The recent standoff in the Strait of Hormuz provided a stark reminder of global shipping vulnerabilities. Yet while Western policymakers focused on the immediate economic damage, Beijing seized a strategic opportunity.
Analysts long assumed a Middle Eastern blockade would cripple China due to its reliance on imported oil, but that assumption is dangerously out of date. Having spent years hoarding strategic energy reserves, increasing overland Russian imports and cultivating diplomatic leverage, Beijing has engineered a position of considerable strength, which it has been using to its advantage.
Look at what actually happened during the Iran conflict. Initially, China benefited. While Western shipping sat paralysed – stranded by Iranian mine and strike threats – China-flagged supertankers kept moving. Tracking data showed that vessels chartered by Unipec, the trading arm of China’s Sinopec, sailed unmolested through the kill zone. Iran has explicitly cleared vessels it considered coming from “non-hostile” nations.
However, that calculus shifted abruptly when the US initiated a naval blockade of Iranian ports last week. Suddenly cut off from its largest source of heavily discounted crude oil, Beijing could no longer afford to simply work the room. It was forced to step out of the shadows, publicly condemning the US blockade as “irresponsible and dangerous”.
This intervention forced a dizzying – if performative – reversal from the White House. Donald Trump abruptly announced he was ending the blockade “for China”, while anticipating a “big, fat hug” from Chinese leader Xi Jinping in return.
Despite Trump’s vow, reports indicate US forces are still turning commercial ships back.
Beijing is treating Trump’s transactional approach as an opening to advance its own broader agenda aggressively. Crucially, China can force this pivot because of its own domestic resilience.
Aware that a maritime freeze could cripple its export economy, Beijing has spent years engineering its energy base for this exact scenario. It boasts the world’s largest emergency petroleum reserve, hoarding an estimated 1.7 billion barrels. It also continues to mine four times more coal than the next largest producer, while piped gas imports from Turkmenistan and Russia have ballooned.
Beijing has also aggressively electrified – electricity now accounts for 30 per cent of its total energy consumption, roughly 50 per cent higher than the UK or US.
Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been badly affected by the US-Israel war with Iran (Photo: Shady Alassar/Anadolu via Getty Images)Bolstered by this, Beijing has weaponised its ostensibly neutral posture to work the diplomatic room. Xi used a recent meeting with Abu Dhabi’s crown prince to insist the “international rule of law” must be upheld, and warning against a return to the “law of the jungle”.
It was a calculated framing, allowing China to portray itself in contrast to the US, while signalling a stronger strategic partnership with the UAE and pushing regional economic items like the China-Gulf trade pact.
But Chinese opportunism extends far beyond the Gulf. Beijing is using the distraction of the Middle East crisis to quietly solidify its relationships, notably thawing ties with India. The two nations’ commerce ministers met on 27 March to discuss deepening trade; a move aimed at further insulating both economies from international disruptions.
Beijing remains profoundly cautious. While encouraging Tehran to accept the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire, it has resisted offering Iran deeper security assurances. This reflects a preference for influence without entanglement.
In short, Beijing is content to facilitate agreements that keep its oil flowing without committing its military to underwrite Middle Eastern security.
This approach appears to be paying off. Gulf nations, weary of collateral damage, are increasingly receptive to Beijing’s offers of post-conflict infrastructure development. There are also negotiations to permit the passage of regional shipping provided payments are made in yuan – accelerating the birth of the ‘petroyuan’ and attempts to dismantle the dominance of the US dollar.
Vessel tracker shows traffic in Strait of Hormuz after Donald Trump announced the blockade (Photo: Marine Traffic/Reuters)Nowhere, however, is Beijing leveraging this crisis more aggressively than across the Taiwan Strait.
On 10 April, while the US was tied down in the Middle East, Xi hosted Taiwanese opposition leader Cheng Li-wun in Beijing. During the talks, he explicitly weaponised the Hormuz crisis, warning of the “inherent fragility of distant lifelines” and the “illusion of external rescue”. By pointing to Washington’s distraction and inability to secure a vital global chokepoint, Beijing was attempting to reinforce calls to slow Taiwan’s defence buildup, while also forcing its electorate to question US security assurances.
This messaging was backed by a chilling proof-of-concept around the impact of blockading commercial waterways. To starve Taiwan – an island entirely dependent on the sea for imports – China’s People’s Liberation Army may believe it only needs to generate enough unpredictable peril to spook shipping underwriters in the City of London.
For the UK and others, the lessons are uncomfortable. The true revelation is not about US strength, but Chinese resilience.
To ensure economic progress, the imperative is fire-proofing the British economy against future geopolitical crises, building fundamental domestic resilience. This requires a dramatic acceleration of renewables, greater electrification of the economy and systemic changes to how Britain prices and trades energy. We knew this before, but the Iran war has given it a newfound importance.
China has shown the world how to prepare and win out in a global crisis.
James Rogers is a co-founder and director of research at the Council on Geostrategy
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