-
By Aadil Brar
-
-
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan.
Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The next 60 days in the Persian Gulf could reveal more about China’s risk calculus in the Indo-Pacific region than any number of Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military drills — because the exam is no longer theoretical. It is being graded in real time.
China’s window to shape Iran’s succession is closing. Beijing holds no formal seat in the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that would elect the next Supreme Leader — but formal seats are beside the point when you purchase nine-tenths of a country’s only serious export. China’s real leverage runs through the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) identifies as the dominant institutional force shaping the post-Khamenei transition — and any successor, CFR notes, “will almost certainly need the IRGC’s backing to govern effectively regardless of formal religious credentials.” Beijing has been quietly cultivating that relationship for years, a campaign that accelerated sharply after former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi’s death in 2024. The calls are being made right now. The generals are being reminded of the US$400 billion on the table, the yuan payment terms and the infrastructure pipeline. China is not lobbying a theocracy; it is making an offer to a military that knows how to count.
Every week without a clear successor is a week in which factional competition could produce an outcome hostile to the partnership — or an IRGC adventurism in the Gulf that Beijing cannot control. China needs a transactional successor, not an ideological one. That window does not stay open indefinitely, and it is a chokepoint that cuts both ways.
Some 84 percent of the oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz flows to Asian markets, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and China alone imported approximately 5 million barrels per day through the strait early last year — representing roughly 40 to 45 percent of its total crude imports. An Iranian threat to close Hormuz does not primarily threaten Houston or Rotterdam. It throttles Tianjin, Qingdao and Zhoushan.
As energy security analyst Ravi Balakrishnan warned in the immediate aftermath of Khamenei’s death: “A closure or serious disruption of Hormuz would deliver a severe shock to Beijing — prices could surge toward [US]$100 to [US]$130 per barrel. Such a spike would squeeze China’s industrial base and growth targets at a delicate economic moment.”
China ran a crude surplus of some 113 million barrels last year and has been building strategic reserves, but stockpiles buy time, not immunity. A prolonged closure hands Washington a template for supply-chain attrition that could be applied in a different ocean to a different crisis.
This places Beijing in a trap Washington has designed with some care: Either China publicly restrains Tehran, legitimizing US coercive power in the Gulf and setting a precedent for future pressure in other straits, or it stays silent and allows the chokepoint feeding its own industrial base to remain under threat. There is no clean exit; each choice costs something. Which one Beijing makes would tell us a great deal about how it intends to manage the next chokepoint on its map — one that lies between China and Taiwan.
China built its Iran sanctions-evasion infrastructure as a Taiwan rehearsal. The Persian Gulf crisis is grading the exam.
Beijing established a dedicated interagency working group reporting to Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) — Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) chief architect for ring-fencing China’s economy from Western sanctions — specifically to study how China would survive a hard-hitting sanctions regime, drawing explicitly on Russia’s experience with an eye toward Taiwan contingencies. The dark-fleet tankers running with disabled automatic identification system (AIS) transponders, the ship-to-ship transfers conducted in open international waters, the yuan payment loops bypassing SWIFT, the gold settlements leaving no dollar trail — none of this was improvised under US pressure. It was a prototype, and Iran was the testing environment.
Washington is stress-testing that prototype at scale. The secondary sanctions campaign targeting Chinese teapot refineries purchasing Iranian crude is, from Beijing’s war-gaming desk, a live simulation of the financial pressure architecture that would be deployed in a Taiwan contingency. Every secondary sanction that successfully alters Chinese purchasing behavior identifies a crack in the evasion system. Everyone who fails hands Beijing’s planners a gap to widen before the next round.
The most important — and least discussed — implication follows directly: China has a strategic incentive to keep this crisis moderately alive. A fully resolved crisis shuts down the testing environment. A fully escalated crisis, with Hormuz closed and oil at US$130, damages China too severely to be useful.
The optimal temperature for Beijing’s Taiwan planners is precisely where we are now: a slow burn that keeps the evasion architecture under operational stress, reveals the outer limits of Western enforcement capacity and imposes no cost severe enough to force Beijing’s hand before it is ready.
That reframing changes everything about how we should read Chinese behavior in this crisis. When Beijing appears passive, it might not be paralyzed — it might be collecting data. When it appears to restrain Tehran, it might not be cooperating with Washington — it might be calibrating exactly how much compliance buys how much goodwill, to be deployed in a future negotiation about a different strait entirely.
Conventional intelligence on Chinese strategic intentions focuses on military signals: carrier deployments, amphibious exercise footprints, missile test trajectories. These signals matter, but they are rehearsed performances, engineered for ambiguity. What China does in the Persian Gulf over the next 60 days is far less choreographed — and therefore far more honest.
The answer would not come in a communique; it would come in AIS transponder data in the Gulf of Oman, in yuan-clearing volumes in Shanghai and in the messages Beijing sends — or pointedly does not send — to Tehran’s transitional council. It would come down to whether Chinese teapot refineries quietly trim Iranian crude intake under US pressure or brazenly maintain it. It would come in whether Beijing’s dark fleet accelerates transfers as a show of defiance, or pulls back to probe Washington’s enforcement appetite.
Three dilemmas — a succession gamble, an energy chokepoint and a Taiwan rehearsal — are converging on the same 60-day window. The Persian Gulf has always been described as a Middle Eastern story with global energy implications. It is, in fact, an Indo-Pacific story with a deadline.
Aadil Brar is an analyst covering Asian geopolitics and international security.
