For the second time this year, Saudi Arabia is under fire from Iran’s proxies, and for the second time China, the Gulf’s biggest oil customer, is watching from the sidelines.
Since Oct. 6, Yemen’s Houthis, allies of Iran, have launched the deadliest series of attacks on the Saudis since 2015. They say they are targeting what they call the kingdom’s most precious assets, the Aramco oil facilities and the airport in Riyadh.
The only ones that have come to its rescue are Britain and France. (The British have deployed Typhoon fighter jets, while the French have sent troops and air-defense equipment to protect critical infrastructure. Both countries have emphasized the strictly defensive nature of these moves.) Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have agreed to activate “deterrence measures” under a mutual defense pact and rapidly deploy forces to the kingdom. The U.S. is providing intelligence and logistical support, but so far, has opted against putting boots on the ground.
And yet – even though it buys more Gulf crude than anyone else – Beijing has not played the role of guarantor in the ways that many analysts predicted. Its behavior follows the pattern it set during the roughly 40 days of open war between the United States and Iran that began on Feb. 28. In the weeks that followed, Iranian forces declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, and traffic largely halted until a two-week ceasefire was agreed on April 7. Iranian missiles and drones also struck Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.
When Iranian missiles were flying at Gulf capitals in the spring, Beijing was reluctant to mediate. Now that Houthi rockets are hitting Saudi Arabia’s strategic sites, killing at least 13 people at Riyadh’s main airport alone and injuring over 370, the Chinese are reacting the same way they did then: calling for calm, keeping their own tankers moving, and demurring from using their leverage to change the course of the war.
China Holds Back
“China has its own calculations and a different strategic reading,” Mohammed Alsudairi, a lecturer in the politics and international relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Australian National University, told me. The same dynamics applied to Iran are now applied to Yemen. “I see China’s ability to influence the reality on the ground as very limited,” Alsudairi, a specialist in China-Arab affairs, explained.
The boundaries of China’s influence lie in crisis management and de-escalation, not in rewriting Iran’s core security assessment.
China was not entirely absent in the spring. On March 31, it joined Pakistan in announcing a five-point proposal calling for a ceasefire and the resumption of normal navigation in Hormuz. Iranian officials said Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei approved the April ceasefire after a last-minute nudge by China. But it was Pakistan, not China, that carried diplomacy forward.
When the truce unraveled, Beijing did not move to rescue it. A memorandum to end the war was signed on June 17, but the ceasefire collapsed a few weeks later after Iran attacked commercial vessels in Hormuz. By late July, Gulf capitals were openly testing the Chinese. A Reuters analysis at the time found Gulf Arab states looking to China, not Washington, to use its economic leverage over Iran to reopen Hormuz and the Red Sea. The answer was disappointing.
Beijing’s transactional understanding with the Houthis has largely kept Chinese-linked ships out of harm’s way but has not created pressure to end all attacks. “This war with the Houthis – and indeed since last year, with the exchange of fire between Iran and the Gulf states – has shown the limits of China’s ability, or really China’s willingness, to use its political capital to contain the war’s repercussions,” Alsudairi said.
If Chinese ships need safe passage through the Bab al-Mandab, as they did through Hormuz, Beijing can reach its own understanding with the Houthis and the Iranians, he said.
Mediator or Bystander?
Alsudairi credits the 2023 Beijing Agreement, which restored Saudi-Iranian ties, with preventing something worse, because it opened channels of communication between Riyadh and Tehran. But he notes that fire was still exchanged despite that agreement. “China did not play the role of mediator, or at least of supporter of that agreement, as many of the parties analyzing it had expected,” he said.
He argued that Beijing came late to that deal too. Riyadh and Tehran arranged the agreement themselves over many rounds of talks. Any future accord, he said, would follow the same logic.
The parties would first settle what they agree on, then bring China in for their own political reasons, whether to improve ties with Beijing or to send a message to Washington. “There is a possibility that China plays a positive diplomatic role, but not as a mediator in the concrete sense,” Alsudairi said.
