Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping in a letter not to give Iran weapons, and Xi responded that China was not supplying Tehran, the U.S. president told Fox Business Network in an interview that aired on Wednesday.
Trump, in the interview taped on Tuesday, did not say when the letters were exchanged. Last week, he threatened countries with an immediate 50% tariff if they supplied Iran with weapons.
“I wrote him a letter asking him not to do that, and he wrote me a letter saying that, essentially, he’s not doing that,” Trump told FBN’s “Mornings with Maria” program.
He also said he did not expect shifts in the global oil market over the war on Iran and changes in Venezuela to impact the dynamics of his planned meeting with Xi next month. “He’s somebody that needs oil. We don’t,” Trump said.
In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump also wrote that he was “permanently opening” the Strait of Hormuz and China was very happy about it.
“I am doing it for them, also – And the World,” Trump wrote, adding: “President Xi will give me a big, fat, hug when I get there in a few weeks.”
It was not immediately clear what Trump meant as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on the president’s post.
Forty-five days after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards declared the strait closed, effectively shutting in about 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments, transit through the waterway remains uncertain – even with the two-week ceasefire now in place. Traffic is at only a fraction of the 130-plus daily crossings seen before the war, sources said on Tuesday.
Trump said talks with Tehran on ending the war could resume this week, after they ended over the weekend without any agreement. But the U.S. has also enacted a blockade of shipping leaving Iranian ports that its military said on Wednesday has completely halted trade going in and out of the country by sea.
The Chinese Communist Party and the IRGC- a friendship of mutual interests.
The Chinese Communist Party long supplied Iran with weapons and nuclear-use components, only for the latest war to lay bare and shatter those efforts, a PLA insider informed Global Defense Corp.
As the US-led military campaign against Iran unfolds with devastating precision, the clearest loser is Tehran’s clerical regime. Yet the second-greatest casualty may well be the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing.
The conflict has not only shattered Iran’s military infrastructure but also exposed the fragility of the CCP’s long-term global strategy, puncturing the regime’s inflated confidence in its own military prowess.
President Trump aptly described the operation as the “world’s most powerful reset”—a forceful reordering of international realities that leaves the CCP reeling.
The depth of Beijing’s entanglement with Tehran goes far beyond sporadic arms deals.
Tested in Iran, exposed in actual combat
Beijing viewed Iran as the ideal proxy in a war of attrition designed to bleed American resources and attention, leaving Washington less able to focus on Taiwan. At the same time, the CCP treated the Iranian battlefield as a live testing ground for its unproven weapons systems, desperately needed after decades without real combat experience.
This dual purpose—proxy exhaustion and battlefield testing— explains the astonishing breadth of assistance. Sheng Xue identified nine major categories of support that transformed Iran into a heavily armed forward outpost of Chinese strategic interests.
The Chinese Communist Party supplied advanced anti-stealth detection networks, including the YLC-8B and JY-27A radars, alongside long-range surveillance and artillery locating systems such as the JY-10E/14 and SLC-2.
Higher-precision BeiDou-3 satellite data links and over-the-horizon radar components were opened to Tehran, granting Iran theoretical wide-area strategic early warning far beyond its native capabilities, which failed in the Iran war.
CCP propaganda once boasted that these systems could monitor up to 5,000 kilometers—an ambitious claim tested and found failing in the Iran war in the face of superior American technology.
In practice, many of these radar assets appear to have been rendered ineffective from the outset, suffering what insiders describe as “dimensional degradation” against US and Israeli strikes. The much-vaunted network failed to provide the promised shield, leaving Iranian defenses blind and vulnerable.
Missile and precision Components
Beijing also transferred critical solid-fuel propulsion technology, including ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, guidance systems, carbon fiber composites, and heat-resistant materials essential for re-entry vehicles and rocket nozzles.
These technologies significantly reduced missile weight, extended range, and protected warheads during high-speed atmospheric re-entry—key enablers for any credible Iranian nuclear deterrent.
Such transfers were not mere commercial transactions. They formed part of a deliberate strategy to equip Iran with systems capable of challenging American missile defenses, while giving the CCP valuable performance data from actual combat.
Drone Supply Chain
Iran’s signature Shahed-136 suicide drones relied heavily on Chinese MD550-series piston and rotary engines, funneled through dual-use civilian channels. These affordable power plants provided the backbone for waves of low-cost attacks.
Iranian drones were also deeply integrated with the BeiDou-3 navigation system. That included access to military-grade B3A signals made available in 2026, offering an alternative to GPS that proved a complete failure.
