The detente between China and the United States was already fragile. It now faces a new tension: the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, a U.S.-backed attack that Beijing denounced as a blatant attempt at regime change.
China has moved quickly to condemn US and Israeli attacks on Iran, with its top diplomat, Wang Yi, accusing both governments of assassinating another country’s leader and pledging to support Tehran’s sovereignty and security.
The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei came less than two months after US forces captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, another close partner of China. Taken together, the measures amount to a forceful demonstration of American power against governments that China has cultivated as part of its broader global strategy.
For Beijing, however, the question is how far to defend Iran, its closest diplomatic partner in the Middle East, without harming its own economic interests or worsening tensions with the United States.
The fighting has already directly affected China. China’s Foreign Ministry said a Chinese national had been killed in Tehran and that Beijing was struggling to evacuate thousands of its citizens.
Beijing is likely concerned about the possible ripple effects of the US and Israeli attacks. China is the world’s largest energy importer and Iran has already threatened to “set fire” to any ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway off Iran’s southern coast through which a fifth of the world’s oil travels. That could drive up prices and hurt China’s economy.
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There is also a quieter domestic sensitivity to foreign-backed regime change. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who has been in power since 2012 and is expected to begin a fourth term next year, presides over a political system that brooks no dissent. In a Chinese state media article about Khamenei’s death, Internet users congratulated Iranian residents and wondered aloud which leader might be next. Other comments suggesting that Iranians might have been celebrating have been censored.
Even as it navigates the various dimensions of Iran’s fallout, Beijing is likely to be most focused on its relationship with the United States.
President Donald Trump and Xi are weeks away from a summit in Beijing where they are expected to extend a trade truce between the world’s two largest economies.
The White House has said the meeting will take place from March 31 to April 2. China has not yet confirmed details of the meeting and a Foreign Ministry spokesman would only say on Monday that the two countries were in talks.
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China could still consider canceling or postponing the meeting with Trump to show its displeasure with Washington’s use of military power against Iran.
Despite its sharp rhetoric on Iran, Beijing has strong incentives to keep its relationship with the United States in balance, analysts said. China wants Washington to agree to extend the trade truce, reduce its support for Taiwan and ease its restrictions on technology exports.
“Beijing cares much more about U.S. management than events in the Middle East,” said Julian Gewirtz, former senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council under President Joea Biden.
The trip to China, which would be the first by a US president since Trump made it in 2017, is seen as vital to maintaining the truce that Xi and Trump reached last October in Busan, South Korea. Before that, China and the United States had engaged in a scorching trade war that sank relations to their lowest point in more than 50 years.
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For China, postponing or canceling the summit would have its own costs. Trump has expressed his willingness to avoid confrontation with Beijing. His administration recently delayed announcing a package of arms sales to Taiwan, the autonomous island claimed by Beijing. It has eased restrictions on sales of advanced American chips to China. Trump refrained from mentioning China in last week’s State of the Union address, an unusual omission.
The legal landscape has also changed in Beijing’s favor, with the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down many of Trump’s tariffs. Its new 10% tariff on global imports is beneficial for China.
Leaving the meeting could mean losing that momentum.
Beyond the summit, the conflict could reshape the strategic landscape in ways that benefit Beijing. The United States has already built up the largest military force in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, deploying aircraft carrier and jet strike groups to the region. If that effort proves sustained, it could divert American attention and resources from Asia.
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Beijing may not mind if “the United States gets bogged down in another unpopular war in the Middle East” that distracts it from China, Gewirtz said.
Beijing must also thread a diplomatic needle with Tehran. China has forged deep economic ties with many of the Gulf countries that Iran has launched attacks against in recent days, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Wang attempted to strike a balance in his call with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, calling on Iran to “pay attention to the reasonable concerns of its neighboring countries.”
Unlike the United States, which has formal defense commitments with dozens of allies, China has only one: North Korea. Its partnerships with Iran and Venezuela are strategic alliances, not military ones.
“Xi Jinping is not sentimental about all of Beijing’s external relationships. He got where he is through stubbornness,” said Joe Webster, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research group. “There are no big dividends for having a soft heart in the Chinese Communist Party.”
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Instead, Beijing is likely to continue offering rhetorical support to Tehran while arguing that the United States is the biggest source of global instability. An editorial in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party tabloid, on Monday called on the international community to reject what it said was Washington’s attempt to return the world to the “law of the jungle.”
Chinese analysts speaking to state media say the United States and Israel are wreaking havoc in the Middle East and have set a dangerous precedent by assassinating Khamenei.
Still, the attacks on Iran have exposed the gap between the military capabilities of the two superpowers. Despite its rapid investments in recent decades, China does not possess a military like the United States that can project power anywhere in the world.
That irritates Beijing, said Dylan Loh, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, because it means that no country – not even China – can stop the United States from taking whatever measures it wants.
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“The display of raw power is something that will worry Beijing,” Loh said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
