Active Neutrality in the Middle East – Chinese Commentary on the US-Iran war
An analysis of reactions by China's establishment intellectuals to the US-Israeli joint strikes on Iran, launched on 28 February 2026
Executive Summary
Chinese expert commentary largely recommends pursuing a position of neutrality and mediation in the Iran-US war, with only two senior academics making subtle arguments for a more assertive posture.
Zheng Yongnian writes that Beijing should “demonstrate the strength and policies befitting a great power”.
Zheng Ge claims that the sustainability of China’s “active neutrality” depends on the war’s direction, noting that meaningful mediation “requires China to transcend its traditional ‘non-interference’ principle”.
Legal condemnation of the strikes coexists with something closer to strategic respect, with several authors arguing that China must learn from this demonstration of American power.
Several authors read the operation through the lens of US “offshore balancing”, with one warning that the Middle East template could be replicated in East Asia with Japan playing Israel’s role.
Others view the conflict as a strategic opportunity for China, with several predicting that the US will become entangled in the Middle East.
Authors broadly agree that the strategic implications for China hinge on how the war ends: US success would challenge China’s vision of declining American hegemony, while a quagmire would accelerate it.
Commentary is sceptical that regime change is achievable without ground troops—a red line all authors agree Trump will not cross.
Most analysts view US-Iran nuclear negotiations as cover for a premeditated attack—though many of the same analysts simultaneously portray the war as primarily Israel-driven.
One author argues that China’s overriding priority should be preventing the Iran crisis from spilling over into the US-China bilateral agenda.
Background to the Crisis
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed, and Iran responded by firing hundreds of missiles and drones at US bases across the Gulf and at Israel.
The strikes followed the collapse of indirect nuclear talks in early February and came one day after Oman’s foreign minister declared a breakthrough “within reach”.
China signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran in 2021 and holds an equivalent partnership with Saudi Arabia, maintaining relations with all sides in the Middle East despite deep regional divisions, most visibly brokering the Saudi-Iran normalisation in March 2023.
Since US sanctions were reimposed in 2018, Beijing has been Tehran’s economic lifeline while also benefiting from Iran’s ostracisation in terms of pricing: China is Iran’s largest oil buyer, absorbing roughly 80% of its exports, while 13% of China’s seaborne crude imports come from Iran.
China’s Official Position
Beijing’s initial reaction expressed being “highly concerned” about what it called a “grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security”. The killing of Khamenei drew a separate, standalone condemnation—China “firmly opposes and strongly condemns it.”
The official narrative highlights the war’s illegality and foregrounds a sense of diplomatic betrayal. MFA statements emphasise the absence of UN Security Council authorisation, while state media editorials highlight that the strikes occurred during active negotiations. Xinhua states that the talks “function less as a genuine pathway to peaceful resolution than as a tactical pause before the resumption of military attacks”.
Wang Yi called the strikes “unacceptable” and outlined a three-point position: stop operations; return to dialogue; and jointly oppose unilateral actions.
I. Introduction
Another of China’s close partners is under attack from the US. The consequences for the region—and the wider world—are immense, but the context of US-China strategic competition has also drawn significant attention to Beijing’s response.
Earlier this year, we noted several calls from Chinese establishment intellectuals for a more proactive Chinese foreign policy. As with Chinese expert commentary on the US operation in Venezuela, these calls are conspicuously muted in analyses of the US-Iran war and its impacts on China.
Zheng Yongnian (郑永年) and Zheng Ge (郑戈), both senior academics, make subtle nods to the need for greater assertiveness, but the dominant prescription is neutrality and mediation. Although no author says so directly, the corpus is consistent with a reading of Beijing’s priorities in which the costs of more active intervention outweigh the downsides of the regime falling—particularly with US trade talks looming.
Beyond this, the corpus is notable for two points that sit in tension: a broadly sceptical assessment of US chances of achieving regime change, and something verging on respect among several authors for this renewed demonstration of American power—and an accompanying conviction that China must learn from it.
II. American Power and Lessons for China
Rhetoric familiar from Sinification’s Venezuela briefing—namely, that the attack on Iran confirms the cold, realist nature of international order—runs through the corpus. Zheng Yongnian, one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals, declares that the rules-based order is functionally dead, replaced by what he calls a Hobbesian “fear-based international order” [基于恐惧的国际秩序]—a structural fact that China must reckon with rather than merely deplore.
The baseline framing across the corpus is legal condemnation—Gao Zhikai (高志凯), former Chinese diplomat turned hardline international affairs commentator, calls the targeted killing of a head of state “typical state terrorism” [国家恐怖主义], a charge repeated in various forms by several authors.