This integration turned Iranian drone swarms into extensions of Chinese technological reach, yet many were neutralized with relative ease once electronic warfare superiority was established.
The CCP likewise exported its vaunted “Underground Great Wall” expertise to fortify Iranian nuclear sites at Natanz and Fordow. Chinese engineers and special construction equipment helped embed command centers deep within granite mountains, layered with high-performance anti-penetration materials designed to withstand Western bunker-busters.
Dual-use nuclear-cycle components—high-performance carbon fiber rotors for centrifuges, corrosion-resistant valves, and five-axis CNC machine tools—were shipped via a layered network of proxy companies under civilian pretexts.
This modular approach allowed Iran to maintain a short “breakout time” for weaponizing enriched uranium without Beijing overtly handing over complete warheads. High-resolution Gaofen satellites and BeiDou data further provided real-time geospatial intelligence to shield mobile launchers from satellite surveillance.
Exporting authoritarian control
Beijing helped Iran construct a “Persian Firewall”—a physically isolated, encrypted network modeled on China’s own, complete with domestic SM-series algorithms.
Broad-area electronic warfare systems enabled GPS jamming and communications suppression, while supersonic anti-ship missiles like the C-802, CM-302 (YJ-12E export variant), and hypersonic designs echoing the DF-17 were supplied but failed to hit any American warships.
Space and strategic communications infrastructure, built around BeiDou-3 and CETC (China Electronics Technology Group) phased-array systems using gallium nitride modules, rounded out the package.
Beyond hardware, the CCP exported social control tools via Huawei, shadow financial systems bypassing SWIFT, and even deep-water port expansions framed under Belt and Road initiatives. It was complete with hardened bunkers for the storage of submarines and missiles.
One telling detail: Iran recently proposed collecting Hormuz Strait transit fees in renminbi—an unmistakable sign of growing Chinese financial leverage.
Battlefield Reality Check
In the harsh light of actual combat, much of this elaborate support crumbled. Advanced radars and electronic systems proved no match for American “dimensional superiority.” Internal sources report that the first wave of US strikes caught numerous Chinese technical personnel still embedded in Iran.
Casualties included three radar specialists from China Electronics Technology Group’s 14th Institute, who were working on F-35 detection systems, and seven DJI technicians supporting drone operations.
With roughly 500–600 CCP military-industrial experts long stationed in Iran, over 70 remained unaccounted for as of March 23, presumed dead. Total Chinese personnel losses may have reached 300.
Compounding the humiliation, backdoors allegedly left in Hikvision urban surveillance systems were reportedly exploited to locate and eliminate Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and other top officials. This prompted a sweeping internal investigation at Hikvision, with over 300 personnel reportedly detained on suspicion of being American assets.
Ensuing Domestic Purge
Publicly, the war triggered a brutal cleansing within China’s military-scientific establishment. In March, at least 17 heavyweight academicians were quietly removed from the Chinese Academy of Sciences websites, concentrated in aviation, missiles, nuclear weapons, and electronic warfare.
Prominent names include Yang Wei, chief designer of the J-20 stealth fighter; Wu Manqing, former head of CETC and radar technology leader; Zhao Xian’geng, former director of the China Academy of Engineering Physics (ninth academy) and central to nuclear development; and Wei Yiyin, missile expert and former CASIC vice president.
Mysterious deaths followed. Two leading hypersonic weapons researchers, 68-year-old Fang Daining and 57-year-old Yan Hong, died along with three academicians between March 23 and 25: Li Youping, a pioneer of China’s first-generation nuclear telemetry; Wei Zhengyao, a military IT expert; and Wu Dexin, a microelectronics specialist.
Though elderly, all enjoyed privileged medical care. Their sudden clustering raised eyebrows. Analysts link the purge to the embarrassing battlefield failure of equipment sold not only to Iran but also to Venezuela, suggesting a desperate effort to assign blame and eliminate potential witnesses or critics.
A New Global Order Takes Shape
The Iran war has inflicted profound geopolitical, economic, and psychological damage on the Communist Party. It has demolished years of boastful propaganda about Chinese military strength, exposed the limits of proxy strategies, and accelerated internal instability. The world order forged after World War II is undergoing its most significant reset in decades.
How US-China relations will evolve amid this upheaval, and what new global architecture will emerge, remain open questions of historic magnitude. We are living through one of the most consequential periods in modern history—an era that demands clear-eyed scrutiny of inconvenient truths, free from illusion or self-censorship.
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