China and America in the Persian Gulf } 559
One of Beijing’s elemental considerations was that in the event of a clash
with the United States which became protracted, Washington might play its
trump card of control of global sea lanes to enforce an embargo cutting off
China’s oil imports. In such an extreme situation, Beijing would face the dif-
ficulty of importing its oil needs via overland routes via rail or pipeline. But
aside from transport links, China would also need, in such an extreme contin-
gency, petroleum-rich countries willing and able to flout American demands
and put large quantities of oil into China’s emergency overland energy sup-
ply system. Russia (which had become a major oil producer since the end of
containment), the Central Asian republics, and the Islamic Republic of Iran
would be the major candidates to supply oil to China in such a dire eventuality.
China’s and America’s First Two Persian Gulf Wars (1987 and 1991)
The United States entered the Gulf militarily and directly only in January
1980, when President Carter proclaimed that the United States would use
its military power, if necessary, to protect petroleum flows from the Persian
Gulf. Prior to 1968, the United States had relied on British military domi-
nance in that area and, after that and until 1979, on Iran under the shah.
Only after the British withdrawal from “east of Suez” and the overthrow of
the shah, followed quickly by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, did the
United States undertake to use its own military power to secure control over
the oil resources of the Gulf.^2 In 1980, Beijing strongly supported this, seeing
it as an important and even long overdue US move to counter a Soviet expan-
sionist offensive that had been virtually unchecked by the United States since
the mid-1970s. Beijing saw the oil-rich Persian Gulf as a focal point of super-
power (US and Soviet) contention, and concluded that control of those re-
sources by US hegemony accorded with China’s interests far more than would
Soviet control.
China’s estimate of the US role in the Gulf changed as Beijing’s fear
of Soviet encirclement ebbed and Sino-Soviet relations improved in the
mid-1980s. As US-Iranian naval clashes escalated in 1986–1987 over Iranian
challenges to oil shipping through the Gulf, Beijing reverted to its earlier
position that the security affairs of the Gulf should be handled by the coun-
tries littoral to that Gulf. (The reader will recall that this principle had been
endorsed by Ji Pengfei in 1973 during the period when the shah was attempt-
ing to “fill the vacuum” in the Gulf.) In 1986–1987, Beijing condemned the US
resort to military force against Iranian warships, even while it rhetorically
upheld the freedom of navigation of neutral shipping.^3 Beijing also advised
Tehran to end the war with Iraq on the grounds that the two superpow-
ers (obviously with the United States in the lead, although Beijing did not