Don’t turn to China in every crisis
From Iran to Venezuela, everyone expects China to act. But Beijing moves with a single aim: safeguard its own long-term plans, stepping in overseas only when stakes hit home, says academic Hao Nan.
The streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities have become a tableau of smoke, shouts and despair. In Iran, as 2026 unfolds, a perfect storm of economic collapse and political crises has ignited nationwide protests, met by a familiar regime playbook: internet blackouts, sweeping arrests and vows of fierce retribution. The crisis threatens to spill beyond Iran’s borders, adding fuel to the Middle East’s volatile landscape. From the Saudi-Emirati fissure in Yemen to the shocking US capture of Venezuela’s president, this year’s opening month screams global instability.
When crises like these erupt, a predictable question travels faster across the world: what will China do? In early 2026, that question has become almost automatic — asked not only by analysts and policymakers in Washington and East Asian capitals, but also by regional actors who are recalculating what a more confrontational and transactional America might mean for their own security.
As the nation frequently dubbed the only “near-peer” competitor to the US — even acknowledged by President Trump’s “G2” rhetoric, China is now widely treated as a global power, reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. In the rhetoric of many debates, China is now the only state confident enough to push back against the Trump administration without immediately paying an existential price. Hence, in every crisis in the world, many instinctively look to Beijing for action, intervention, or at least a decisive stance.
China is not the Soviet Union — and it has no intention of becoming one.
China is not the Soviet Union
The assumption is that a great power will act like one, projecting influence and shaping outcomes. But that assumption is built on the wrong historical analogy. China is not the Soviet Union — and it has no intention of becoming one.
The Soviet Union treated influence as the currency of survival: it sought ideological alignment, built client states and accepted costly security commitments to compete globally with the US. Beijing’s strategic grammar is different. Beijing’s legitimacy still rests primarily on development, stability and national rejuvenation targets that culminate in long-range milestones. Its hardest security problems remain concentrated close to home: the Western Pacific, particularly the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
Even as China’s global footprint expands, its default instinct is not to collect distant protectorates; it is to reduce exposure, control risk and keep strategic focus on the regions that directly shape its long-term national project.
China prefers to intervene collectively
Engaging in costly, open-ended security commitments in the Middle East or Latin America would divert precious resources and political capital from these primary fronts. It could also trigger the very confrontations with the US that Beijing has thus far skilfully avoided. This is not weakness; it is a different conception of power.
China’s strength is rooted not in a network of global military alliances, but in its economic gravity, manufacturing hegemony and diplomatic patience. It seeks influence through infrastructure corridors, trade deals and multilateral institutions.
When it “intervenes”, it prefers the collective, legitimising cover of the United Nations or regional blocs like the Arab League. It acts as a “stabiliser” or “facilitator” — as with the Saudi-Iran detente — when parties are already willing, not as an enforcer of its own will.
Nowhere is this calibrated restraint clearer than in the current Middle Eastern turmoil. In Yemen, from late 2025 into January 2026, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE became unusually public — driven by disagreement over what Yemen’s political end-state should be and inflamed by clashes involving the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. This is a crisis where Gulf powers are directly, nervously invested.
For Middle East flashpoints like this, even if it scales up to impact the security of key waterways like the Red Sea, the parties that are affected most are Gulf countries that have been trying hard to avoid disruptions to their respective economic diversifications and grand visions, and the US that is bound by treaties and the regional countries’ massive investment commitments, to offer security guarantee, not external latecomers like China.
Even if Beijing decides to intervene, its posture is usually to emphasise sovereignty, political dialogue and support for regionally led and UN-framed processes, and to engage in “quiet shuttle diplomacy”...
China’s approach to the Yemen crisis a good example
So far what has been China’s response to the Yemen crisis? Measured calls for dialogue, support for regional initiatives by the regional countries themselves and affirmations of Yemen’s sovereignty. This is the kind of conflict where a “China factor” is more likely to be imagined than real.
For Beijing, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are its major Comprehensive Strategic Partners in the region. “Taking sides” would damage core economic and diplomatic interests — exactly the opposite of what Chinese statecraft typically optimises for. Beijing has not dispatched envoys to mediate between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, nor has it threatened sanctions or offered security guarantees. China’s military presence in the region — the Djibouti base and anti-piracy patrols — is geared towards protecting shipping lanes, not picking sides in intra-Gulf squabbles.
