China’s Low-Key Response to the Iran Crisis
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Hello and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Seneca podcast network. I’m Eric Olander.
Today we’re going to dive into the situation in Iran. It’s been a dramatic past few weeks in Iran. As we are recording this now, it appears, and again, the information coming out is quite spotty, but it appears that there has been a massive government crackdown on two to three weeks of protests that were protesting the cost of living, inflation, corruption. These were the most serious protests to the regime that we’ve seen in years in Iran, and it appears that thousands have been killed now by security forces.
Now, throughout all of this, there was also the prospective threat that the United States was going to launch some type of military intervention, potentially alongside Israel. This kind of gained momentum after the U.S. intervention and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Now, the subtext in all of this was, well, certainly the Americans have been wanting to change the regime in Tehran for a very long time, but at the end of the day, too, they also want to try and box in China. That was something that came up quite a bit in the discourse in Washington.
There was this kind of giddy excitement in some of the MAGA circles and conservative podcasts and conservative media that the United States has successfully cut off the oil supply from Venezuela to China. As we know now, the ships are not sailing. That’s going to cut off about 4% of China’s oil supply coming from Venezuela.
China gets between 12% and 14% of its imported oil from Iran. And so the prospect of cutting off about 20% of China’s oil supply was something that was getting a lot of attraction in conservative media circles in the U.S. and to some extent also in Europe.
But it’s interesting because the Chinese reaction—you would never know that so much was potentially on the line. The Chinese have had a very subdued reaction to the situation in Iran. They’ve kind of issued the pro forma denunciations of the U.S. threats to intervene. At the same time, we saw a very different reaction coming out of Beijing and also out of the United Nations than what China did for the abduction of Nicolas Maduro.
So to find out why there’s been such a divergence between Venezuela and Gaza earlier and now Iran, we have our old friend back on the show, one of the leading China-Iran scholars in the world, William Figueroa, who is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and really, again, one of the great go-to people on this issue.
Bill published a fascinating article on CGSP:
As Iran faces its gravest crisis in decades, China stays on the sidelines
where he breaks down the Chinese response to the crisis in Iran.
We are thrilled to have you back on the show, Bill. Great to speak with you. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year, Eric. Always happy to be here.
Well, you started your column saying Chinese officials have struck a cautious tone in response to the protests. Let’s kind of start at the beginning and understand a little bit why the Chinese are reacting so differently to what’s happening in Iran than to what happened in Venezuela. And again, even the response to Gaza, where the Chinese were much more enthusiastic.
Absolutely. Well, first, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge what you said at the beginning, that these are some of the most serious protests we’ve seen in Iran since at least the Jina Amini protests or the Women Life Freedom movement a couple of years ago.
But also that in terms of the state response, we’re definitely seeing something new. The number of people who have been killed, the types of scenes we’re seeing, the kind of technological sophistication of the crackdown is all rather unprecedented. So it’s a scary time right now for a lot of people, for Iranians especially.
So, if you have any Iranian friends, definitely reach out to them and see how they’re doing. This is also just one of those difficult moments, especially when you see the sort of heroic scenes of Iranians who, this protest in particular, as you said, started very much growing out of spontaneous protests from merchants who are protesting against recent news that was released against the price of inflation.
And even the international context, when you talk to people who are in the protest, many of them were very disconnected from the discourse outside the country. So I think it’s also really important to remember going into this discussion, how much of this is driven by what Iranians are doing, how much Iranians are suffering and also the domestic problems they have inherent within Iran.
Right.
OK, so before we get to the China part of this, are there similarities to these protests than to those that we saw in other Gen Z riots, say, in Indonesia, Nepal, Manila and also in Nairobi, where young people in particular were frustrated with corruption?
They were frustrated with:
- the lack of services
- the cost of living
- and that the governments aren’t doing more to make their lives better.
Yeah, I think that this is kind of underlying all of the frustrations across social classes in Iran right now. I had an Iranian friend say to me that in so many words that even people in his life who had very comfortable lives up till this point are suddenly very much wondering about their future.
They talk a lot in Iran about poor millionaires, basically people who had enough money to build these great lives for themselves, but in the current situation don’t even have enough money to put, you know, new rims or new wheels on their fancy cars to go for a drive around the country.
Right. So this is kind of the wider mood across the board.
So this is getting, as I mentioned, a lot of people in conservative media and MAGA circles in Washington excited that there is the prospect that the regime, the Ayatollahs in particular, are in jeopardy of collapsing.
