On February 28, the leader of China’s closest Middle East ally was killed in Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury. Beijing’s response: a press release. As the Israeli-U.S. strikes sparked a broader regional conflict, China reiterated on March 5 that it is “gravely concerned over the tense situation in the Middle East.”
After initially calling for an immediate ceasefire, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly shared how they are “highly concerned” – language nearly identical to its claim of being “deeply worried” during last June’s 12-Day War, as American B-2s pummeled Natanz and Fordow.
Having tracked China’s regional partnerships over the last decade, we have found that Beijing’s influence consistently peaks at signing ceremonies and fades when security risks arise. Beijing has built a Middle East strategy centered on influence without military presence.
With the Islamic Republic regime in Iran facing unprecedented strain, Xi Jinping has much to lose. China’s influence in the Middle East rests on a single pillar: the survival of the Islamic Republic. From energy to long-term Belt and Road ambitions, all roads run directly through Tehran. If the Iranian regime falls, China’s Middle East strategy falls with it.
China’s economic weight in Iran is undeniable. Iran acts as Beijing’s gas station, sending roughly 90 percent of its oil exports – more than 1 million barrels per day – to China at deep discounts owing to United Nations sanctions. Beyond much-needed foreign currency, Beijing has even thrown in surveillance technology and infrastructure to sweeten the deal.
On March 27, 2021, Beijing and Tehran signed the grandly titled “China-Iran 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.” The deal is a classic example of Xi’s “major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics,” prizing status and access while avoiding risk. Reporting emphasized China’s massive $400 billion investment in Iranian oil, gas, petrochemicals, manufacturing, and transportation. How much of that money ever materializedhowever, is up for debate.
Regardless, Beijing failed to offer Tehran the most precious regional commodity: security. A political partnership built on trade and finance alone cannot fully address the concerns of leaders from Riyadh to Amman to Jerusalem – and, yes, even to Tehran.
As this past week has shown, in today’s Middle East, hard power is still hard currency.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria offered a warning to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For more than a decade, Russia carried the military burden of propping up Assad’s rule, while China offered diplomatic protection at the United Nations and over $130 billion in Belt and Road contracts. When Assad fell in December 2024, Beijing had no security presence on the ground to protect its interests, and no loyal constituency to rely on. China’s envoys scrambled for access and to secure their financial deals. Shortly thereafter, Ahmed al-Sharaa was jetting to New York to schmooze with Western investors.
Syria was a setback for China’s Middle East strategy. The fall of the Islamic Republic would collapse it.
Khamenei is dead, and the Islamic Republic’s remaining leaders find themselves under bombardment from American and Israeli aircraft. The 20 remaining years of the China-Iran partnership suddenly look fragile.
The United States has nearly 20 bases across the Middle East, plus a deep military and intelligence coordination with Israel. Despite grassroots resentment from George W. Bush’s Iraq War, Washington has quietly spent the last two decades building a security architecture that Beijing cannot replicate through economic incentives and shiny infrastructure deals.
But this goes further than Beijing’s balance sheet. Remember the mood when Saudi and Iranian security delegations walked into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on March 10, 2023 to sign an agreement normalizing their diplomatic relationship? Headlines lauded the symbolism, as the deal was concluded with no U.S. or European diplomacy – supposedly heralding a new “post-American Gulf era.” China, long the distant commercial giant of the Middle East, had brokered a surprising reconciliation.
However, any deal brokered in Beijing still relies on security underwritten elsewhere.
We have lost count of academic and policymaker predictions that the West could not compete with China’s flexible, sophisticated, no-strings-attached approach to diplomacy. In the post-Arab Spring Middle East, Beijing is not asking for human rights scorecards or democratic reforms.
And yet, two years on, the future of both Tehran and Riyadh is being written in the hallways of Washington. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s triumphant prose in 2023 – that Beijing had set “a new example of political settlement of hotspot issues” – has been exposed as an empty promise.
Just a few months ago, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was back in Washington with a shopping list of F-35s, civilian nuclear technology, and a defense treaty – concrete security guarantees and a sustained American presence. As for Tehran, it’s safe to say that their future lies in the hands of Trump’s “beautiful armada.”
Today, Tehran is under non-stop bombardment. Six Middle Eastern countries have come under its relation, in the form of ballistic and drone fire. The great power rivalry in the Middle East is being stress-tested in real time – and U.S. warships are met with Chinese letters of condemnation.
If the Islamic Republic collapses, fragments internally, or pivots decisively to the West, China loses its most reliable geopolitical foothold in the Middle East. Beijing’s energy supplies, market access, and technology networks run through a regime that may not survive the week.
Source:
thediplomat.com