiao is quick to deny when the two ever come into conflict, claiming that this is western propaganda–hence Qiao denies the existence of any contention by workers against the Chinese state when the state comes in on the side of capital.

Indeed, one could be some form of Chinese left nationalist and very readily acknowledge that workers in China do often find themselves contending with the Chinese state. Hence, Chinese left nationalists as the Chinese New Left historically called for the Chinese state to re-embrace Maoist principles that it turned away from during the Deng period, even if in the current age of Xi, the Chinese New Left has become uncritically supportive of Xi’s cult of personality.

This was never the case with the Qiao Collective, as a diasporic group whose understanding of China was mostly fantasy projected onto a romanticized vision of an imagined homeland, and detached from the actual social conditions there. Qiao imagines an unbroken continuity from Maoist China to the present, with no deviation during the Deng period. This is a way in which, as a form of diasporic Chinese left nationalism, Qiao’s rhetoric differs sharply from counterparts who are actual Chinese leftist nationalists.

So, too, with Qiao’s comments in defense of China at the UN on Palestine. For Qiao, China can do no wrong–it never has and it never will. Thus, China’s contemporary actions are “broadly consistent with the principles that have guided China’s foreign relations since 1949”. China’s path is immutable and will never change for Qiao. When contradictions are visible, Qiao simply turns a blind eye or attempts to explain them away with contorted logic.
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