And again, something similar is also happening in Havana as well, where again, the cutoff of the Venezuelan oil is prompting an economic crisis there.
So when we take that into account, a lot of people have said that China is Iran’s lifeline. It buys something around 80 to 90 percent of its oil. So the relationship between China and Iran is very close.
Iran, as you’ve pointed out, is much less important to China than China is to Iran.
But let’s get an understanding before we dive into the reactions. What is the nature of the China-Iran relationship as you see it?
Well, first of all, yeah, as you said, there are these kind of more serious questions now about the survival of the Iranian government.
I think just to put my cards on the table, based on what we’ve seen now, it seems like things are moving more towards its back to the status quo. So for me, obviously, no one knows what the next couple of weeks or months can hold, but it looks like the repression has been successful in quieting the protests for now.
So to me, that question is a little less up in the air than it felt a couple, you know, last week.
But there are two points you brought up that I think are worth discussing before we dive into that.
Sure.
And I’ll take care of the first one because the one about Iran-China relations kind of naturally flows into the second question.
So on the topic of oil, where does China get its oil from? Oil from Venezuela, oil from Iran?
You know, there’s been a lot of talk, as I’m sure you know, of this idea that, as you said earlier, that by cutting off the oil from Venezuela and potentially from Iran, if what Trump had said had actually materialized into some sort of intervention or the government actually collapsed and that this is somehow, you know, a kind of whatever it is these days, “19 D chess move” against China.
I would push back against that analysis a little bit, first of all, because, you know, as you said, the numbers might look impressive:
- 13, 14 percent of oil coming from Iran and
- 4 percent, of course, coming from Venezuela.
You put it together. It’s a lot. But China gets oil from so many other places.
Russia is its number one supplier. Other major suppliers include:
- Saudi Arabia
- Iraq
- Brazil
all of which are absolutely going to keep the oil flowing.
So would it hurt financially? Maybe a little bit. But I think it’s not that difficult to make up for. China has oil coming from all over the world these days, including potentially new partnerships like—and we can get into this later if you’d like to—what’s going on in Canada, Canada also being an oil producer.
Yeah, no, I do want to bring that up as well.
And just to note that there’s an estimated 60 to 90 million barrels of oil right now sitting off the coast of Malaysia and in the South China Sea that have not been able to make it up to China.
This is purportedly some of the Russian sanctioned oil and some of the Iranian sanctioned oil that is part of the black market kind of laundering that happens as the sanctions have clamped down on it.
The point is that there are pools and pockets of big supplies of oil out there, as you pointed out, that China can turn to to compensate for the 16 to 18 percent.
And as you pointed out, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, just got back from Beijing. He’s in the Middle East right now, interestingly, but he there signed deals for energy and the Canadians do not want to be as reliant on the United States. So this is a situation of Donald Trump’s making. And Canada may become a rather large energy supplier to the Chinese, again, potentially offsetting some of this Venezuelan and Iranian crew that may be cut off.
So continue on on that.
Well, first of all, I could not possibly imagine why Canada would be interested in turning away from the United States.
Yeah. So as you said, there is this question, first of all, of even if — even if, because right now it’s not looking like anything that’s going to happen. They could cut off the oil from Iran. It wouldn’t necessarily hurt them so much.
More importantly, they might even be thinking:
“You’re going to cut off the oil from Iran? Good luck,”
because about 20 years of sanctions have been unable to do that so far.
So anything short of a full-scale invasion of Iran and a sort of, you know, direct or maybe even something as dramatic as what we saw in Venezuela, a kind of a surgical strike on the leadership and then a subsequent American-dominated political reconstruction — this is not likely to happen at all. Iran is not Venezuela. It’s bigger. It’s different. It’s further away. It’s much more expensive and technologically unfeasible to do something like that.
And I think it’s really obvious by the fact that Donald Trump didn’t do anything, despite very loudly saying and recklessly, I should add, saying that he might do something, leaving Iranians bleeding in the streets, hoping that help was coming as he was saying. And he said if the killing started, he would come to their aid. And of course, he didn’t in the end.
Yes, exactly. So, you know, Iran’s not Venezuela.
Venezuela, you know, it’s more local, right? Venezuela is not really, in my opinion, ultimately about China. It’s partially about China, but it’s ultimately about Latin America, Cuba, you know, the Trump corollary, as he likes to call it, although I’m loathe to use that word.
