Following the twelve-day Iran-Israel war in June 2025, China has quietly accelerated its strategic partnership with a weakened Islamic Republic through renewed infrastructure commitments, expanded technological cooperation, and deepened diplomatic alignment. This calculated entrenchment represents Beijing’s broader ambition to reshape the post-American architecture of influence across Eurasia, potentially shifting the future of Middle Eastern geopolitics away from Western capitals toward Beijing.
As the dust of the twelve-day war between Iran and Israel in June 2025 barely began to settle, a deeper strategic question emerged: had China, perceiving both a challenge to its influence in Western Eurasia and an opportunity to tighten its grip on a vital regional partner, seized the moment to reinforce its relationship with the Islamic Republic? While much of the world’s attention was absorbed by the spectacle of Israeli airstrikes, American-brokered ceasefires, and nightly protests in Tehran, Beijing appeared to move with characteristic discretion. In a conflict that left Iran’s infrastructure battered, its leadership weakened, and its regime increasingly reliant on coercive power, China may have identified not a failing state, but a moment of strategic leverage.
This hypothesis — that China has used the post-conflict window to accelerate its entanglement with Iran — is not merely speculative. In the months following the cessation of hostilities, multiple signals suggest a quiet but purposeful intensification of Sino-Iranian ties: renewed commitments to long-term strategic agreements, expanded technological and infrastructure cooperation, and increasingly aligned diplomatic rhetoric. These developments do not unfold in isolation. They must be read in the context of a shifting Eurasian balance of power, a fraying liberal order, and Beijing’s broader ambition to shape the post-American architecture of influence across the Global South.
This paper examines the extent to which the hypothesis of strengthened China–Iran strategic cooperation holds under scrutiny, and what such a development might reveal about Beijing’s long game in a region still reeling from the aftershocks of war.
Early Signals and Strategic Hypotheses in the Post-War Landscape
In the immediate aftermath of the June 2025 war between Iran and Israel, a new strategic question rapidly came into focus: would China exploit the Islamic Republic’s moment of political and institutional vulnerability to reinforce its role as Iran’s principal external guarantor? As Western and regional observers analysed the battered state of Iran’s leadership, infrastructure, and internal legitimacy, subtle but significant signals began to suggest that Beijing was not merely watching events unfold — it was preparing to act.
Already by late June, informed speculation was circulating in diplomatic and intelligence circles about Beijing’s dual incentives: first, to prevent a vacuum that Western-aligned actors might fill; second, to consolidate its influence over a regime that remains geographically central, energy-abundant, and increasingly embedded in the connective tissue of a rising Eurasian order. In this view, the Islamic Republic is no longer a peripheral rogue actor but a key node in China’s multipolar strategy — a state that anchors Belt and Road corridors, supplies vital energy resources, and links Central Asia to the Gulf.
For Beijing, then, the weakening of the Iranian regime was not an opportunity to reshape the region in liberal terms, but rather a risk to be mitigated and an asset to be preserved — or reconfigured. Two scenarios seemed plausible. The first, more conservative, implied shoring up the existing regime through quiet injections of military aid, intelligence support, and economic lifelines — converting Iran into a de facto client state under Chinese tutelage. The second, more disruptive, imagined a transition toward a post-theocratic, military-led order, managed behind the scenes by external stakeholders such as China and Russia — a nationalist yet autocratic regime shorn of clerical dominance, more palatable to Beijing’s strategic sensibilities.
Even as these remained hypotheses, scattered empirical signals hinted at their plausibility. Reports of Chinese military cargo flights entering Iranian airspace on June 23 — vanishing from radar over the Alborz range — suggested movements with potentially high strategic stakes: weapons deliveries, personnel transfers, or even preliminary support for an internal realignment. While the exact content of these flights remains unconfirmed, the symbolism was potent. Beijing, it seemed, was no longer content to hedge. It was preparing to intervene — on its own terms, and for its own long-term vision of the regional order.
Tangible Indicators of Strategic Acceleration: June–September 2025
If, in the immediate aftermath of the June 2025 conflict, speculation swirled around China’s intentions vis-à-vis a weakened Islamic Republic, the months that followed provided increasingly concrete evidence that Beijing was not merely hedging — it was accelerating its strategic entrenchment. A series of high-level declarations, diplomatic gestures, and sectoral agreements reveal not only a deepening of the Sino-Iranian partnership but also a new urgency in its implementation.
