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Just hours after a bomb planted in a Hamas guest house in Tehran killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, the Chinese foreign ministry issued its comment about the act. "We are greatly concerned about the incident, firmly oppose and condemn the assassination, and are deeply worried that this incident may lead to further instability in the region," said spokesperson Lin Jian.
There are many reasons for China to be "deeply worried." With the killing of one of its friends, Beijing's string of stunning successes in the troubled Middle East looks like it is coming to an end.
"China has tried to simultaneously stand above the fray of Middle East politics while playing a more prominent role as a mediator of disputes," Afshin Molavi, senior fellow of the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me this month. "Beijing is now learning that is a balancing act that is hard to achieve."
The killing in Tehran undermines one of China's core initiatives in the region. Hamas took center stage in the Chinese capital on the 23rd of last month when Chinese diplomats announced the Beijing Declaration, a reconciliation pact among 14 Palestinian factions, including Hamas arch-rival Fatah.
China, according to the Jerusalem Post's Seth Frantzman, was part of a group of countries hoping to make Hamas the undisputed leader of the Palestinian movement. "Haniyeh was being groomed to be the man who would take over the Palestinian Authority in the coming years," he writes. "October 7 was designed to catapult Hamas from its isolation in Gaza to controlling Ramallah and the West Bank, uniting the Palestinian fronts."
Now, after the killing, Hamas is in turmoil. There is rumored infighting and apparently no obvious replacement for the terrorist group's most well-known figure. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas's chief inside Gaza, is cut off from the world, believed to be hunkered down in a Gaza tunnel, likely surrounded by American hostages serving as human shields.
And in Beijing, Chinese leaders must be wondering what to do next. As an initial matter, the Beijing Declaration now looks like it will end up as just another failed agreement. Chinese prestige, therefore, is taking a hit.
The prestige hit will also be global in scope. "With tensions between the United States and China growing, Beijing has leveraged the war in Gaza to challenge the United States in the region and the developing world more broadly," wrote Gedaliah Afterman and Allie Weinberger of Israel's Reichman University at the end of last month. China, they noted, was positioning itself even more on the Palestinian side. "For Beijing, this is about narrative," the pair argue. "This move serves as a strategic, low-cost method for China to enhance its regional influence and present itself as a counterbalance to the United States."
"Low-cost method"? The October 7 attack was the start of a proxy war. Hamas was a proxy for Iran. Iran in turn was a proxy for China.
Iran could not have gone to war without China, which both before and after the attack on Israel has provided economic, diplomatic, and propaganda support to Tehran.
Furthermore, China has for years been supplying the instruments of war. "The proof of Iran's status as a Beijing proxy is the continual flow of both Chinese weapons to Iran and Chinese components for Iran's own arms," Jonathan Bass of InfraGlobal Partners told me. "Everybody in the region knows this." The U.S. Fifth Fleet routinely seizes arms supplied by China.
Bass, who since October 7 has spoken to senior leaders of Arab League states and four of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, told me the region is now especially concerned about the flood of Chinese weapons.
There is nonetheless friction between Beijing and Tehran. "Indeed, Iran's new president has already been pressuring the People's Republic of China to fulfill its commitments to the Iran-PRC accord, which committed Beijing to investing up to $400 billion in Iran and its oil industry, little or none of which has actually arrived in Iran," Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told me last week.
Copley, also editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, sees Iran closer to Russia than China, in part because Iran is a crucial piece of Moscow's North-South Transport Corridor, which undermines Beijing's east-west Belt and Road Initiative. Russia's route, which begins in St. Petersburg on the Baltic, passes through Bandar Abbas, the Iranian port near the Arabian Sea.
Yet whether or not Iran is a Chinese proxy, Beijing has staked its Middle East policy on Tehran, and now Iran's terrorist proxies are on the defensive. Iran itself has been humiliated.
As CNN reported, "the revelation that a bomb was smuggled inside the guest house, which was under the protection of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, indicates a startling breach of security for the IRGC." The Iranian regime was especially embarrassed because Haniyeh was in the Iranian capital for the inauguration of Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian and the Hamas leader had just met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As Khamenei said, in remarks directed at Israel, "You killed our dear guest in our house."
It's no wonder that Beijing is now trying to cool the tensions it has inflamed. "China always stands for resolving regional disputes through negotiations and dialogue," said the Foreign Ministry's Lin on July 31st. "There should be no more escalation of the conflict and confrontation."
By backing Iran's attack on Israel last October, Beijing thought it would benefit from waging a "low-cost" proxy war against the United States. The conflict looked cost-free then. Now, however, Beijing is about to learn how proxy wars can go terribly wrong.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and China Is Going to War. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
