574 { China’s Quest
Security Council over Iran’s nuclear program (discussed below) was one rea-
son why Iranian leaders favored China as Iran’s development partner.
In 1997, Beijing quietly acceded to long-standing US demands and ended
China’s nuclear cooperation with Iran.^28 As discussed in an earlier chapter,
since 1985 China had been Tehran’s major partner in nuclear science and
energy, and had supplied the IRI with a range of core materials, technolo-
gies, and equipment between 1985 and 1996. But in 1997, Beijing suspended
that nuclear cooperation as part of the renormalization of PRC-US ties. This
was a major Chinese concession to the United States. The American side, in a
display of deft diplomacy, said very little about this important Chinese con-
cession. Beijing’s move was motivated by a desire to avoid a confrontational
and rivalrous relation with the United States. Since the 1970s, the Americans
had argued that nuclear nonproliferation was a shared PRC and US interest
in which the two powers should cooperate, Iran and North Korea being the
two key areas in which this Sino-American cooperation was most impera-
tive, or so said American representatives. From Beijing’s perspective, with
the strategic ballast of parallel interests vis-à-vis the USSR gone, new areas
of cooperation were extremely useful to restabilize the PRC’s vital relation
with the United States. Nor did there exist with Iran the hard realist calculus
of balance of power that existed with Pakistan vis-à-vis India. This strategic
logic is clear. But there may have been more. Because of its robust decade-long
cooperation with Iran in the nuclear sector (which presumably gave Chinese
intelligence a good knowledge of IRI nuclear programs and purposes), and
because of Tehran’s occasional solicitations of a partnership to drive the
United States out of the Persian Gulf and East Asia, China may have con-
cluded that the IRI was driving toward nuclear weapons and that it would be
best if China disassociated itself from that effort as soon as possible. Chinese
association with Iranian nuclear weaponization could have a seriously ad-
verse on PRC-US relations. Earlier rather than later Chinese disassociation
from the IRI nuclear program was thus prudent.
PRC defection from nuclear cooperation with Tehran was a sharp blow to
the PRC-IRI relationship. High-level leadership exchanges withered for sev-
eral years. But as with the setback in the relationship following Hua Guofeng’s
disastrous 1978 visit, Beijing gradually rebuilt the partnership. Chinese sup-
port in Security Council debates over Tehran’s nuclear programs now became
the major form of PRC political support for Tehran.
In the 2000s, Iran’s nuclear program again came before the international
community, posing yet another set of Washington-or-Tehran choices for
Beijing. Following a series of revelations in 2001 about a large and secret
Iranian uranium enrichment facility, in 2005 the IAEA determined that
over a period of eighteen years the IRI had conducted a series of nuclear
activities that Tehran, as a NPT signatory, was obligated to report to the
IAEA, but had not. A number of these previously undisclosed nuclear