Beijing wants the Strait of Hormuz open, for now

Latest Chinese trade data re: the Middle East; Saudi Crown Prince calls Xi Jinping

The next few days could be highly consequential for the Middle East. With the ceasefire set to expire on Tuesday, and seemingly little progress made on U.S. – Iran negotiations, fighting appears likely to resume this week, as of this writing.

Xi Jinping talked via telephone with MBS on the afternoon of the 20^th, according to the authoritative People’s Daily. During the call, Xi stated the following:

China advocates an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire and supports all efforts conducive to restoring peace, while adhering to resolving disputes through political and diplomatic means. The Strait of Hormuz should remain open to normal navigation.”

Xi’s phone call with MBS – and pointed reference to opening the Strait of Hormuz, contrary to Iranian wishes – comes on the heels of an April 12^th visit to Beijing by Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the son of MBZ, the UAE’s President. While in Beijing, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi met with Xi Jinping. Taken in tandem, the visit and the call with Arab leaders suggest that Beijing may be considering a sort of “pro-Arab neutrality” amid the U.S.–Israel–Iran war. This doesn’t mean that Beijing will desist from supplying intelligence, defense industrial base support, or even weapons to Tehran. Instead, it suggests limited enthusiasm in Beijing for a region-wide war that would damage key oil suppliers and export markets. Beijing’s apparent opposition to a regional war holds true in 2026 but may change over time as the PRC decouples from the region’s oil markets.

China’s commercially-motivated, pro-Arab neutrality

Of course, China’s Middle East imports are concentrated in commodities, especially oil. These imports faced only limited disruptions in March, per GACC data, although things have shifted somewhat in April and could change starkly in the coming days.

For context, China’s total imports stood at about 11.43 Million barrels per day in 2025, from well-diversified supply sources. Russia was the single-largest supplier, at about 18 percent, but if the GCC countries are treated as a single entity, then they comprise a much larger share.

As any Middle Eastern expert is sure to point out, the GCC countries are not a monolithic or even coherent bloc: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain blockaded Qatar in 2017. And mere weeks before the U.S. – Iran war, Saudi Arabia and the UAE “were locked in a broader strategic contest,” as my colleague Jonathan Panikoff wrote at the time. Still, grouping the GCC makes sense in the context of the U.S. – Iran war.

But major disruptions in the Middle East will not only impact China’s energy and commodity imports, but also its exports. The GCC market accounts for a non-trivial portion of Chinese exports and GDP. GCC countries accounted for about 6 percent of the PRC’s total merchandise exports in 2025, per my calculations. Since exports comprised about 19.3 percent of Chinese GDP in 2025, exports to the GCC totaled 1.1 percent of total Chinese GDP. These exports unsurprisingly tumbled in March, the latest month for which data is available, due to the U.S. – Iran war.

Beijing sees more risks than opportunities from a Middle East war, for now

Beijing has consistently expressed skepticism of a Middle Eastern war, although it has done little to oppose the conflict. It has largely stayed out of the way, skipping trilateral naval exercises with Iran and Russia just ahead of the conflict. That muted stance is because while the PRC will be damaged by the economic fallout of a war, it has stockpiled oil for years and is relatively well-prepared for the crisis, at least when compared to regional rivals.

A future crisis could see Beijing take a starkly different approach. Beijing is rapidly mitigating its Malacca Dilemma, or its vulnerability to the U.S. Navy interdicting oil volumes from the Middle East. While fleet turnover takes several years, electric vehicles are slowly diminishing Chinese transportation fuel demand. Chinese gasoline consumption has already peaked; Chinese diesel demand is also increasingly facing structural pressure, as sales of battery electric heavy-duty vehicles nearly tripled in 2025. While some of these sales were pulled forward from 2026 due to tax incentives, the trend is clear and will accelerate when more energy-dense batteries, such as solid-state batteries, are commercialized.

Again, the vehicle fleet will take time to turn over, but the direction of travel is toward lower gasoline and diesel use, which makes the PRC less reliant on interdictable maritime imports, including from the Middle East.

As PRC dependence on interdictable Middle East crude declines, so does the coercive value of a U.S. naval blockade along the Malacca Strait in a Taiwan contingency. Washington and Taipei need to think now about what deterrent instruments can replace the Malacca dilemma.

Meanwhile, the GCC countries should consider not only Beijing’s present response to the crisis, where it has hedged against both sides of the conflict, but also the next one. In the medium term, and given its relative energy self-sufficiency, Beijing may have an interest in instigating a future Middle East energy crisis through an Iranian proxy. As Beijing’s energy self-sufficiency grows, its structural alignment with the GCC weakens, raising the possibility that Beijing’s calculus on regional instability could eventually invert. In the future, both Moscow and Beijing may have an interest in ensuring an unstable Middle East.

Joseph Webster is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, and editor of the independent China-Russia Report.

The China-Russia Report is an independent, nonpartisan newsletter covering political, economic, and security affairs within and between China and Russia. All articles, comments, op-eds, etc represent only the personal opinion of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the position(s) of The China-Russia Report.