The Affective Politics of Diplomatic Discourse: China’s Humanitarian Imagination of the Palestine–Israel Conflict

Drawing on the affective turn in International Relations, this article argues that through diplomatic discourse on the Palestine–Israel conflict, China constructs an alternative humanitarian imagination rooted in anti-imperial historical memory and Global South solidarity. Its principal political effect lies in restoring Palestinian political subjectivity. Analyzing texts published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China between October 2023 and October 2025, the article supports this argument along two dimensions. In affective valence, normative texts intensify evaluative language, shifting from ‘institutionalized restraint’ to a ‘discourse of hope’ centered on victim agency, while speech texts employ five corporeal and traumatic metaphors to render abstract suffering into morally resonant cognitive frames. In spatiotemporal orientation, normative texts construct a long durée narrative linking the 1948 Nakba to Palestinian statehood; speech texts challenge the ‘immediacy’ framing of dominant Western discourse through amplified deferral numerals and embodied generational vocabulary; and bilateral interaction texts reveal a mirrored temporality: braking toward Israel and propelling toward Palestine. Read against this trajectory, China’s Global Governance Initiative, proposed in September 2025, codifies an affective-normative repertoire that two years of discourse on Palestine had already assembled.