Chinese strategists and public opinion have turned sharply against Iran's military credibility after years of watching Tehran respond to attacks with what Chinese netizens now call "performative retaliation," a new Foreign Affairs analysis has found. Beijing's confidence in Iran as a regional power has collapsed.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing Yun Sun's analysis in Foreign Affairs, the pattern of disillusionment stretches back years. When the United States assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and when Israel struck the Iranian embassy in Syria in 2024, Tehran's retaliation was seen as "underwhelming" by Chinese observers. The 12-day war in June 2025 deepened the contempt further.
During that conflict, Iran offered advance warning to Qatar and the United States before launching missiles - a move Chinese analysts found "disproportionately weak and ineffective." The broader pattern of Iran choosing de-escalation over confrontation has led Beijing to conclude that Tehran uses proxy wars and asymmetric warfare merely to "inflate its capacity and disguise its internal weaknesses."
Iran's treatment of its proxy network reinforced this assessment. Since 2023, groups in the so-called axis of resistance have been targeted and decimated one after another. Israeli forces destroyed Hamas and Hezbollah, yet Tehran failed to lend meaningful support or retaliate effectively. In December 2024, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Zarif publicly denied Iran's relationships with these proxy groups, and in April 2025, Iran evacuated its military personnel from Yemen - abandoning its Houthi allies to keep alive the hope of negotiations with Washington.
Sun writes that pessimism about Iran's fate "is now baked into Chinese assessments of the Middle East." Prominent Chinese pundit Hu Xijin has publicly lamented the situation Iran's people now face - and blamed Tehran's leadership for leading the country into it. Beijing has effectively concluded that Iran's revolutionary image was a facade masking a state unwilling to back its rhetoric with action.
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