In a word, China and the U.S. are actually operating very similarly in their foreign policy right now in that respect:
- Aggressive maneuvers and assertions of their own rights and claims in their own neighborhood
- A much more light touch when it comes to the rest of the world.
So that brings me then to the China-Iran relationship and China’s reaction to all of this.
So as you mentioned, and as I’ve said many times, Iran-China relations are much more circumscribed, much more limited than they’re often presented in the media. There’s this narrative of $400 billion worth of investment that’s gone into Iran or is going into Iran over the next 25 years, which is a complete exaggeration.
I’ve written extensively about how this number is basically plucked from some, in my opinion, some very poor journalism, anonymously sourced kinds of things. And it bears no resemblance to reality or indeed the numbers we’ve seen going into Iran from China over the last couple of years.
Let’s just take a very quick pause there because not everybody may understand the $400 billion reference that you’re making. This was part of an agreement that Wang Yi, I think it was in 21 or 22, during the pandemic, went to Tehran and signed what was purported to be this big strategic agreement that had this huge price tag on it. Maybe you could just give a little background on that.
Yeah, in the simplest terms, they signed an upgraded sort of MOU, a strategic partnership between China and Iran. And it is exactly that. It was sort of an MOU. It was a list of things that Iran and China would like to increase, like to increase their cooperation on over the next 25 years.
There were no enforcement mechanisms. There were no specific proposals. There was no China and Iran will cooperate based on these banks. It was just:
- “We’ll increase economic cooperation.”
- “We will enhance security cooperation,” between, you know, sharing information about terrorism, these kinds of things.
The $400 billion price tag came from some anonymously sourced news articles in Petroleum Economist, which is an oil industry magazine that got picked up by The New York Times and has been endlessly repeated since then.
And as I said, you just don’t find anything like that in the documents themselves or in reality.
So if you look at China’s investment to Iran over the last, you know, since the deal, basically, you measure the amount of money coming into the country in the hundreds of millions of dollars every year, not billions.
So we’re not anywhere on track to get to that level of investment.
And also, I should say that if we somehow were, that would account for more than half of the amount of money that China puts into the entire world as investments every year.
So obviously, that’s not going to go to Iran. And even I should say that, like right now, the amount of investment, cumulative investment that Iran and China have had since then, it stands at a couple of billion.
By contrast, all of the surrounding countries from Iraq to the various Gulf states have cumulative investments of China in the tens of millions or higher or planned in the near future.
Yeah. And Saudi Arabia, of course, being the most important country in the region.
So this might then explain a little bit why we have not heard much from China. Again, there’s been some pro forma outrage, which is quite typical. But there’s been nowhere near the passion that the Chinese had in response to what happened in Venezuela.
Let me just refresh everybody.
Within hours, less than 24 hours, the Chinese issued a statement on January 4th denouncing the United States. Then on that same day, a second statement denouncing the United States and calling for the release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia, from detention. And then on Sunday, Wang Yi used his meeting with the Pakistani foreign minister to say:
“The world doesn’t need an international policeman, an international judge.”
And then on Monday at the United Nations, they led the charge against the United States to denounce them for what they did in Venezuela.
By contrast, in Iran, virtually nothing, virtually nothing.
Mao Ning, the foreign ministry spokesperson, she said it in response to a planted question and, you know, very choreographed by the Chinese media and the Chinese foreign ministry to say that they are discouraging external interference in Iran.
At the same time, just on Friday, we got a message from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a statement that was published by Russia and China asking to protect the sovereignty of Iran’s borders, which is the height of irony that Russia is talking about the sovereignty of countries’ borders.
But anyway, that’s where we are: much more subdued than what we saw from the Chinese about Venezuela.
Yeah, I would say even like there are some similarities in the sense that they’ve been equally outraged about the United States when it comes to Iran. And in fact, that’s one of the reasons why I would say that it’s been a bit of a more subdued response, which is the fact that they’ve mostly focused on condemning potential U.S. involvement.
They’ve had next to nothing to say about the actual situation and taken no real concrete steps. Anything from evacuating Chinese citizens to expressing even the same kind of direct opinions on the sources of the conflict or who is in the right and who is in the wrong that we saw in the Gaza, what’s going on in the genocide in Gaza.
What we now see in Venezuela is, I think, a higher level of outrage and even a little bit more political action in terms of, like you said, leading the charge at the United Nations, but still focused on the United States. Because, again, Venezuela is far and China has little that it can offer.