For some authors, condemnation coexists with something closer to strategic respect. Zheng Yongnian claims that the attack proves the US is still “number one”, his tone verging on admiration, while Niu Tanqin (牛弹琴)—not an academic, but one of China’s most widely-read opinion leaders on foreign affairs writing under a pen name—is more candid, admitting he “cannot but admire” US operational precision. Gao Zhikai occupies an interesting middle position, explicitly condemning Chinese commentators who “greatly praise” the strikes, yet calling on China to “seriously study” US military methods.
Three authors—Gao Zhikai, Zheng Yongnian and Zhao Jian (赵建)—ultimately draw the conclusion that China has lessons to learn from this exercise of US power. Zheng is the most prominent. Referencing the use of artificial intelligence in the attacks, he warns that China must not fall into the “trap of excessive moralisation and self-restraint” [过度道德化的陷阱], invoking the historical analogy of China inventing gunpowder but using it for fireworks while the West made cannons. His formulation is blunt: “not using it is equivalent to not having it” [不用等于没有].
III. Premeditation and the Israeli Role
There is near-consensus that negotiations were cover rather than a genuine diplomatic process—a “smoke screen” [烟雾弹] designed to buy time for military positioning while creating a pretext for war. This aligns with Beijing’s official framing of the attack as a major act of diplomatic betrayal, and most authors embrace it without apparent discomfort. A small number of authors, including Wang Jin (王晋), Director of Northwest University’s Centre for Strategic Studies in Xi’an, argue that the US was genuinely frustrated when negotiations failed to produce acceptable terms.
A separate cluster of authors foregrounds US domestic politics as the primary driver—the Iran strikes as political theatre ahead of the midterms and a quick win mirroring success in Venezuela.
Many of the same authors who claim that the attack was premeditated also argue—with some apparent tension—that it was fundamentally Israel-led. Shen Yi (沈逸), a Fudan University professor and popular nationalist commentator, puts it most bluntly, stating that Israel has achieved effective command over US military assets. In one piece, Li Shaoxian (李绍先) and Liu Zhongmin (刘中民), two prominent Middle East scholars, offer divergent readings—the former attributing unilateral initiative to Israel, the latter arguing the two acted in concert from the start.
In a separate piece, Zheng Yongnian offers a unique reading: this is not primarily a strategic operation or an Israeli project but the latest chapter in a civilisational and religious confrontation between the West and political Islam.
IV. Prospects for Regime Change
Chinese expert commentary is broadly sceptical that the US and Israel can achieve their stated objective of regime change. The dominant view is that this would be extremely difficult without ground troops—something all authors agree is a red line for Trump. Notably, Ding Long (丁隆), a professor at Shanghai International Studies University, dissents, arguing that new warfare models may make regime change achievable without large-scale ground deployment.
Several authors point to US constraints, including domestic political opposition and munitions shortages. A striking number of authors also make a positive case for Iranian resilience, noting the regime’s decentralised collective leadership structure and the probability that Khamenei’s death is more likely to harden popular resistance than fracture it.
Most authors are nonetheless candid about the high degree of uncertainty, mapping several potential paths: regime survival, gradual collapse, or internal fracture. A pro-US successor government features as a scenario, but no author treats it as a likely outcome.
V. Strategic Implications for China
On the broader question of the war’s strategic implications, the corpus is genuinely divided. The most analytically rigorous treatment comes from Zheng Ge, who frames the question with a simple but important observation: the strategic outcome for China is entirely conditional on how the war ends. Zheng writes that if the US succeeds in reshaping the Middle East order, it could reverse China’s vision of gradually declining American hegemony and rising regional autonomy. If the US gets bogged down in a quagmire, the reverse holds: American overextension accelerates the shift.
Several pieces highlight negative strategic impacts. Qian Yaxu (钱亚旭), a relatively junior scholar at Southwest Jiaotong University, contends that regime change would free US resources for the Asia-Pacific, increasing containment pressure on China, while Ye Weimian (叶卫冕) and Li Zheng (李征) argue that the operation falls within a window created by Russia’s attrition in Ukraine and that the strategic space available to both China and Russia is being further squeezed.
Zheng Yongnian and Guo Hai (郭海), a researcher at South China University of Technology, read the operation through the lens of US offshore balancing [离岸制衡], arguing that Iran is not an isolated case but part of a consistent US strategy of reshaping regional orders through proxies. Liu Zhongmin directly identifies Israel as the main instrument of that strategy in the Middle East.
Zheng Yongnian explicitly outlines the concern that the US might replicate this model in East Asia—with Japan playing Israel’s role and Taiwan and the Philippines serving as two other offshore balancing instruments against China.
