✪ EPIC FURY: China Is Scrambling

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ecades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for social/political/economic turbulence. However with the events of the last week, Xi Jinping is scrambling. That word is not to be used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, this current moment in History is acutely dangerous. Not because China faces any direct military threats, but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

✪ Three Reasons Why Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic For China

First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior Party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” and America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was the central element in that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to develop & sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor; and above all, to stand as living proof American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of CCP’s dogma of inevitability which rested on Iran’s ability to endure in its current form as a theocratic Islamic state, was destroyed by Epic Fury in a single afternoon.

Khamenei was the man who made the thesis feel real. Beijing’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei’s survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and he was still giving Friday sermons calling for “death to America.” Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the Security Council veto. Yet, none of this kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.

Second, Xi’s own story has already been collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people; how America is a declining world power incapable of decisive force projection, does not match with what happened over seventy-two hours in Tehran. State censors may suppress the media footage and scrub Weibo, but the people who matter most: the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living, know exactly what they are looking at. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether the CCP is now right about anything else.

Third, the energy math has now turned against Beijing. China was buying 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and took over 80% of everything Iran shipped. Half of China’s total oil imports also pass through the Strait of Hormuz. With Ayatollah Khamenei now dead and Iran’s military leadership decapitated, the Gulf’s strategic energy balance shifts decisively toward Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the United States are strengthening. China’s old selling point was very simple and transactional: we buy your oil and never mention human rights. That pitch loses its utility when Gulf producers already feel protected by an American security guarantee that just proved to the entire world on live television, that it works.

✪ The Messaging Trap

However, Xi’s communications problem may be worse than his strategic one, because there are no good outcomes for China to be found in any of this. If Beijing endorses the strikes, it loses the “Global South.” If Beijing condemns the strikes, it then attaches Chinese prestige to a dead man’s regime; and risks provoking a Trump Administration which has just demonstrated, through the act itself, it does not bluff.

So Beijing has chosen the only remaining option: to hide behind the United Nations. The official spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning called the killing of Khamenei “a grave violation of sovereignty.” That language may sound forceful, but the ugly truth is the Belt and Road countries are watching closely, and what they see so far is a confused superpower reading from a script while American carriers make the actual decisions.

✪ Every Iranian Move Is Now A Chinese Loss

The truly most vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage will land on China instead. Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten the very oil infrastructure and port facilities Chinese companies have spent decades & billions investing in across the region.

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The Strait of Hormuz is even worse. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced within hours of the start of Epic Fury no ships would be allowed to pass through the channel; a threat designed as leverage against the West, except that the United States has a shale industry and a crisis-proof strategic petroleum reserve. In fact, according to Kayrros, as of March 31, 2025, China had only filled 56% percent of its above-ground strategic and commercial storage facilities.

Which means nearly 45% of China’s own oil imports now sit/would sit hostage to a blockade that was never intended to hurt Beijing. The Houthis have resumed their attacks on Red Sea shipping; so every flare-up in Iran threatens oil concessions Chinese companies have spent billions building. The sum of Iran’s resistance equates to a systematic disruption of Chinese commercial interests across every waterway and energy corridor Beijing depends on, executed in Khamenei’s name, with no regard for who actually pays the price.

✪ Counting Moves

The clearest sign of Beijing’s disorientation is the complete absence of action: no emergency summits, no diplomatic maneuvers, no military repositioning, even after a Chinese citizen was killed in crossfire in Tehran and over 300 nationals were evacuated. The sum total of Beijing’s response to the largest American military operation in a generation remains a single, lowly press conference.

Xi has bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to withstand American pressure; and that bet did not pay off. Operation Epic Fury was designed to break the Islamic Republic, but it may also have exposed the uncomfortable truth that Chinese influence in the Middle East was only as durable as the assumption that no one would ever call it into question, & in Beijing they now know that. ✪