China and Iran are maintaining close relations, but Beijing’s influence is limited

China and Iran flaunted their close friendship this week.

In a meeting in Russia aimed at cementing an anti-Western alliance, Chinese leader Xi Jinping welcomed Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to Iran’s first BRICS summit as a full member. He also demonstrated Beijing’s diplomatic and economic alliance with Tehran as the conflict in the Middle East escalates further and Iran prepares for Israel to retaliate against it for recent attacks.

“China will unswervingly develop friendly cooperation with Iran,” Xi told Pezeshkian, according to a Chinese government report. Xi expressed support for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the two leaders agreed to work together to “oppose hegemony and aggression”.

But with the violence threatening to bring to light the long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran, China is unlikely to force Iran to detente, and the relationship between Beijing and Tehran is more strained than it appears.

“China’s relationship with Iran is strategically important but also limited,” says William Figueroa, a China-Iran expert at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “It is certainly not this new axis of evil that people are describing China, Russia and Iran. It’s actually one of his smaller, more minor relationships in the Middle East, and I think that’s getting lost.”

Economically isolated due to a regime of strict international sanctions, Iran is dependent on trade links with China, its largest trading partner. This, along with their shared distrust of the United States, contributed to stronger political ties.

Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization last year, a political and economic organization set up by China and Russia with Beijing’s encouragement, and was welcomed into BRICS this week with Beijing’s help. In February 2023, amid both countries’ rising tensions with Washington, Pezeshkian’s predecessor led a large delegation to Beijing on a high-profile state visit. It was the first time by an Iranian president in 20 years.

China seized the opportunity to buy cheap oil from heavily sanctioned Iran, with Iran’s oil exports to China rising more than 25 percent in the first nine months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. Sales hit an all-time high in August of 1.66 million barrels per day, according to data from Vortexa, an energy analysis firm.

But the two countries’ overall bilateral trade has declined over the past decade and is dwarfed by China’s trade with Iran’s Gulf neighbors. Last year, for example, China’s trade with Iran was only one-seventh that of Saudi Arabia, according to Chinese trade data.

If Iran and Israel come to direct conflict, China’s supply of Iranian oil could be cut off. But analysts agree that this would not have a disastrous impact on Beijing, as China could rely on its strategic oil reserves and other suppliers such as Russia and Venezuela.

“They have a pretty strong hand in terms of being able to drop it,” said Alex Turnbull, a commodities analyst in Singapore.

However, China has used its economic relations with Iran and other Gulf nations to assert itself as a power agent in the region.

Beijing last year announced a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, surprising Washington, which has been the main foreign negotiator since the end of the Cold War. It underlined Xi’s ambitions to establish a wider political presence in the Middle East.

Then, earlier this year, Beijing, which has increasingly aligned itself with Palestinian leaders since the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, announced an agreement between Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, to increase unity between the rivals fierce since the war in Gaza. .

But that Palestinian accord amounted to nothing, and even the landmark agreement between China and Iran reveals the limitations of its influence.

“China hasn’t done much, basically,” said Ahmed Aboudouh, an expert on Middle East-China relations at the Chatham House policy institute in London. “The Iraqis and the Omanis played a very important role for two years in bringing these parties together, and China just came in and put its big-power stamp on the deal and got a shot.”

China’s leverage over Iran remains minimal, analysts say, even as Chinese diplomats have been sent to talk to their Iranian counterparts. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, meanwhile told his Israeli counterpart last week that Beijing wants to “play a constructive role in cooling the situation and restoring peace in the region”.

Jonathan Fulton, an Abu Dhabi-based expert on Chinese Middle East policy at the Atlantic Council, said China had been “very active rhetorically” but had not come up with a tangible result.

China’s approach has been more bark than bite, Fulton said. “As with many things, the farther you get from its boundaries, the more barking.”

But Beijing, which prides itself on the principle of “non-interference” in other nations’ affairs, is neither willing nor able to exert influence over Tehran at this precarious moment, Figueroa said.

“What they’ve done is what they can do,” he said. “They have proposed to all their allies and the United Nations several times to organize some kind of peace summit for diplomatic negotiations. They called again and again for a ceasefire. It’s just that it’s not in their power to make any of these things happen.”

This week, Xi doubled down on rhetoric calling for peace in the Middle East.

“As the world enters a defining new period of turbulence and transformation, we face critical choices that will shape our future,” he said at the BRICS summit on Wednesday. “Should we allow the world to descend into the abyss of disorder and chaos, or should we strive to steer it back onto the path of peace and development?”

But for Xi, being seen as contributing to that goal, particularly in the developing world, may be more important than successfully brokering peace.

Chinese leaders don’t “judge success or failure based on whether they successfully brokered an end to the conflict,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Chinese military expert at Stanford University and author of “Upstart: How China Became a Great Power.”

“The Chinese see it mainly as a lever and a tool of global influence. And so what really matters to them is…does it improve their image if they appear to be mediating?” she said.

Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan contributed to this report.