By the same token, we see even less investment, I think, in what’s going on in Iran, because, again, China is less far, but China has equally little to offer.
And, like I said before, their relationship is not especially strong. Well, I mean, it’s not that it’s not politically strong, but it’s economically not particularly strong. So there’s less to be lost for China.
Now, that doesn’t mean, as some have suggested, that China would somehow benefit from some sort of chaos. In fact, I think they’re quite worried about the potential of it spilling over to their surrounding countries where there’s a lot of investment. There’s also their political clout that they’ve invested in Iran to a certain degree.
But I really don’t think this is going to hurt their international standing in the way that a lot of people seem to be imagining that it might.
What do you think of the criticism that we have heard quite a bit in media narratives and on social media as well that says Venezuela and Iran were both all-weather and strategic partners of the Chinese, and when push came to shove, the Chinese weren’t there to help or to defend them?
At the end of the day, American hard power is what’s most important.
This is, of course, the Stephen Miller line that:
“It’s this era of hard power now in China with its all-weather partnerships and its all-weather friends and its strategic partnerships in places like Iran mean nothing in a new era of hard power.”
Oh, so first of all, I would say that, you know, some people say that in a positive way. I would agree with that in a strongly negative fashion.
I do think that there’s been an overblown narrative of China is coming to replace and overthrow the U.S.-backed international order coming from the opposite end of the spectrum.
Some people are trumpeting the end of the American empire and saying that China is going to replace or hasten that as a sort of anti-colonial even or sort of, you know, non-Western force that operates differently. I caution against both of those narratives. Basically, I would say that the American empire may be on the decline in some places, but it’s still there and it’s still the predominant hegemonic force in a lot of these regions. That’s obviously true in Latin America, and it’s also increasingly clear in the Middle East.
I’ve described what we’re seeing in the Middle East not as the decline of U.S. power and the ascent of Chinese power, but rather the playing out of the Sino-U.S. rivalry in a kind of, what even Mao often called back in the day, a kind of intermediate zone, right? A middle area in which both powers have some ability to project power, but in which U.S. kinetic power is clearly much more the predominant force.
Now, what I would add to that is China is very aware of that, everyone in the region and for the most part outside of Washington and these kinds of media analysis that look at these kinds of things. And nobody had any confusion that a strategic partnership with China is going to mean China is going to come to your rescue if you are collapsing under the weight of your own internal contradictions or if you’re facing aggression from the United States, especially in areas that are not within, you know, China’s neighborhood in Asia, for example.
So I would definitely emphasize that China doesn’t call for itself this label of anti-Western defender of a multipolar order, right? It’s more of a kind of attempt to peacefully manage the reactions that naturally come from the most powerful country in the world as it tries to expand and encroach into what it traditionally sees as its territory.
Yeah, this was one of the points that I was making over the past week and some of the conversations I was having with folks that they say:
- “Well, listen, the Chinese have built up this massive Navy, this huge military investment, and you would think that they could deploy it in order to counter a Chinese or a U.S. intervention in that respect.”
And I said, that military investment that the Chinese have made, as you pointed out, is really specifically designed for the Western Pacific and the first and second island chain, with the focus on Taiwan and then periphery defense. It is not focused on projecting power into the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, or as far away as Venezuela. That is just not what they’ve designed it to do.
So this idea that the Chinese could match U.S. hard power so far afield is simply not grounded in Chinese security strategy. And as you pointed out, it’s not a core security interest for the Chinese to be engaged militarily in Latin America and also in the Persian Gulf. The core security interest for the Chinese is:
- Taiwan
- South China Sea
- East China Sea
- India-China border
So I guess, I mean, this is why it’s been frustrating to watch a lot of the analysis coming down about this, because, again, it’s just a misunderstanding of what or an ignorance of Chinese security strategy.
Yeah, to give you a great example of how this kind of exaggeration versus reality happens, a couple of years ago, there were reports that there was a doubling of the presence of China’s fleets in the Persian Gulf. And this was interpreted as potentially having to do with the ongoing bombardment of shipping lanes that was happening at the time because of the Houthi, the Ansar Allah attacks.
What actually was happening was that the three ships that China often has in the region, that it basically just uses to, as you said, sort of run supplies and protect some of its own military maneuvers, had crossed paths with the other three ships that were moving into the region as the two were switching, basically.
