ANDES News Agency/Wikimedia Commons
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi
Beijing waits and sees: it seeks to dialogue with any leadership that emerges in Tehran. Furthermore, the new conflict also brings opportunities.
The offensive by the United States and Israel against Iran is now in its fifth day and China, which has its closest partner in the Middle East in Tehran, has so far been left with verbal condemnations of the increasingly violent attacks against Iran.
The Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yicited by , stated on Sunday that it is “unacceptable” for Washington and Tel Aviv to attack Iran while negotiations are taking place and, “even less so”, for it to move towards the assassination of a leader of a sovereign state [Ali Khamenei] and for incentives for regime change
In a call with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, on Monday, Wang reinforced that Beijing “supports the Iranian side” in defending sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and “national dignity”.
But according to analysts there is little margin for China to go further. Beijing tends to favor a stance that allows it to appear as a defender of an international framework based on norms, positioning itself to dialogue with any leadership that emerges in Tehran when hostilities end. In fact, this is what has been done with other strategic partners.
Venezuela, another long-time ally, also had the same Chinese reaction to US military action that culminated in that of President Nicolás Maduro.
The pattern may even anticipate the Chinese reaction if the US comes to pressure militarily, a country with which Beijing describes the relationship as one of “unshakable friendship”.
But political experts consulted by the WSJ say that Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s strategy of building a front of “like-minded” countries to challenge US global supremacy could fail. weakened.
In recent years, Beijing has promoted initiatives such as the Global Security Initiative and the Global Development Initiative, with a view to offering an alternative to the Western-led international order. In conjunction with Russia, China helped Iran enter two multilateral platforms where the three are members: the BRICS (in 2024) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (in 2023). None gave Tehran security guarantees.
Alicia García Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at French bank Natixis, says that the message for those who saw China as an alternative is somewhat discouraging: “there is no alternative” if, at the crucial moment, Beijing does not appear.
The crisis also offers opportunities for China. North American involvement puts pressure on US military capacity, and this includes weapons that could be relevant in a , particularly in a crisis scenario around Taiwan.
US intervention also gives China indirect information about latest equipment and tacticsas a fresh “window” into the way the US operates. And Beijing seeks to capitalize on the conflict to reinforce the idea that Washington is a destabilizing force — Wang, the foreign minister, called the US action a “regression of the world to the law of the jungle”.
Furthermore, Beijing is faced with a dilemma: its economic and energy relationship with countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is seen as much more important than with Iran itself. According to the WSJ, Saudi Arabia sold China more oil last year than Tehran, and Chinese investments in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi exceed investments in Iran. Any step that could be interpreted as helping Tehran attack neighbors could jeopardize these ties.
And Russia? And North Korea? Although there are examples of cooperation — such as Beijing and Pyongyang’s support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine — collective support for Iran has been very limited: everyone also stopped at the Americans’ response to Iran in June last year.
At the military-industrial level, Russia and Iran collaborate in the production of weapons, including the production of Drone Shahedwhich Moscow would have replicated and used in attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. China, for its part, supplied electrical components and raw materials that ended up being used in weapons in both Russia and Iran.
From an economic point of view, Beijing and Tehran announced a cooperation agreement in 2021 that provided for Chinese investments of around US$400 billion over 25 years. Progress has been slow, hampered by US sanctions. In the background, Tehran depends much more on Beijing than the other way around. China will buy about 90% of Iranian oil exports, but this volume represents only about 12% of China’s total oil imports.
The immediate risk to the global economy is Iran’s threat to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuza crucial bottleneck for energy flows in the Middle East, already associated with rises in oil and natural gas prices. China has been preparing for this: it has reinforced strategic reserves and accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles and other technologies to contain oil consumption, which, according to the WSJ, is expected to peak next year.
