One of China's most cynical strategies in its all-encompassing struggle against the United States is to cast itself as a peacemaker while claiming that America fuels conflict. Beijing propagates this false narrative even as it ignites bonfires.
This Chinese doublespeak was on display at the BRICS virtual summit last week, when President Xi Jinping proposed a six-point plan to permanently stop the fighting in Gaza. The Chinese ruler called for an end to "all violence and attacks against civilians," the securing of "humanitarian corridors" and additional aid for Gaza, "the establishment of an independent State of Palestine," the convening of an "international peace conference," the adoption of U.N. General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, and the implementation of "practical measures to prevent the conflict from spilling over and endangering stability in the Middle East as a whole."
Many foreign observers are buying Beijing's China-desires-peace propaganda line. "What China really wants in the Middle East is order," writes Omer Aziz, a former foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government, in the Globe and Mail. "A regional war is not in China's interests if it wants to grow economically and keep its own interests—principally Taiwan—in line."
Yet Xi Jinping is not promoting peace in the Middle East. He is rather continuing to stoke war. China's actions in recent years reveal not just that China has been pushing war in the Middle East, but that it knew it was doing so. China, after all, has been continually backing Iran's militant Shiite regime, which openly talks about war and consistently works to destabilize the Sunni states in the Gulf region.
China has for decades been aiding the relentless drive of the Islamic Republic of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Iran received Chinese uranium-enrichment technology and equipment through the China-sponsored nuclear-black-market ring of Pakistan's A. Q. Khan. And China-proxy North Korea could never transfer ballistic missiles to Iran without Chinese approval, something it has done consistently in recent decades.
Moreover, China has been supplying arms used by proxies of the Islamic Republic. Hamas, for instance, appears to possess old Chinese-made weapons, presumably supplied through Iran. Likewise, the U.S. Navy in 2021 and this year seized Chinese weapons in transit to the Houthi militia in Yemen, another Iranian proxy. Richard Fisher, a China military analyst at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told me that Beijing also provides weapons to Hezbollah, Iran's third major proxy.
Meanwhile, Iran's own weapons are chock full of Chinese components. China provides what the Wall Street Journal termed the "building blocks" for Tehran's drone program. In April, Ukraine brought down an Iranian Shahed-136 drone operated by Russia. The device contained a voltage converter that appeared to have been made in China in January. Both the United Nations and the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control have documented Chinese involvement in Iran's weapons programs.
The Islamic Republic cannot make drones and other basic weapons. "Iran does not make any chip that goes into any of its weapons," Raj Dutt, CEO of Culver City, California-based Advanced Photonic Integrated Circuits Corp., a U.S. defense contractor developing high end integrated circuits, told me last week. Its chips appear to come from all over Asia, including China.
More important, China has fully supported the Iranian economy. In the first nine months of this year, the volume of China's purchases of Iranian oil was 60 percent above that in 2017, the last year before the United States re-imposed sanctions on such purchases.
China, in turn, sees Iran as its proxy. Tehran not only destabilizes America's Sunni friends in the region but also promotes the narrative that Beijing is a supporter of the "Global South." Moreover, Iran's location is crucial for Chinese strategists. "Beijing needs Iran to provide the essential land bridge down into the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, as well as into the Indian Ocean," Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, told me this month.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Beijing and Tehran inked a 25-year, $400 billion "Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement" in 2021. And in February Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Beijing and signed 20 agreements and memoranda of understanding on various matters, including trade.
Although China has often not lived up to investment promises to Tehran, as Copley also notes, Beijing has nonetheless deepened ties to the Iranian economy. China has been the Islamic Republic's largest trade partner for 10 straight years, with bilateral trade jumping 7 percent last year.
Beijing's support is out in the open. From the beginning of the October 7 conflict, Beijing has been providing intensive diplomatic and enthusiastic propaganda support for Hamas. Last week, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, referred to Arabs as "our brothers and sisters." Indeed, the ongoing war served Chinese interests by preventing Israel and Saudi Arabia from signing a "normalization" deal, which would have lessened Beijing's importance to the House of Saud.
So far, the Biden administration has tried to enlist China in reining in Iran, something evident when President Joe Biden met Xi in San Francisco earlier this monnth. Bolstering China's role, however, is deeply counterproductive to American interests.
China has made it clear it supports the barbarism of Hamas. Washington policy, therefore, should undermine the malign Chinese influence in the region and seek the complete destruction of that terrorist group. An end to Hamas would go a long way to defanging Iran, but it would also help deter China from acting on dangerous designs on neighbors and the broader world.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and the just-released China Is Going to War. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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