China’s horror picture came true – but its solution surprised the West, says the researcher

The vulnerabilities of the energy sector do not now and will not make Beijing a possible mediating party in the Middle East crises.

This is the conclusion of the British think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute) in guest pen writingwhich examines China’s way of managing its oil imports after the Iran war suppressed oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz.

Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Exeter, China expert Andrea Ghiselli stresses that if energy self-sufficiency is set as the yardstick, China’s long-term plans at the time of the Strait of Hormuz crisis went awry. In this sense, China has failed, he states.

“China remains the world’s largest importer of crude oil. More than 70 percent of its oil is imported, and roughly half of those imports are tied to the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz. This is exactly the kind of narrow maritime bottleneck that Chinese strategists have worried about for decades.”

China survived its horror picture surprisingly cleverly

According to Ghiselli, however, the Strait of Hormuz crisis revealed that China is more resilient than expected to withstand disturbances in the energy market, and this should be noted in Western countries. According to Ghiselli, the background to crisis resilience is the diversification of oil purchases in the directions of Russia, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America, own natural gas production and the controlled growth and use of strategic oil reserves.

“A combination of long-term planning and careful short-term intervention has meant that China has not had to deal with [Hormuzinsalmen] crisis as an emergency that would require procurement at any cost. The fact that the Chinese government has so far resisted the release of strategic oil reserves and has instead allowed only limited use of commercial reserves has been significant,” Ghiselli assessed.

Ghiselli also highlights China’s green transition. For example, the noticeable increase in the use of electric trucks has already reduced the daily need for oil by one million barrels, in other words, by an amount comparable to the level of Oman’s daily production in 2025.

“By 2030, this replacement is projected to reach 2.7 million barrels per day. This is strategically significant, especially when combined with the continued decline in the energy intensity of the Chinese economy,” Ghiselli reminds.

“Cooperates where interests meet”

According to Ghiselli, the conclusions about China’s tenacity should be clear to Britain and other Western partners: decision-makers should not assume that China’s vulnerability in the energy sector makes Beijing willing to cooperate.

Nor should decision-makers anticipate that China’s resilience will make Beijing careless, Ghiselli adds.

“China’s energy strategy is designed to preserve as much foreign policy leeway as possible. That’s why China cooperates where its interests intersect: preventing a total collapse of Gulf energy flows, avoiding uncontrollable spikes in prices, keeping shipping lanes open, and limiting regional escalation.”

“In the future, China may resist or even ignore Western pressure if its access to sanctioned oil, relations with Iran, or broader financial and trade policy efforts are threatened. Beijing’s greater-than-expected resilience will naturally also have an impact on a possible conflict in the Taiwan Strait, as the blockade of China has long been considered a decisive way to resolve a potential conflict,” concludes Ghiselli.