China, Iran, and the new Silk Road

• Tom Fowdy
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Source: Al Mayadeen English

China’s relationship with Iran has significantly increased in recent years, with a comprehensive 25-year strategic partnership having been announced in March 2021.

Last week China’s top diplomat Wang Yi met with Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Akbar Ahmadian in Beijing. As reported by China’s official media, Xinhua, “During the meeting, Wang said China is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with Iran to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, and promote the steady and long-term development of the bilateral relations.” In addition, “Wang stressed that China is willing to strengthen synergy with Iran on the implementation of the China-Iran comprehensive cooperation plan, advance Belt and Road cooperation.”

While Beijing has taken a “best of all worlds” approach to Middle East diplomacy seeking to build positive ties with all regional parties irrespective of their alignment, China’s relationship with Iran has significantly increased in recent years, with a comprehensive 25-year strategic partnership having been announced in March 2021. Tehran sees China as its best bet to secure economic development, gain strategic space and escape the jackboot of US containment policies against it that have sought to cripple its growth. In doing so, Beijing hopes to make Iran a “gateway to Eurasia.”

Iran, historically known as Persia, is a conduit between continents. To its immediate south is the Arab world and the Middle East, to its west is Anatolia and thus onwards to Europe, to its southeast, the Indian subcontinent and to its east is Central Asia. Persia subsequently developed from its strategic geography and influenced all these regions as one of the oldest civilizational states in history, and became a medium for the flowing westward of Asian ideas, culture, and causes. It was an integral part of the historical Silk Road, which allowed both parties to prosper and thus provide an onward passage of goods to Europe.

With the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China aims to connect Eurasia once again through the construction of infrastructure in the form of railways, roads, seaports, airports and energy facilities, to make it possible for countries to economically integrate with each other and commerce to boom. In doing so, the BRI rivals what is known as the “Indo-Pacific strategy” advocated by the United States, which aims to comprehensively militarise the span of the Indian and Pacific oceans with the tantamount goal of containing the rise of China and thus upholding American hegemony. The construction of land-based cross-continental infrastructure is also designed to hedge China’s strategic weaknesses against US-led maritime conflict or embargos against it, as notable through the creation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is designed to create a new economic route into Europe, bypassing the contested South and East China Seas.

Therefore, Iran and China have several common strategic interests. Iran too, wants to escape US containment. Following the US’ illegal and unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Washington has imposed crippling unilateral sanctions on Tehran in order to try and subjugate it to its own strategic preferences. This has elevated the importance of China as a trade and export partner for Iran. Both countries seek to establish a multipolar international environment whereby they can gain strategic space for themselves to develop and exert their national interests against opposition from the United States. As a country of 87 million people, Iran has the economic and strategic potential to be a great power, but has continued to experience decades of US and UK attempts to undermine it, beginning in the 1950s.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, Iran can subsequently gain access to high-quality infrastructure that can accelerate its economic development, integrate it with its neighbors and also establish new land-based routes to export oil and natural gas, therefore outmaneuvering attempts at US-based maritime hostilities, which have sometimes even involved the seizure of cargo and assets. Neither Iran nor China pursues this partnership to target any other regional party, and both countries have used the opportunity to accelerate peace with rivals, such as Saudi Arabia [in Iran's case]. The goal is to reduce foreign interference in the region, as opposed to increasing it. China has always understood the BRI as being about “common development”, that is creating a strategic environment whereby the development of countries does not have to be subject to Western-only terms and conditions, which usually withhold investment and finance on political and ideological conditionalities, while also imposing sanctions and embargos designed to block the advance or development of countries they deem adversarial to their interests. Access to “development” in other words, has been a Western privilege, a club dictated by those who control global capital, and thus in the Cold War era. But now the world has changed because the rise of China has changed the game, and therefore gave some countries access to opportunities and resources they could have not previously attained without politically subjugating themselves. 

For 44 years, that has been the very primary problem of post-revolutionary Iran, because the West only tolerates an Iran which is subject to their political and strategic hegemony, as it was with the Pahlavi dynasty. Thus, the BRI is about providing “alternatives” than explicit antagonism of others, which is why the Beijing-Tehran partnership has grown existentially.