So I had to laugh yesterday when China's $400 billion, 25-year comprehensive co-operation agreement with Iran, in practice, amounts to moral support in the U.N., and less than nothing else. Military aid in Tehran's most desperate hour? How do you say "Fuggidaboudit" in Mandarin?
Yeah, well, it isn't like the military gear was doing Tehran much good, anyway.
Another thing that made me laugh much too hard was this post from my old blogger acquaintance, Emily Zanotti, in response to the news.
“You’re doing great, sweetie!” https://t.co/bARzQj2lv9
— Emily Zanotti 🦝 (@emzanotti) March 3, 2026
There's something about Xi speaking in the voice of a young mom that just kills me.
But the sad part — sad for the remnants of Beijing's Axis of Resistance "allies" in Tehran — is that Beijing couldn't even muster that promised moral support. Whatever that means.
Because the closest thing to a trump card that Tehran has to play is closing the Straits of Hormuz and shutting off the vital supply of Gulf oil to the global economy. To which Beijing basically said, "Yeah, if you could reopen those Straits, that'd be great."
All China wants is the oil. When push comes to Epic Fury, China couldn't care less about who they buy it from.
"China buys 80% of Iran’s shipped oil. Beijing has a $400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement with Tehran," Shanaka Anslem Perera reminded X readers on Tuesday. "China is Iran’s economic lifeline. If any country on earth has leverage over Iran, it is China. And China is now using that leverage to demand the Strait reopens."
And Another Thing: The joke, however, is on Beijing. Tehran didn't close the Straits of Hormuz; Lloyd's of London did, unable to assess the current risk and forced to cancel insurance policies for oil tankers traveling through the Gulf. No insurance, no sail. "China has leverage over Iran. China has zero leverage over Lloyd’s of London," Perera also wrote. What a shame, that.
Remember: China doesn't have allies and it certainly doesn't have friends. China has rivals, trading partners, vassals, and chumps. Tehran might have thought they were Beijing's ally, but learned the hard way that they're just a source of oil — and with that demand to reopen the Straits, probably no better than chumps. See also: Venezuela.
You look at stories like Iran and Venezuela (and soon, Cuba) and you have to wonder what they're thinking right now in the Kremlin.
On the eve of the Russo-Ukraine War, Xi and Vladimir Putin signed the "Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development." Because, good lord, those people are even wordier than the Pentagon.
Anyway, whatever the diplomats called it, it's most often referred to as the "no-limits partnership" (or "no-limits friendship") between the two countries. "Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is not aimed against third countries," to be exact.
In practice, there seem to be hard limits on how much and what kind of military aid China will send, even after four years of war. While Beijing claims not to send any lethal aid, in practice, Russia gets plenty of dual-use technology for the production of drones, artillery shells and explosives, fiber optics, batteries, etc. Experts estimate China supplies about 80% of the sanctioned dual-use items Russia needs to sustain the war.
But not, say, a squadron or two of Chinese-made/Russian-flown stealth attack jets that might be enough to break Ukraine's lines and force an end to the war. Beijing supplies Russia with just enough material to keep the war going, which, in my estimation, is Beijing's way of reducing Moscow from trading partner to vassal.
You're doing great, sweetie!
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