However, several authors read the same entanglement as an opportunity for China. Zhu Zhaoyi (朱兆一), Executive Director of the Institute of Middle East Studies at Peking University HSBC Business School, argues that a US bogged down in the Middle East would relieve pressure on China in the Indo-Pacific. Li Nan (李楠) and Chen Kaiyu (陈开宇), two researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, make the same point while warning that the opportunity only holds if China stays out—intervention would simply create another drain on Chinese resources that the US could exploit. Chen Jiahui (陈佳慧), a junior researcher at South China University of Technology’s Institute of Public Policy (IPP), argues explicitly that the attack is not directed at China and that the two theatres should be kept analytically separate.
A significant portion of the corpus predicts the war will ultimately backfire on the US. Views range from dramatic to measured: the popular nationalistic blogger Zhan Hao (占豪) warns it could drag American hegemony “into a bottomless abyss”; while scholars Liu Zhongmin and Ding Long (丁隆) note that both backfire and strengthening of the US position are both live outcomes—successful political realignment in the Middle East could strengthen rather than erode US regional dominance.
This tension—backfire or success—mirrors the unresolved conditionality that Zheng Yongnian identifies as the central question. Ultimately, whether this war proves strategically beneficial or not for China cannot be answered until it is known whether Trump’s gamble succeeds or fails. None of these authors treat Iran’s collapse as the most likely outcome—but the weight of the concerns they raise about energy security, Chinese investments, and regional realignment underscores that a Trump success would carry a serious cost for China.
VI. Economic and Structural Risks for China
Energy is the most discussed immediate risk, but the dominant assessment is that disruption is manageable in the short term, with most referencing China’s reserve accumulation over the past two years as a meaningful buffer.
Qin Jinghua (秦菁华), researcher at the Southern Power Grid Energy Development Research Institute, is a notable dissenting voice, arguing that this is not merely a short-term supply shock but “a structural challenge that [China’s] mid-to-long-term energy security strategy must confront”.
Two authors flag BRI exposure. Zhu Zhaoyi notes that short-term shocks to energy costs and BRI investments are real; Zheng Ge goes further, warning that if the regime falls, Chinese investments will “turn to ash”—making the war’s outcome directly consequential for China’s economic interests.
The roundtable piece featuring Ye Weimian and Li Zheng raises the possibility that the decapitation operation may ultimately strengthen US hegemony through political realignment, the demonstration of power, they argue, may produce a “chilling effect” [寒蝉效应], pushing Global South states into diplomatic wait-and-see postures and alignment shifts.
VII. How China should respond: Neutrality and Mediation
The largely passive and legalistic recommendations that emerge from commentary on the US-Israeli strikes on Iran will be familiar to readers of Sinification’s Venezuela briefing. The dominant cluster concerns risk mitigation: energy diversification; advancing China’s payment system and cross-border currency settlement to reduce dollar-denominated exposure; and protecting stranded Iranian assets through contractual documentation and preparation for international arbitration.
Several authors identify the opportunity for China to pursue the role of mediator in the conflict—and that analysis has since been validated by Beijing’s announcement on 4 March that it would dispatch Special Envoy Zhai Jun to the region. Echoing discussions around Ukraine, one author even looks ahead to a potential Chinese role in Iran’s post-war reconstruction.
The dominant prescription is continued non-alignment: China’s response should mirror its posture on Russia-Ukraine—no capacity or interest in direct involvement; refraining from taking sides; maintaining active neutrality [积极中立]; and preserving the advantages that comes from de-ideologised economic relationships with all regional parties.
Zheng Ge stands out from the neutrality crowd with his prediction that China may ultimately be forced to take sides and that the sustainability of “active neutrality” will depend on the war’s trajectory. He explicitly notes that meaningful mediation “requires China to transcend its traditional ‘non-interference’ principle” [超越传统不干涉原则]—a significant ask, given how central that principle is to Beijing’s self-presentation. Zheng Yongnian is the only other author who calls for a more assertive Chinese foreign policy in light of the attacks, in the subtle but significant line: “In the next phase of action, we must demonstrate the strength and policies befitting a great power”.
One piece, from Chen Jiahui, illuminates Beijing’s risk calculus and geopolitical priorities. She argues that China’s overriding priority should be preventing the Iran crisis from spilling over into the US-China bilateral agenda. Although she is a junior figure and the only one to make this point explicitly, the Foreign Ministry’s refusal to confirm or deny the upcoming US-China trade meeting—while continuing to field questions about it—does signal Beijing’s preference to keep the bilateral track insulated from the Iran crisis.
However, the dominant sentiment in the corpus is reflected in Li Nan and Chen Kaiyu’s blunt formulation: “The world is a ramshackle theatrical troupe; let the world remain in chaos—China should keep doing China well” [世界就是个草台班子，让世界继续乱吧，中国继续做好自己].
— Jacob Mardell
Today’s briefing draws on fifty-three articles published between 28 February and 3 March. The full bibliography is available here.
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