558 { China’s Quest
reality that a hugely disproportionate share of the world’s oil was located
around the Persian Gulf.
In Beijing’s view, that simple reality underlay the fact (as judged by Beijing)
that the Persian Gulf was a focus of rivalry between the Soviet and US super-
powers. Each of the two hegemony-seeking superpowers sought to control
that region’s oil wealth as a stepping stone on the path to world domination.
When China did not need Persian Gulf oil, it had the luxury of “sitting on the
mountain top and watching the tigers fight”—in the words of an old Chinese
saying—although, as discussed in an earlier chapter, Beijing decided in the
1970s that China’s interests were served if Persian Gulf oil was kept out of
Soviet hands. As China’s need for imported oil rose in the post–Cold War
period, its interests in the Persian Gulf grew. By then, however, China found
that only one tiger, the United States, bestrode the Persian Gulf.^1
The Persian Gulf became a major arena of PRC-US interaction during the
post–Cold War period as frequent US sanctions, bombing, and wars touched
on China’s roles in the Security Council and as a partner of Iran and Iraq, the
two countries targeted by US punitive measures. In these conflicts between
the United States, Iran, and Iraq, Beijing encountered but rejected the option
of forming with Iran an anti-US partnership along the lines of its strategic
partnership with Russia. Beijing initially threatened Washington with such a
bloc during the lead-up to renormalization of Sino-US relations in 1996–1997,
but ultimately eschewed that option in order to avoid confrontation with the
United States in the Gulf. Instead, Beijing opted to stand aside and allow the
United States to run amuck in the Gulf, but simultaneously sell China’s non-
opposition to Washington’s thrusts in the Gulf for as high a price as could be
obtained from Washington.
There was a virtual consensus among Chinese analysts that the goal of
US policy in the Persian Gulf was, and had always been, control over that
area’s rich oil supply in order to move a step closer to US global domina-
tion. Washington appealed to various themes: nonproliferation of nuclear
weapons, upholding UN Security Council resolutions, antiterrorism, human
rights, democracy, and the security of oil-bearing sea lanes of communica-
tion from the Gulf. But at bottom these were either nice-sounding pretexts
useful for mobilizing support for US moves or second-order objectives use-
ful as a means of achieving a deeper, more fundamental objective. The core
US objective was to dominate the world by controlling the world’s richest
supply of crude oil in the Persian Gulf region. Controlling the oil flowing
from the Gulf would give the United States the ability to coerce countries
dependent on that oil: the European countries, Japan, South Korea, and, of
course, China. This, Chinese analysts virtually uniformly believed, was the
real, unstated but paramount, purpose of US policy in the Gulf during the
post–Cold War era.