Dr. Wang Guangda, Secretary General of China-Arab Research Center on Reform and Development, put the limits more bluntly in response to my written questions. “China possesses constructive partnership influence with Iran on diplomatic and economic levels, but lacks coercive dominance,” Dr. Guangda said. In Beijing’s view, Hormuz is Tehran’s main counterweight to U.S. and Israeli military pressure, one that Iran will not give up for the sake of “the economic and trade interests of third parties.”
“The boundaries of China’s influence lie in crisis management and de-escalation, not in rewriting Iran’s core security assessment,” said Dr. Guangda, professor of international studies at Shanghai University.
The View Through Washington’s Eyes
During my recent visit to China, I interviewed two envoys, one Arab and the other Western. Both said that the country’s calculations in the Gulf start and end with the United States. They said that Beijing reads the war as an American attempt to impose security control over the region, with Washington firmly behind Israel.
The two diplomats I spoke to in Beijing, in addition to other political analysts, had the same view. “China does not want to be dragged into a military confrontation with the United States,” said the Arab envoy, who has spent over four years in China. “China has military bases, and they are not willing, for the sake of maintaining their foreign interests, to get into a confrontation with the U.S.”
The Western diplomat said the first casualty of any such confrontation would be Taiwan. Beijing intends to reunify the island with the mainland without force, and a push toward Taiwanese independence would be a strategic blow with domestic consequences.
Iran has also come up directly between the two leaders. The U.S. president has sought Beijing’s help pressuring Tehran towards a settlement, and the U.S. ambassador to China has said that Trump has made U.S. interests on Iran “very clear” to China (including in the latest summit meeting with Xi Jinping).
Alsudairi pointed to unconfirmed reports that Beijing scaled back intelligence cooperation with Iran after the Washington summit. He said that, true or not, the reports highlight the limits of the Chinese role.
The Latin America Lesson
The two diplomats in Beijing cited Latin America as the template for how far China will go to defend its interests abroad. Washington’s Dec. 2025 National Security Strategy placed the Western Hemisphere at the center of U.S. national security for the first time in decades, recasting China primarily as an economic competitor.
The document declares that the United States will remain the dominant power in the hemisphere, and that non-hemispheric actors, China foremost among them, will be denied military footholds and strategic resources there.
This is why Beijing made no major move to side with Iran. China cares about Gulf oil infrastructure, maritime routes and energy sources.
Panama has been the test case. Panama’s top court ruled in January that the contract granted to Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison to operate two ports near the canal was unconstitutional, a win for Trump’s drive to curb China’s control of strategic infrastructure in Latin America. The company has started international arbitration proceedings that could take years.
The diplomats said the same restraint is now on display as Chinese companies retreat from Venezuela and governments across the region tilt toward Washington. A U.S.-China trade truce, renewed for a year in September, gives Trump room to consolidate what they called America’s front yard. They described China’s approach as protecting its interests through litigation rather than armed confrontation, and said it is applying the same rule in the Gulf.
This is why Beijing made no major move to side with Iran. “China cares about Gulf oil infrastructure, maritime routes and energy sources,” the Arab diplomat said.
Weaning Itself Off Gulf Oil
China has cushioned the blow at home rather than embarking on confrontation overseas. In 2025 it imported about half of its crude oil and almost a third of its liquefied natural gas from the Middle East. According to Kpler’s commodity intelligence platform, Chinese imports through Hormuz fell to about 222,000 barrels per day in April from 4.45 million before the war.
Beijing drew on its stockpiles and leaned harder on Russia, which also supplies about one million barrels per day to China through pipelines, bypassing maritime chokepoints.
Alsudairi said China also restricted exports of refined products. The longer-term consequence, Alsudairi argues, will be a faster shift to renewables. China is already using renewables to generate an amount of energy each year that is comparable to the entire energy output of the Gulf states.
For Gulf capitals that spent a decade courting Beijing as a counterweight to Washington, that shift may matter more than anything China does, or declines to do, in this war.
“This war will accelerate the pace [of the shift to renewable energy sources],” Alsudairi said, “and even the dynamics of China’s relationship with the region will change because of it.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