Even if Beijing decides to intervene, its posture is usually to emphasise sovereignty, political dialogue and support for regionally led and UN-framed processes, and to engage in “quiet shuttle diplomacy”, rather than to insert itself as an independent arbiter. Even when China’s diplomacy succeeds — as in the Saudi-Iran rapprochement it helped facilitate — its own framing is closer to providing venue, endorsement and mechanisms once the parties are ready, rather than coercing outcomes through hard power.
Furthermore, China’s interventions would also disrupt China’s own efforts in planning a China-Arab States Summit and China-GCC Summit in China in 2026, and perhaps a continued China-GCC-ASEAN Summit with ASEAN’s 2026 chair, the Philippines — though to what extent such trilateral summit could be continued under the current China-Philippine tensions over the South China Sea remains uncertain.
China unlikely to assert authority in western hemisphere
The same logic applies beyond the Middle East. In Latin America, a hemisphere where US dominance is unambiguous, observers also ask whether China will counter the US in a more direct way. Yet the structural reality is that the western hemisphere remains America’s most advantaged security theatre. The dramatic US operation to apprehend Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and effectively seize control of the country’s oil revenue streams is a stark assertion of power, and an illustration of how US power can be applied rapidly in its near abroad.
While the loss of Venezuelan assets is a setback, it is a manageable one.
It is true that Venezuela is one of China’s small circle of “all-weather” comprehensive strategic partners, with billions in debt and energy ties, but China’s leverage is overwhelmingly economic, diplomatic and contractual. So far, Beijing’s reaction has been limited to expressing concern over sovereignty and international law. There will be no gunboat diplomacy from the Pacific to the Caribbean. China recognises the hard limits of its power projection far from home.
While the loss of Venezuelan assets is a setback, it is a manageable one. Venezuelan oil constitutes a minor share of China’s vast, diversified import portfolio, only accounting for 0.27% and 0.07% of China’s total oil imports in 2024 and the first eleven months of 2025, respectively.
China may push back in multilateral forums and negotiate bilaterally with Washington to protect its financial interests, perhaps in the lead-up to President Trump’s April visit to China, but it will not confront the US in its own backyard to save a beleaguered regime. Furthermore, China would perhaps remain the only viable buyer to take in the US-controlled Venezuelan oil.
The same rationale applies to Iran as well. Even if internal pressure — or renewed US and Israeli strikes — pushed Iran into a sudden collapse that disrupted oil exports and raised risks in Hormuz or the Red Sea, the most immediately anxious actors would still be Iran’s Gulf neighbours and the US. For China, the shock would be real but not existential in the short term. Beijing’s energy vulnerability is often overstated.
Can China do more?
In 2024, China’s energy self-sufficiency rate climbed to a record 85%. Oil and natural gas make up only 18.2% and 8.9% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024, so even though over 70% of its oil and more than 40% of its gas were imported, and the Middle East supplies over half of China’s crude and about a quarter of its LNG, the dependence is less decisive than often assumed.
Furthermore, Beijing has hedged via Russia and Central Asia pipelines and rising Arctic LNG flows that can bypass Hormuz. An Iran-centred crisis would raise prices, not “break” China’s energy security. So Beijing is unlikely to intervene actively, beyond diplomacy and multilateral coordination.
The question is not whether China can do more. It is whether it wants to pay the price of becoming what it has never aimed to be.
A fair counterargument is that a “global power” must accept global burdens. If China wants respect, critics say, it must do more than issue statements and host talks; it must help stabilise regions whose shocks ripple into the world economy. But this argument assumes that global responsibility equals security intervention.
Beijing’s model of responsibility — consistent with its repeated emphasis on regionally led security architectures — is to favour multilateral legitimacy and risk-sharing, not unilateral enforcement. That means if China becomes more active, it is most likely to do so with regional states, regional organisations, and the United Nations, and often only when a workable diplomatic track exists.
The ceiling for Chinese involvement remains low; the threshold rises only when shipping lanes, Chinese citizens abroad, or core economic interests face direct and immediate danger.
The deeper point is that early 2026’s turbulence — whether in Iran’s streets, Yemen’s factional map or Venezuela’s oil politics — does not signal the arrival of a new Soviet-style China eager to contest the US everywhere. It signals something else: a world in which local conflicts are intensifying, the US is acting more transactionally, and many audiences are searching for a second “counter-manager” of global disorder.
That search is understandable. It is also misguided. China’s strategic centre of gravity remains in the Indo-Pacific; its preferred tools are economic statecraft and multilateral process; and its incentive is to avoid becoming the insurer of last resort for other regions’ political crises. The question is not whether China can do more. It is whether it wants to pay the price of becoming what it has never aimed to be.
