Wang Yi’s 26 Calls: Who Called Beijing and Why It Mattered

When asked whether China helped broker the truce between the U.S., Israel and Iran this week, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning did not deny it. Instead, she pointed to the record: Foreign Minister Wang Yi had made 26 calls with his counterparts across the region, a special envoy had traveled to the Middle East, and China and Pakistan had jointly put forward a five-point peace initiative. The specific number — 26 calls — was notable. 

The MBN China Tracker verified 24 of those calls in official Foreign Ministry records. The two-call gap is unexplained, though Beijing routinely keeps some diplomatic contacts off the public record. The verified data alone tells a revealing story.

 Wang Yi’s 24 calls unfolded in three distinct phases — an opening burst of outreach, a mediation-building push through mid-March, and a final round of calls just before the Apr. 7 ceasefire.

How China Played Peacemaker in Gulf

Wang’s call log tracks closely with the conflict’s timeline. In the first week, March 2-6, he spoke with France, Oman, Iran, Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. By mid-March, the net widened to Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan and the U.K., as the mediation track took shape ahead of the Islamabad summit March 29. In the final days before the ceasefire, the calls shifted to Germany, the European Union, Bahrain and Russia, suggesting Beijing was consolidating international consensus around an outcome it anticipated.

In Chinese diplomacy, who picks up the phone first is never an accident and a subtle signal of who needs whom more. Beijing keeps careful note of call direction.

 Beijing initiated just seven of its 24 verified calls – concentrating its outreach on Gulf states and selected European counterparts.

From the first days of the conflict, Wang’s proactive outreach was tightly focused: France on March 2, then a push into the Gulf with the UAE and Saudi Arabia on March 4, Bahrain and Kuwait on March 9, and Egypt on March 12 and again on March 25. Of the seven calls Beijing initiated, six went to countries with direct stakes in Gulf energy security or the emerging mediation track. Egypt subsequently joined the quadrilateral summit hosted by Pakistan. Oman, often cited as a back-channel to Tehran, appears in the data as an inbound call to Beijing, not an outreach by Wang. Special Envoy Zhai Jun conducted parallel in-person consultations across the same regions, reinforcing Wang’s diplomacy.

But not all the conversations made it into the record.

Wang Yi called Iran twice and Israel once, but has not spoken with the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio since the war began.

Of the 24 calls the China Tracker verified, none involved Washington. Since their meeting at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, there is no record from either Beijing or Washington that Wang and Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke during the six weeks of war. 

That gap in the official record does not mean the two sides were not talking. On April 9, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that conversations had taken place. “There were conversations that took place between top levels of our government, and China’s government,” she said. Asked the same day, China’s Foreign Ministry said only that Beijing had “worked actively to communicate with relevant parties.” Neither side said who spoke to whom.