448 { China’s Quest
exchanges. A visit by President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani in June 1985 can be
taken as the symbolic renormalization of Sino-Iranian ties.
A murky but probably extremely important area of PRC-IRI cooperation
was in the nuclear area, where China emerged as Iran’s most important, and
covert, partner starting in 1985 and continuing until 1997, when Beijing would
suspend this cooperation under American pressure. Iran had had a large and
active nuclear energy program under the shah. Khomeini had suspended this
after the 1979 revolution, but revived it a couple of years into the war with Iraq
when it became apparent that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. Iran’s
nuclear partners under the shah—the United States and France—were no
longer willing to cooperate. China, however, moved in, while keeping nuclear
cooperation covert. Only many years later would the contours of PRC nuclear
cooperation with Iran become apparent.^36 In 1984, Iran opened the Esfahan
Nuclear Research Center (ENRC) to study basic reactor processes and tech-
nology, including the nuclear fuel cycle for both uranium enrichment and
the chemical extraction of plutonium from depleted uranium. The next year,
perhaps during Rafsanjani’s visit to China in June, China and Iran signed a
secret protocol for cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Under
the agreement, China supplied Iran with four small research reactors.
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) also sent engineers to
China for training in reactor operations. By 1987, fifteen AEOI engineers were
reportedly undergoing training in China. Also in 1987, China agreed to supply
ENRC with a device that uses magnetism to separate beams of uranium iso-
topes of varying atomic weights. This was a version of a device used by the US
World War II Manhattan Project to enrich uranium. The China-supplied de-
vice could enrich up to 37 percent. In 1989, Chinese geologists began helping
the AEOI prospect for uranium. Within a year, the AEOI announced that the
search had been successful and that mining operations would begin at seven
sites.^37 In short, during the 1980s the PRC became Tehran’s major partner in
the nuclear field. Locked in a desperate and bloody war with an Iraq push-
ing for nuclear weapons, China’s support for Iran’s mastery of basic nuclear
processes and technology was a powerful demonstration of China’s under-
standing of Iran’s national defense concerns—and of Beijing’s willingness to
tell the Americans “no.”
Support for Iran in United Nations action on the Iran-Iraq war was yet
another dimension of China’s assistance. Beijing balanced at the UN be-
tween, on the one hand, staying in step with the other Permanent Five, thus
demonstrating that China was a responsible great power, and, on the other
hand, differentiating itself from the United States by supporting Tehran
whenever that was convenient and not too costly. In mid-1987, the Security
Council began drafting a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire to
be followed by peace negotiations between Iran and Iraq. Tehran initially
sought Soviet assistance in modifying some of the text of the draft, only to