As the U.S. and Chinese presidents meet, Iran looms in the background. Meanwhile, Iranian cinema is once again represented at the Cannes film festival, and human rights abuses in Iran continue unabated.
Read more below.
Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by MBN’s own Rami Al Amine and renowned former BBC journalist Pooneh Ghoddoosi as we look at the latest from Hezbollah and at how Iranians are coping.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Each day the strait remains closed, China’s long-term position grows stronger.”
— David M. Hart, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
TOP OF THE NEWS
As this edition of the MBN Iran Briefing newsletter lands in your inbox, Presidents Trump and Xi will be deep in talks about the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
The stated focus is stabilizing the two countries’ economic ties: energy, aerospace, and agriculture, with a proposed Board of Trade mechanism to keep the two sides talking. The commercial deliverables are largely pre-arranged. The question is what Beijing wants to extract in return, and whether it again reaches for the critical minerals pressure point that rattled Washington twice last year.
But the economic theme is a placeholder for something tougher. The U.S. president arrived in Beijing wanting two things from Xi that won’t appear in a joint statement: a public commitment that China will not re-arm Tehran if fighting resumes, and meaningful pressure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As my MBN colleague and China expert Min Mitchell wrote on Monday, the blockade has already cut China’s Gulf crude imports by 25 percent year-on-year, which means Xi has his own reasons to want it resolved, even if his timeline and his terms differ sharply from Washington’s.
In the words of Iranian site Negah-e Iran, “Tehran has become one of the main topics of the meeting, especially in a situation where China is still the largest buyer of Iranian oil and has refused to back down in the face of US pressure.”
Beijing’s handling of the war has shifted. It opened by condemning the initial strikes and calling for a ceasefire. It then changed visibly, dropping the language of solidarity with Tehran and pressing instead for de-escalation, urging Iran privately not to widen the conflict into the Gulf. China’s Middle East envoy spent weeks moving between regional capitals with a consistent message: Chinese citizens and commercial interests must be protected, and Hormuz must reopen.
As I noted in a previous edition of this newsletter, Iran and China signed a 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership in 2021 covering infrastructure, trade and security cooperation. In theory the document gives Tehran its claim to Chinese strategic backing, and Beijing its formal stake in Iran’s survival as a functional state. However, when I asked my colleague Min how significant this agreement is, she said: “China and Iran’s relationship isn’t as deep as their 25-year cooperation deal on paper makes it look. Beijing’s interests in Iran are quite narrow: discounted oil, some sanctions workarounds, a useful counterweight to U.S. power in the region, and none of that obliges it to defend Tehran when the pressure mounts. The war made that asymmetry impossible to hide.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shaking hands in Beijing last week. Photo: Reuters
In the first such visit since the war began, Iran’s foreign minister traveled to Beijing last week. According to Iranian site Fararu, Tehran’s message to Beijing was unambiguous: a permanent end to the war, a sustainable ceasefire, the lifting of the blockade, and “respect for Iran’s legitimate rights,” with a request that China carry that position into its talks with Washington. In the words of my colleague Min, Beijing took that meeting “because it cost nothing to take,” using it to call publicly for the war to end and Hormuz to reopen, in a gesture aligned with Washington’s timetable, not Tehran’s interests.
China will not take any visible action that looks like compliance with American demands. What Xi is likely to have offered today is a kind of calibrated ambiguity: enough for the U.S. president to claim a headline but not enough to close off Chinese options in whatever Iran emerges after the guns fall silent.
As Min put it, “If decades of careful U.S. policy can be reshaped for a short-term win on Hormuz, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will draw their own conclusions about what their partnership with Washington is actually worth.”
For a great overview of what’s at stake in this summit, check out this recent edition of the CSIS Asia Chessboard podcast, featuring China expert Evan Medeiros assessing Beijing’s relationship to the war.
And don’t forget to check out this Iran Briefing podcast in which MBN China expert Min Mitchell joins Matthew Kaminski and yours truly in unpacking the U.S.-China summit, its connection to the Iran war, and how the world’s superpowers are gaining and losing from the conflict.
Members of the UAE Armed Forces perform military drills during a military parade. Photo: Reuters
UAE AND SAUDI QUIET ATTACKS ON IRAN
The war has drawn in two of Iran’s Gulf neighbours as covert combatants. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the UAE has secretly been carrying out attacks on Iran, with a strike in early April hitting an oil refinery on Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf, just off Iran’s southern coast. The island hosts one of Iran’s significant oil refinery and export terminal facilities and sits well within Iranian territorial waters. This casts the UAE, until now identified primarily as a target in the war, as an active combatant.
Semafor reported yesterday that the UAE attacks were allegedly conducted in coordination with Israel. A statement last week by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the country “reserves its full sovereign, legal, diplomatic, and military rights to address any threat, allegation, or hostile act.”
MBN Iran Briefing Podcast
Expert conversations unpacking the latest developments in Iran and how they are reshaping security, energy markets, and geopolitics across the Middle East.
Moreover, it’s now been reported that Riyadh launched multiple strikes on Iran in late March in retaliation for attacks carried out on Saudi Arabia during the Middle East war.
