570 { China’s Quest
During their exchanges of views on international issues of common concern,
Chinese leaders discovered in the IRI an ambitious regional power deeply
resentful of US domination of its region and of US efforts to spread liberal
democratic values around the world. That is to say, PRC leaders discovered in
the IRI a like-minded state dreaming of and willing to work toward an end to
US hegemony. CCP leaders did not, of course, share, or even understand, the
religious fundamentalism of IRI leaders. The notion that religious scholars
should constitute the highest political authority of a state—the core notion of
Ruhollah Khomeini’s “rulership of the righteous jurisprudent” that inspired
both the 1979 revolution and the state structure of the IRI—made no sense to
the CCP, or to most ordinary Chinese for that matter. China’s long tradition
was, after all, one of rule by a secular, rationalistic bureaucracy. Moreover, a
large portion of Chinese, certainly CCP leaders, was atheist. But Beijing was
willing to set aside these divergent worldviews and build cooperation in areas
of common interest and mutual agreement.
The problem for Beijing was that escalating US conflict with the IRI led
Washington to object time and again to aspects of PRC-IRI cooperation, and
to demand that China disengage from particular types of cooperation with
the IRI. It is not possible to trace the downward trajectory of US-IRI relations
here. Stated simply, those relations were bad and generally got worse. By 1995,
the Clinton administration declared “dual containment” of both the IRI and
Iraq under Saddam Hussein to be US policy. Often, in its effort to “contain”
the IRI, Washington would ask Beijing to cooperate on this or that issue.
Between the founding of the IRI in 1979 and 2014, there were at least thirteen
times that Washington laid IRI-related demands before Chinese representa-
tives, placing Beijing in the dilemma of saying no to the Americans and con-
tinuing cooperation with Iran or of acceding to American demands, thereby
demonstrating to Tehran that China was really not a very reliable partner and
possibly helping Washington realize its dream of hegemony over Persian Gulf
oil. Figure 21-1 lists the instances of China’s Persian Gulf dilemma of accept-
ing or rejecting US demands for China’s cooperation vis-à-vis the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
The stakes for Beijing in managing this dilemma were potentially high.
On the one hand, the favorable macro-climate for China’s New Long March
toward modernization depended on amicable relations with the United States.
Moreover, as we have seen, Chinese leaders saw the Persian Gulf as the focus
of an aggressive US drive for world hegemony in the extremely unbalanced
post–Cold War international system. If China supported the IRI against the
United States in the very center of Washington’s drive for global hegemony,
PRC-US ties could suffer considerably. The PRC might find itself in the same
condition as the late USSR, with the United States viewing it as a hostile and
rival power. That was ultimately one major factor bringing low the USSR
which PRC leaders sought to avoid. In addition to these elemental power