So there was never intended to be more than three in the region at any time, but there was temporarily six as they were sailing past each other. And the defense news bloggers have reported this as a doubling of ships, of Chinese ships in the Persian Gulf, potentially related to China’s new aggressive power expansion.
So there’s a whole fever dream around this. And I also should say Chinese bloggers participate in the same thing. So every time U.S. seizes a tanker or something happens that could potentially threaten this sort of discussion about threatening China’s energy lines, they say:
“This is exactly why we need to build up power, and we should be doing this kind of Red Sea special ops kind of things that we depict in the movies and what have you.”
So it’s a fantasy on both sides. It is a fantasy on both sides. And a lot of the new Chinese movies have been fueling a lot of this fantasy of the ability to project power in the way that the Americans can. And the Chinese simply don’t have the capacity by design, by the way, not by any other thing.
But two other quick points before we go. Number one is you’ve talked about how they’re not reliant on Iranian oil, but about 30 to 40 percent of Chinese energy that’s imported every year does pass through the Straits of Hormuz.
And there were concerns last year that in the conflict between the United States, Iran, and Israel, the Iranians were going to shut down the Straits of Hormuz. That would cause a very big problem for the Chinese.
It’s surprising to me from a security point of view, when they’re already dealing with the Straits of Malacca dilemma, where they’re very afraid of this very small waterway that a lot of Chinese energy passes through in Southeast Asia, that they would make such investments in Persian Gulf energy that also passes through a very vulnerable waterway that the Americans or the Iranians, for other reasons beyond the Chinese, would want to shut down.
Talk to me a little bit about the vulnerability that the Chinese face in the Straits of Hormuz.
Sure. So, I mean, there is, without a question, a serious issue. I mean, if you looked at even just the downward effects of downstream effects of rerouting of so much shipping—not of oil flows, but of just commercial shipping—during the Ansar Allah attacks on Red Sea shipping cost China a lot of money. So that wasn’t great. They’re definitely concerned about those kinds of things, and that, I think, much more so than any potential loss of investments in Iran or Iranian oil access.
Again, it’s something, so I think I would answer it like this: I think they’re very concerned about it. And if that were to be something that was on the table or close to reality, I think they would be putting all of the resources they had at their disposal to preventing that from happening.
The thing is that those resources are largely diplomatic and economic. They’re not military—both, as you said, by design. China’s power projection capability is not designed for those purposes. And secondly, because it’s not in their interests, in their strategy and how they envision how they are, will and want to be and should be doing things.
So with all these questions about China’s power projection capabilities, we have to remember:
- It doesn’t really have the ability to do that kind of power projection by design
- It also doesn’t see that as necessarily being advantageous
If China wanted to prevent a conflict that would cause the Straits of Hormuz to be closed, they wouldn’t see dispatching Chinese naval forces to the region as a way of countering potential U.S. naval forces in the region as conducive to that goal. They would see that as:
escalating the situation, moving it away from their strengths of diplomacy and moving it toward a kinetic conflict.
It’s also worth mentioning this is Iran’s strategy. Every bit of the Iranian military strategy is based around hunkering down, adopting a defensive posture until diplomacy can settle it, because that’s what you do when you are the militarily weaker party.
This is kind of the point I want to emphasize: there’s a lot of this crowing of
“America is great and it’s so much more powerful than China. Look at how China was trumpeting how great it was and how it was going to be a major player. And now, you know, look, we’ve proven that we’re still the big dogs in town.”
That’s one perspective. But another perspective is that unrealistically, the Western media and Western government officials have hyped themselves up about this China threat, that China is coming and that it’s going to be a massive threat to the U.S.-run order—what they sometimes call the rules-based international order or stability.
But the reality is that China hasn’t been saying that. No one is really expecting that. What they’re expecting is what China does: to come and provide
- economic investment opportunities that the West will not
- an alternative diplomatic platform that gives some ability to push back against Western-dominated international structures
But at the end of the day, China is firmly integrated into the international order, and is really just trying to redefine and alter that in a fundamental way—yes—but not one which is going to result in this kind of conflict.
So you’ve raised your own expectations, and then China doesn’t meet them, and everyone is shocked. Well, I’m not that shocked, and I would end by just saying that it’s not the case, in my view, that if China is on the sidelines, that’s very much where they’ve calculated that they should be, and I don’t see this as a misstep for them.
Yeah, that’s a strategic decision on their part.