The spokesman for the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the joint command of Iran’s armed forces, called the UAE “one of the main American and Zionist bases as enemies of the Islamic world” and warned of a “crushing and regretful response” to attacks on Iran by the UAE. A member of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee stressed the same point.
Riyadh has drawn no comparable fire from Tehran.
Prisoners on bunk beds in the regime’s notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Photo: Reuters
HUMAN RIGHTS UPDATE
Fatemeh Sepehri, a 61-year-old activist who previously underwent open-heart surgery, has spent more than 1,000 days in Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad with documented cardiac problems and limited access to specialist medical care. A social media campaign has emerged around the slogan “Be the voice of Fatemeh Sepehri.”
Daneshvarkar sisters: Akram and Azam Daneshvarkar were arrested last month after repeatedly visiting Ghezel Hesar Prison, the forensic medicine office, and judicial authorities to seek the return of their executed brother Akbar’s body. They were transferred to Qarchak Prison in Varamin and subsequently moved to an undisclosed location, with no contact with their families since. The charges: “assembly and collusion against internal security” and “disrupting public order.”
Bodies withheld from families: The “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign is a coordinated weekly hunger strike by political prisoners across 56 Iranian prisons, held every Tuesday to protest the use of the death penalty against political detainees. It started in January 2024 in Evin Prison’s women’s ward and has now run for 120 consecutive weeks, backed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi from her cell.
In late March and early April, six of its members were hanged at Ghezel Hesar Prison in a single week: Akbar Daneshvarkar, Mohammad Taghavi, Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi, Vahid Bani-Amerian, and Abolhassan Montazer, co-defendants in a single case, retried and resentenced to death last December. None of them, their families, or their lawyers received advance notice. Amnesty International said all six reported torture including beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, and death threats, and that their convictions rested on forced confessions extracted in trials lasting only a few hours. The executions were carried out in stages over six days, with phone lines to their ward cut between hangings. Their bodies have not been returned to their families.
Displaying the Palme d’Or, the highest prize awarded to competing films, before the opening of the 79th Cannes Film Festival this week. Photo: Reuters
IRANIAN FILMS AT CANNES
The Cannes film festival opened this week, and two Iranian filmmakers, both working in exile, are featured there this year. Even as the regime in Tehran demonstrates its brutality to the world, Iranian artists continue to display the sophistication of their culture.
Director Asghar Farhadi premieres Parallel Tales, a feature about voyeurism and obsession, in the main competition at Cannes today. The director, who has won two Oscars and is one of the most prominent Iranian filmmakers, has previously said he will no longer make films in Iran as an act of resistance against the regime. This new film has been noted in the Iranian press.
Pegah Ahangarani brings Rehearsals for a Revolution to Special Screenings at Cannes. The documentary traces forty years of Iranian history through five portraits of the director’s relatives and mentors and their expressions of resistance stretching from 1979 to the present day.
Living Twice, Dying Thrice, by director Karim Lakzadeh. Three miners who survive a pit collapse fake their deaths so their families can claim compensation.
Dans La Gueule de l’Ogre, directed by Mahsa Karampour. A documentary about the filmmaker’s brother Siavash: she has just become French, he is about to become American, and both are searching for common ground far from their native Iran.
ESSENTIAL READING I: CHINA AND IRAN
China-Iran Fact Sheet: A Short Primer on the Relationship — U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), March 2026. The most current authoritative overview, everything from BeiDou satellite use by Iranian forces to China’s $31.2 billion in unreported Iranian crude imports in 2025.
China-Iran Relations Put to the Test of War — Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), March 2026. Explains Beijing’s restrained posture, balancing domestic priorities with a desire to avoid friction with the U.S.
Between “New Axis of Evil” and “Paper Tiger”: Expectations and Reality of the 25-Year Iran-China Cooperation Agreement — Iranian Studies, 2025. Argues that Persian-language sources reveal a very ambivalent Iranian view of the partnership.
China and Iran: A Reading List — Jonathan Fulton, updated March 2026. The best single aggregator of academic and policy literature on the relationship.
ESSENTIAL READING II: IRANIAN CINEMA
The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Iranian Cinema — Langford, Ghorbankarimi & Khosroshahi (eds.), Bloomsbury, November 2024. The most comprehensive recent reference volume, covering pre- and post-revolutionary cinema.
Trends in Iranian Cinema: Local and Global Perspectives — Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari & Rahmati (eds.), IB Tauris, November 2024. Situates contemporary Iranian output in domestic and international contexts.
The New Wave Cinema in Iran: A Critical Study — Parviz Jahed, Bloomsbury, 2022. Traces how a small group of filmmakers built an intellectual cinematic practice in the 1960s, drawing on Italian neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague.
Iranian Art as Resistance: Films, Books and Podcasts — The National, March 2026. A current guide covering renowned filmmakers Panahi, Rasoulof, and Abbasi.
Andres Ilves
Andres Ilves is Iran Editor and Senior Adviser at MBN. His career as a journalist and writer includes two decades at the BBC and Radio Free Europe.
