China buys roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports. Before the war, 5.35 million barrels per day flowed to Chinese ports through the Strait of Hormuz. As of last week, that figure had collapsed to approximately 1.22 million — coming exclusively from Iranian tankers that Tehran still guarantees safe passage. For the world’s largest oil importer, the arithmetic is existential: the war that Washington launched to weaken Iran is simultaneously delivering the most severe energy disruption China has faced since the founding of the People’s Republic.
Trump’s response has been to demand that Beijing help fix the problem he created. In an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday, he said China gets 90 percent of its oil from the strait — roughly double the actual figure — and warned that failure to cooperate could delay his planned summit with Xi Jinping. By Tuesday, the summit had been postponed. Chinese support for a US-led operation to unblock the strait is, to put it gently, not coming.
The Supply Shock
The scale of disruption dwarfs anything in recent Chinese economic planning. China imported approximately 11.5 million barrels per day in 2025, making it the world’s largest crude buyer. The strait’s effective closure has cut off not only Iranian crude but also supplies from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Iraq that transit the same waterway. Alternative routes — pipeline imports from Russia and Central Asia, seaborne shipments from West Africa and Latin America — can partially compensate, but not at the volumes or speed required.
Chinese refineries have already begun drawing down commercial crude inventories, which stood at approximately 950 million barrels before the war. At the current rate of drawdown, analysts at Energy Aspects estimate China has roughly six to eight weeks of buffer before supply constraints begin forcing industrial output cuts. The State Council convened an emergency meeting on energy security on March 10 — the first such session since the 2020 pandemic lockdowns disrupted supply chains.
Iran has reportedly offered to allow tankers carrying yuan-denominated cargo to transit the strait — a gesture designed to cultivate goodwill in Beijing and advance Tehran’s long-standing goal of de-dollarizing oil trade. In practice, coordinating such an arrangement during wartime seems implausible, given uncertainties around insurance, GPS interference, and sailors’ safety. Some Chinese-flagged vessels have managed to pass through, but many others remain stranded in Gulf anchorages.
The Green Energy Argument — and Its Limits
Some Western analysts have suggested the oil shock could ultimately benefit China by accelerating its already dominant position in green energy. China’s clean energy capacity reached 52% of its total installed power generation in early 2026, and its electric vehicle industry — producing 70% of global EVs — is far less vulnerable to oil price shocks than Western competitors still reliant on internal combustion.
But as James Palmer argues in Foreign Policy, Beijing hardly needs another push in a sector it already dominates. The immediate concern is economic. China’s post-pandemic recovery remains fragile. Consumer spending is weak. The property crisis continues to drag on household wealth. And the costs of losing both oil supplies and agricultural imports — fertilizer shipments through the Gulf have also been disrupted — could deepen the slowdown at precisely the wrong moment.
The crisis may instead accelerate the rest of the world’s adoption of Chinese green technologies, as countries shocked by the vulnerability of fossil fuel supply chains rush to diversify. FP columnists Jason Bordoff and Erica Downs argued that the war could prove the greatest advertisement for Chinese solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles that Beijing never had to pay for. Every day the strait stays closed, the case for electrification — and for buying the cheapest hardware to achieve it, which is overwhelmingly Chinese — gets stronger.
The Diplomatic Tightrope
Beijing’s position is uniquely uncomfortable. China signed a strategic partnership with Iran in 2025 that includes provisions for countering shared threats. It has publicly condemned the US-Israeli strikes as violations of the UN Charter. At the same time, China’s economy depends on stable energy markets and functional global trade routes — both of which the war is destroying.
Trump’s demand that China send war ships to the strait puts Beijing in a position where any response is costly. Joining a US-led naval operation against a strategic partner is unthinkable. Refusing openly risks providing Trump with a pretext for further economic pressure — or for scuttling the summit altogether. The postponement of Trump’s planned March 31 visit to Beijing, which he attributed to the war, may have deeper roots. Multiple Americans with contacts in the Chinese government told Foreign Policy that Chinese officials were having difficulty reaching their US counterparts to coordinate arrangements.
China maintains a small anti-piracy task force in the Gulf of Aden that has cooperated with the United States in the past. But that is a very different matter from providing military support for a US-led war against a key partner. Beijing’s preferred approach — quiet diplomacy, economic hedging, and rhetorical neutrality — is being tested by a crisis that demands something more concrete.
The THAAD Withdrawal and Pacific Ripples
The war’s consequences are also reshaping security calculations across Asia. The United States has begun relocating components of its THAAD missile defense system from South Korea to the Middle East to replace units damaged by Iranian strikes. Seoul is understandably upset — it paid a significant diplomatic price when it agreed to host the system in 2016, enduring Chinese state-organized boycotts that drove out South Korean businesses and cost the economy billions.
For South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, the redeployment sends an unmistakable signal: when Washington’s priorities shift, Asia’s defenses are the first to be cannibalized. Taiwan’s parliament approved a $9 billion arms package with the Trump administration last Friday, but delivery timelines are now uncertain as the US strains to replenish its own munition stocks.
The Iran war may also be shaping Taiwan’s strategic thinking in unexpected ways. Iran’s ability to threaten shipping with relatively inexpensive missiles and drones — despite formidable US conventional air superiority — offers a proof of concept for Taiwan’s own defense doctrine. If Iran can effectively close a 21-mile strait against the world’s most powerful navy using cheap asymmetric weapons, Taiwan can credibly threaten Chinese troop transports across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait in the event of an invasion.
No Good Options
China’s dilemma has no clean resolution. It cannot force the strait open. It cannot sustain its economy indefinitely on reduced imports. It cannot openly support Iran without jeopardizing its broader economic relationships. And it cannot help the United States without betraying a partner and undermining its own narrative as a defender of sovereign equality and the UN Charter.
What Beijing can do — and is doing — is hedge. It is increasing pipeline imports from Russia and Kazakhstan. It is drawing down strategic reserves. It is quietly accelerating LNG contracts with Australia and Qatar through non-Gulf routes. And it is watching, with a mixture of alarm and strategic satisfaction, as the United States burns through diplomatic capital, military stockpiles, and allied goodwill in pursuit of objectives it cannot clearly articulate.
The war Trump launched to constrain Iran is constraining everyone — including the country he has identified as America’s primary strategic competitor. Whether that constraint ultimately weakens China or accelerates its drive toward energy independence and technological self-sufficiency may be the most consequential question of the war. Beijing is betting on the latter. The strait, for now, remains closed.
Original analysis inspired by James Palmer from Foreign Policy. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
