Gulf investments and economic interests motivate Beijing to help Trump end war

US President Donald Trump is set to meet his counterpart, Xi Jinping, on Thursday in Beijing for a two-day visit. Business and trade deals are at the top of the agenda for the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, but Iran will loom large in the background.

Providing military support to Iran in its war with the US and Israel has benefited China, but the conflict in the Middle East also challenges its ties with Gulf states and its broader economic model, experts say.

“Iran’s brave response [to the US attack] gave Trump a lesson. Trump cannot blackmail China, not to mention Iran, with the so-called ‘art of the deal'," Wang Yiwei, an international relations scholar at Renmin University in Beijing, told Middle East Eye.

China is the US’s only peer rival. The two are locked in competition over artificial intelligence, critical minerals and Taiwan.

The US's failure to subdue Iran has been welcomed in China, and the emerging power has not just been sitting idle on the sidelines.

MEE was the first to report that China provided air defence systems to Iran following its June 2025 war with Israel that culminated in the US attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. On the cusp of the 2026 attack, China supplied Iran with kamikaze drones, MEE reported. The New York Times subsequently reported that shipments of Chinese shoulder-fired air defence systems to Iran took place in April.

The Financial Times reported that Iran used sophisticated Chinese satellites to target US military bases in the Gulf.

Converging interests

The US-Israeli war on Iran has been compared to a "Suez moment" for the US by some experts, who see a parallel in the 1956 conflict with Egypt over the canal that spelt the beginning of the end of the British Empire’s dominance in the Middle East.

Amos Hochstein, a former senior US official, said this month that Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz “forever”, despite the US imposing a blockade against Iranians ports. Meanwhile, the US has been unable to retrieve Iran’s enriched uranium and or destroy the vast quantity of its ballistic missile arsenal.

“If the US had succeeded in overthrowing the Iranian government in February, China would have panicked. But Beijing is also cautious. They see a very powerful country, the US, bogged down, and they don’t want to provoke it,” Jake Werner, director of the East Asia programme at the Quincy Institute, told MEE. 

'China and the US are aligned in opposing Iran having a nuclear weapons and seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened'

Beijing has had some tactical victories closer to home as a result of the war. For example, Washington had to temporarily withdraw some military assets from the Pacific to support operations in the Middle East.

But Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow at Chatham House and head of the China Studies research unit at the Emirates Policy Center, told MEE that Beijing and Washington have common interests in seeing a ceasefire in the Middle East.

“China and the US are aligned in opposing Iran having a nuclear weapons and seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened,” he told MEE.

Pakistan, one of China’s closest security and economic partners, has been mediating talks between the US and Iran.

Two days after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called on China to “step up” diplomacy to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Beijing for talks with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi.

“The timing was important,” Aboudouh, at the Emirates Policy Centre, told MEE. “The Chinese want to show the Americans they have leverage over Iran. But they genuinely want this war to end.”

Trump said on Monday that the ceasefire with Iran was on “life support”, as he rejected an Iranian proposal to end the war. On Tuesday, he rejected the notion that he needed China's help to end the war.

"I don't think we need any help with Iran. We'll win it one way or the other, peacefully or otherwise," he told the media.

 Jesse Marks, the CEO of Rihla Research and Advisory, a consulting firm focused on the Middle East and Asia, told MEE that Xi “would not offer Trump a way out of the Iran war”, but could help with the “mechanics” of a nuclear deal.

“If there is a clear deal on the table where China can play a role it sees as productive, and where it can deliver without getting entangled, then Beijing is likely to play that role,” Marks said.

“China has already explored helping remove the existing enriched uranium from Iran as part of a deal.”

China's economic vulnerability

China has its own motivations to end the war.

The war on Iran has jolted Asia’s economies because they are particularly reliant on oil and gas from the Gulf. On Sunday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on Indians to cut down on petrol and diesel consumption and stop buying gold.

'The war has upended China’s investments in the Gulf'

“US allies in the region - Japan, South Korea and India - are likely to crack before China does because of the Hormuz closure,” Werner told MEE.

“Beijing likes to see those countries’ bilateral ties to the US weakened, but they aren’t happy about the economic damage because they are tied into those economies. Their economy is based on trade and exports.”

The conflict has put a spotlight on Chinese economic ties to Iran.

Iran was buying around 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports before the war, and US officials have honed in on those purchases. Earlier this month, China ordered its companies not to comply with US sanctions on five oil refiners that purchase Iranian crude.

But China’s economic ties to Iran pale in comparison to its investments in the oil-rich Gulf. For example, Saudi Arabia was the third-largest recipient of Chinese construction contracts under the Belt and Road Initiative in 2025, with a total of about $20bn dollars.

China is also the UAE's fourth-largest source of foreign direct investment inflows. Chinese firms have invested billions of dollars in the UAE’s Khalifa Industrial Zone in Abu Dhabi.

“China has poured billions of dollars into the GCC, a lot more money than it has given Iran,” Werner told MEE.

“Those investments are not looking so great now. The war has upended China’s investments in the Gulf.”

Aboudouh told MEE that China wants to prevent the Gulf states from joining the war.

"That is the one difference they have with the US, which has lobbied the Gulf to enter the conflict," he said.

He said that China would like to expand on the 2021 deal it struck between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which normalised ties between the two countries.