Why Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic for Xi

By Zineb Riboua

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

 

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.–Israeli military campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.

 

Xi Jinping is scrambling — and that word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, Xi faces an acutely dangerous moment — not because China faces a direct military threat but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

 

There are three reasons why these strikes have created big problems for China. First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” that America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of the CCP’s dogma of inevitability rested on Iran’s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.

 

Ayatollah Khamenei was the man who made that thesis feel real. Beijing’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei’s survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man whom Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and yet he was still giving Friday sermons. Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the U.N. Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.

 

Second, Xi’s own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people — that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection — does not match what happened in mere hours over Tehran. State media can suppress the footage, and the censors can scrub Weibo, but the ones who matter most — the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living — know what they saw. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether it was ever right about anything else.

 

Third, the energy math is turning against Beijing. China bought 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and takes over 80 percent of everything Iran ships. Half of China’s total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. With Khamenei now dead and Iran’s military leadership weakened, the Gulf’s strategic balance shifts decisively toward Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the United States are strengthening. China’s old selling point was very simple and transactional: We buy your oil and never mention human rights. That pitch loses its utility when Gulf producers already feel protected by an American security guarantee that just proved, on live television, that it works.

 

And Xi’s communications problem may be worse than his strategic one. If Beijing endorses the strikes, it loses the Arab world the moment China is seen applauding the killing of the supreme leader of a Muslim-majority country. If Beijing condemns the strikes, it attaches Chinese prestige to a dead man’s regime and risks provoking a Trump administration that has just demonstrated, through the act itself, that it does not bluff.

 

So Beijing chose the remaining option: Hide behind the United Nations. Mao Ning, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, called the killing “a grave violation of sovereignty.” The language sounds forceful, but the Belt and Road countries are watching, and what they see so far is a confused superpower reading from a script while American carriers do the actual deciding.

 

The truly vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage lands on China instead. Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten the very oil infrastructure and port facilities that Chinese companies have spent billions investing in across the region.

 

The Strait of Hormuz is worse. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced within hours that no ship would pass through the channel, a threat designed as leverage against the West, except that the United States has a shale industry and a strategic petroleum reserve and China has neither, which means that nearly 45 percent of China’s own oil imports now sit hostage to a blockade that was never meant to hurt Beijing. The Houthis have resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping, every flare-up in Iraq threatens oil concessions Chinese companies spent billions building, and the sum of Iran’s resistance amounts to a systematic disruption of Chinese commercial interests across every waterway and energy corridor Beijing depends on, executed in Khamenei’s name, with no regard for who actually pays the price.

 

The clearest sign of Beijing’s disorientation is the absence of action: no emergency summits, no diplomatic maneuvers, no military repositioning, even as a Chinese citizen was killed in cross fire in Tehran and over 3,000 nationals were evacuated. The sum total of Beijing’s response to the largest American military operation in a generation remains a press conference.

 

Xi bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to survive American pressure, and the bet did not pay off. Operation Epic Fury was designed to break the Islamic Republic, but it may also have exposed the uncomfortable truth that Chinese influence in the Middle East was only as durable as the assumption that no one would ever call it into question. And in Zhongnanhai, they know it.