The most emblematic signal came on June 10, 2025, when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and China’s Ambassador to Tehran, Cong Peiwu, publicly reaffirmed their governments’ “strong commitment” to the complete execution of the 25-year Strategic Cooperation Agreement signed in 2021. Rather than allow this long-term pact to fade amid geopolitical turbulence, both parties chose to double down — a move widely interpreted as a message of resilience and strategic continuity.
This political momentum was further reinforced on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on September 2 2025, where President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran and President Xi Jinping held a bilateral meeting. The two leaders not only reiterated their pledge to deepen the strategic partnership, but also announced an acceleration of key infrastructure projects already outlined in the 25-year plan — notably high-speed railways and major highway corridors. These initiatives, far from symbolic, imply substantial capital commitments and serve as physical anchors of the Belt and Road Initiative across the Iranian plateau.
In parallel, cooperation has expanded into critical technological domains. In May 2025, Iran’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Sattar Hashemi, met with his Chinese counterpart to initiate joint ventures in artificial intelligence, smart industry, and communications infrastructure, accompanied by plans for human capital development through bilateral training exchanges. Unlike energy trade or diplomatic alignment, technological integration is both strategic and difficult to reverse — a sign that Beijing is building long-term systems, not merely conducting transactions.
Diplomatic discourse has also shifted in tone and intensity. A high-profile meeting in July 2025 between Foreign Ministers Wang Yi and Araghchi produced strong mutual affirmations of sovereignty, opposition to “power politics,” and a renewed commitment to bilateral alignment even under international pressure. The language, notably invoking resistance to “bullying,” reflected not just solidarity but ideological synchronisation—a shared positioning against Western geopolitical narratives.
Trade and investment signals have likewise multiplied. Joint declarations throughout the summer consistently emphasised an “acceleration” in project timelines, especially in the energy, transport, and infrastructure sectors, which are foundational to both Iran’s domestic resilience and China’s regional ambitions. While some of these announcements may be aspirational, others, such as renewed work on joint rail and highway ventures, are already underway.
Taken together, these developments point not to symbolic alignment but to a rapidly maturing partnership. While military cooperation remains less publicly visible, the economic, technological, and infrastructural dimensions of the Sino-Iranian relationship have intensified significantly since mid-2025 — suggesting that China has chosen not simply to support Iran, but to actively integrate it deeper into the fabric of Eurasian connectivity and geopolitical resistance.
The Quiet Realignment That Demands Attention
While the world’s attention remains fixed on the visible wreckage of the June 2025 conflict, a quieter — but no less consequential — realignment is unfolding beyond the headlines. In Tehran’s moment of vulnerability, Beijing has not hesitated; it has moved swiftly, strategically, and with purpose. What we are witnessing is not simply a tactical partnership, but the consolidation of a long-game Eurasian axis — one that binds energy, infrastructure, technology, and strategic leverage into a coherent whole.
This Sino-Iranian acceleration does not unfold with fanfare, but rather through cables, contracts, and corridors — via deals signed in shadows and infrastructure built in silence. Yet its implications are profound. Should this trajectory continue unchecked, China will not merely support the Islamic Republic’s survival; it will shape its post-crisis future. And in doing so, it may gain unrivalled influence over one of the most geopolitically sensitive pivots of the 21st century. For Western policymakers, ignoring this development would be a grave strategic error. The real contest is no longer about regime change or containment. It is about who defines the architecture of what comes next. And unless the West recalibrates its gaze — beyond missiles and ceasefires, toward infrastructure, influence, and long-term positioning — it may wake to find that the future of the Middle East is no longer negotiated in Washington or Brussels, but increasingly… in Beijing.
Dr Pierre Pahlavi is a full professor at the Royal Military College of Canada in the Department of Defence Studies, co-located with the Canadian Forces College, Canada’s Staff and War College. His research focuses on Iran and its asymmetric strategies, public diplomacy, and the use of force in the international system. He has published in various journals in strategic and security studies and has recently published a book in French on the Iranian revolution, Le Marécage des Ayatollahs, prized by the Académie française. He has a PhD in political science from McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.
