The rapprochement between China and the United States was already fragile. Now the country faces a new strain: the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader in a US-backed strike that Beijing denounced as a blatant attempt at regime change.
China was quick to condemn the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Its top diplomat, Wang Yi, accused both governments of killing the leader of another country and pledged support for Tehran’s sovereignty and security.
The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei came less than two months after US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, another close ally of China. Taken together, these actions represent a powerful display of U.S. power against governments with which China seeks to develop ties as part of its broader global strategy.
But the question for Beijing is how far it can go to protect Iran, its closest diplomatic partner in the Middle East, without jeopardizing its economic interests or further escalating tensions with the United States.
The fighting has already directly affected China. China’s Foreign Ministry announced the death of a Chinese citizen in Tehran, and Beijing is scrambling to evacuate thousands of its citizens.
Beijing is likely concerned about the potential fallout from U.S. and Israeli strikes. China is the world’s largest energy importer, and Iran has already threatened to “set fire” to all ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway off Iran’s southern coast through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes. This could lead to price spikes and seriously damage the Chinese economy.
There is also a domestic, albeit more muted, sensitivity to the issue of foreign-backed regime change. Xi Jinping, China’s leader since 2012 and expected to begin a fourth term next year, presides over a political system that tolerates no dissent. Under a Chinese state media article about Khamenei’s death, netizens congratulated the people of Iran and openly wondered who would succeed him. Other comments suggesting that Iranians may have been celebrating were censored.
As Beijing grapples with the various fallout from the Iran crisis, its main focus is likely to be on its relationship with the United States.
President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in a few weeks for a summit in Beijing, where they are expected to extend a trade truce between the world's two largest economies.
The White House said the meeting would take place from March 31 to April 2. China has yet to confirm details of the meeting, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman saying only on Monday that the two sides were in talks.
China could cancel or postpone the meeting with Trump to demonstrate its dissatisfaction with Washington's use of military force against Iran.
Despite its strong rhetoric in support of Iran, Beijing has strong incentives to maintain stable relations with the United States, analysts say. China wants Washington to agree to extend the trade truce, reduce its support for Taiwan and ease restrictions on technology exports.
“Beijing is much more concerned with managing its relationship with the United States than with events in the Middle East,“ said Julian Goertz, former director for China and Taiwan affairs on the National Security Council under President Joe Biden.
The trip to China, the first by a sitting U.S. president since Trump's 2017 visit, is crucial to maintaining the truce reached by Xi and Trump last October in Busan, South Korea. China and the United States were previously locked in a bitter trade war that has brought relations to their lowest point in more than 50 years.
For China, postponing or canceling the summit would come at a cost. Trump has signaled a willingness to avoid confrontation with Beijing. His administration recently delayed the announcement of a package of arms deals for Taiwan, the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing. It has also eased restrictions on the sale of advanced American chips to China. Trump notably omitted China from his State of the Union address last week.
The legal situation has also shifted in Beijing’s favor, with a recent Supreme Court ruling overturning several of Trump’s tariffs. The new 10 percent tariff on global imports is particularly favorable to China.
Beijing also needs to carefully balance its diplomatic relations with Tehran. China has built deep economic ties with several Gulf states that Iran has been attacking in recent days. Wang sought to strike a balance in his call with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, urging Iran to "pay attention to the legitimate concerns of its neighbors."
Unlike the United States, which has formal defense commitments with dozens of allies, China has only one - with North Korea. Its partnerships with Iran and Venezuela are strategic, not military alliances.
Beijing is likely to continue to offer verbal support to Tehran while emphasizing that the United States is the main source of global instability. On Monday, an editorial in the Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, called on the international community to reject what it described as Washington's attempt to return the world to the "law of the jungle." Chinese analysts who spoke to state media said the United States and Israel were sowing chaos in the Middle East and had set a dangerous precedent with the assassination of Khamenei. The strikes on Iran, however, exposed the gap in military capabilities between the two superpowers. Despite its rapid investment in recent decades, China does not have a military like the United States' capable of projecting power anywhere in the world. That's worrisome for Beijing, said Dylan Lo, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, because it means no country - not even China itself - can afford to be so aggressive. cannot stop the United States from taking any action it wants.
“A harsh display of hard power is something that will worry Beijing,“ he added.