Very quickly before we go, just, you know, you talk about kind of misreading the situation. One of the things that I’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks since this happened, when a lot of people have said that what happened in Venezuela was a strategic failure of the Chinese, and I think that’s being carried now over into Iran as well.
I always remind people that the Americans rolled into Baghdad in 2003 super fast. And remember those, you know, we took Baghdad in three weeks or four weeks, and then, of course, we have the famous “mission accomplished” on the aircraft carrier with George W. Bush.
Let’s remind everybody that today China is the number one buyer of Iraqi oil. So this is a long game, and so to make any bold declarations about Iran or Venezuela or any of these very fast-moving situations I think is highly premature.
One last question, and I’m throwing you a curveball here, so if you want to kind of deflect it, that’s fine. But while all of this was going on, China’s special envoy for the Middle East, Zhai Jun, made an interesting stop in Jerusalem and met with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli foreign minister.
This is very interesting because it overlaps with the response or the muted response, you know, in Iran. What do you make of that? And a lot of people have said that Israel, in some respects, at least strategically, is more important to the Chinese in the long run than even Iran is, given the great power dynamics with the U.S.
Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. It’s always been the case, in my view, that while China calculated that it was strategically advantageous to be as loud and as involved in an ineffective way, you know, their shuttle diplomacy didn’t end up much. But they were there, and they were making serious proposals to mediate in Gaza.
Despite all of that, you know, their economic relationship with Israel did not change. They are still, I mean, not substantially. There is still a big economic partner. They have investments that have been walked back, have largely been under U.S. pressure or under new security concerns from within the Israeli government, within the army. But largely, you know, that relationship is on the rocks diplomatically, but not really fundamentally changed.
And Israel has always been an important part of China’s strategy in the Middle East, not just because of something to do with their bilateral relationship, which is valuable to China as a kind of a way to a lot of, for example, a lot of Chinese companies do R&D in Israel. For various reasons, but also because their primary strength in the Middle East, as in elsewhere, is their connections to many different partners that could pretend that otherwise might have difficulty talking to one another.
The big difference here is that Israel is always much closer to the United States, and so in any situation like in Gaza, where they have the choice between Chinese mediation and U.S. mediation, they’re obviously going to go to U.S. and then box the Chinese out.
So that’s one fundamental limit on China’s relationship with Israel and also with any other country that’s very close to the U.S.
But yes, I would agree with you, and I would emphasize that, you know, this is I think we’re seeing that now that the war has kind of ended, we’re going into this phase of discussing reconstruction. China’s trying to salvage the damage from what’s happened, and I think that probably Israeli politicians will be more than happy to hear from them.
And if I could add just one last bit in the interest of, you know, this kind of things that people aren’t necessarily thinking about enough. One thing I have seen is with thinking about all this discussion of, like, is China doing enough? Where’s China’s military hardware? One question that people aren’t asking enough is what has China done already?
And one thing that China, I kind of alluded to this in the article that I posted for you guys, is that one thing it’s done is sold a lot of surveillance technology and drones technology to Iran.
To put it in a nutshell, the technological sophistication of the repression that we saw in Iran that I alluded to earlier is one of the things that’s new about this situation and has been getting more and more draconian and effective and technologically sophisticated over the last decade, largely with the help of Chinese firms and Chinese technology, Chinese even training kits on how to use the technology that has been sold to them.
So if the Iranian government, and it’s increasingly looking like it will, survives, you know, what’s going on now, it will be in no small part because China already helped them behind the scenes in a quiet way.
So it’s not a bit player in that sense. And I also really want to emphasize that this isn’t just China.
Where did China get its surveillance empire technology from?
- The United States tech companies
- European tech companies. So this is a transnational issue where there’s a global supply chain of draconian surveillance technology that makes its way to both democratic regimes and the most despotic regimes in the world.
Well, that is a great place for us to end.
And the article that Bill wrote for us, which I cannot recommend enough, is as Iran faces its gravest crisis in decades, China stays on the sidelines. By the way, it is outside of the paywall so everybody can enjoy it.
I want to also let everybody know that Bill is going to be a regular writer for us going forward throughout the year to tell us everything that’s happening in the China-Iran relationship. This is one of the most consequential and interesting relationships that China has anywhere in the world, but particularly in the Middle East.
Bill is an assistant professor at the University of Croningen in the Netherlands, and again, one of the foremost and smartest experts on China-Iran relations.
Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to join us, and thanks for the great article.
Thanks. Always happy to be here.
And we’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South podcast.
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