We Cut Off Its Oil & Attacked Its Partners; China Can Afford To Wait

There’s an old saying: When your enemy is digging himself a hole, the smart move is to hand them a bigger shovel. China appears to be doing exactly that — watching, waiting, keeping its powder dry while America commits massive military resources to the other side of the world.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, USC professor of international affairs David C. Kang returns to examine whether China’s restraint vindicates his contrarian thesis, or reveals something more calculated.

His research challenges every assumption driving current US policy. Analyzing 12,000 official Chinese sources, Kang found China’s territorial claims have actually shrunk since the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). 

Rhetoric about displacing America is absent from Chinese leadership. Beijing’s focus remains on sovereignty, borders, economic relations — not global domination.

But the Iran crisis has turned theory into test case. The United States struck Iran, killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and shut down the Strait of Hormuz — through which 40–50 percent of China’s oil flows. 

Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro sits in a New York detention cell; China’s Venezuelan oil is curtailed. Two of Beijing’s closest energy partners eliminated in two months. China’s response? Evacuations. Diplomatic phone calls. Measured statements about restraint.

Kang explains why Xi Jinping has purged 48 of his top 50 People’s Liberation Army generals in 18 months. Why Canadian and European leaders are rushing to Beijing as America grows unpredictable. Why the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) answers to the Communist Party, not the Chinese state.

So what’s really happening? Is China the transactional, domestically focused power Kang describes — or are we watching strategic patience while Beijing lets Washington exhaust itself fighting wars on the other side of the world?

Because if we’re wrong about what China wants, we’re preparing for the wrong war. And if we’re right but responding inappropriately, we’re creating the very threat we claim to contain. Either way, Kang argues, the consequences will define a generation.

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Full Text Transcript:

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[00:00:09] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Two weeks ago, the United States and Israel struck Iran. They killed Ayatollah Khamenei. They devastated Iran’s nuclear facilities and military infrastructure, and almost immediately the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil flows, effectively shut down. Not because Iranian forces physically blocked it, but because insurance underwriters won’t cover the risk and commercial shipping simply stopped. China imports 40 percent of its oil and 30 percent of its liquefied natural gas through that strait. Beijing has evacuated 3,000 nationals from Iran. It has pressed Tehran not to target energy infrastructure. And beyond diplomatic protest, calling this a war that benefited no one, China has done remarkably little. For those who see China as an expansionist power preparing to challenge American hegemony, this restraint is baffling. Two of Beijing’s closest partners, Maduro in Venezuela, Khamenei in Iran, taken out in two months. China’s energy lifeline disrupted, and the response is evacuations and phone calls urging restraint. But what if the conventional wisdom has it backward? What if China’s muted response isn’t weakness or strategic patience, but evidence of something we fundamentally misread? When we spoke with USC professor David Kang several months ago, he presented research that challenged every assumption driving current US policy toward China. He and his colleagues analyzed 12,000 articles from official Chinese sources, hundreds of Xi Jinping’s speeches. They found that China’s territorial claims haven’t expanded; they’ve actually shrunk by 4 million square kilometers. The Chinese rhetoric consistently states no intention to displace the United States, that China’s aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited, focused on borders, sovereignty, and economic relations, not global conquest. The Iran crisis has turned that argument into a live test. Because if China were truly the revisionist power preparing for confrontation that Washington believes, this would be the moment. The US is committed to a massive military operation on the other side of the world. Energy flows are disrupted. European allies are scrambling. Russia is watching. This is the opening, and yet China is positioning itself as the responsible mediator, calling for dialogue, preparing for trade talks with Trump, and doing everything possible to avoid escalation. There are two ways to read this. One is that Kang is right, that we’ve projected fears and assumptions onto China that don’t match what they actually want or how they actually behave, that we’re preparing for a war of our own creation while missing the competition that actually matters. The other is that China is playing a much longer game than we realize, that restraint now is preparation for action later, that every general Xi has purged, every diplomatic protest Beijing has filed, every energy vulnerability they’re managing is part of a calculus we’re only beginning to understand. Today we’re going to examine David Kang’s thesis against what’s happening right now, because the gap between what we believe about China and what China actually does has never been more consequential, and getting it wrong in either direction could define the next generation. It is my pleasure to welcome professor of international relations at USC, David Kang, back to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. David, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:03:54] David Kang: Well, thank you for having me. It’s a delight to be asked back.

[00:03:59] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is great to have you here. Thank you so much. As we look at what’s transpiring right now, at core, the US has taken out in the past two months two of Beijing’s closest allies, two of its partners that it relies on for oil in Venezuela and in Iran, and the response from China has been very muted. First of all, talk about that in a general sense.

[00:04:22] David Kang: Sure. The first thing that I’d point out, I try and make this clear, is America has views of alliances that are these deep, tight, and meshing types of relationships — NATO, the US-Japan, US-Korea alliance. We call them allies, but they’re not allies in any sense for China, Venezuela, or Iran, the way that we think of American allies are. These are transactional relationships. These are countries that they care about. But in terms of being deep allies for which China is going to come to their aid, I think that’s always been an exaggeration of how China views these countries. They’re important, and China will give them attention, but they’re not allies that China is going to have to rush to defend by any stretch of the imagination. And I think we’re seeing that right now.

[00:05:16] Jeff Schechtman: Are there allies that China has that they would rush to defend?

[00:05:20] David Kang: The one that I can think of that is probably the closest to an American ally, and even there I’m not sure that would work, would be North Korea. North Korea and China in the 1950s had a mutual defense treaty. They actually had a sort of treaty, and maybe 20 years ago, China said they might view that treaty still in existence if the United States got too adventurous with North Korea a long time ago. Even there, I don’t think China views North Korea the same way that America views, for example, its relationship with South Korea. So I don’t think there’s many at all Chinese alliances the way we think about them.

[00:06:00] Jeff Schechtman: What about the fact that there is so much at stake economically for China in terms of both Venezuelan and Iranian oil being essentially cut off?

[00:06:10] David Kang: Yeah, I mean, this is important, as we’re seeing with the markets. This is important for the entire globe. China is not unique in how much we’re affected by what’s going on in the Strait of Hormuz and the US-Israeli attack on Iran. Two points about that. The first one is, this is something that the Chinese have been preparing for for a while. Their electrification in terms of solar, in terms of renewable energy, and in terms of EVs, all up and down the sort of production and consumption chain of energy, is in part an attempt to reduce their dependence on oil. So of any of the large countries, China is probably as well-positioned to handle this because it’s been moving much more quickly than the United States toward electric renewables and electric vehicles and stuff like that. That being said, they think that China may reach peak oil consumption in a year or two, and then it’ll begin to fall. So they won’t be completely independent, obviously ever, but we’re reaching sort of peak Chinese oil demand. But they’re still responsible. They still really need oil from both Iran and Venezuela. But this is a global issue. It’s not unique to China in any way.

[00:07:32] Jeff Schechtman: And according to reports, China’s oil reserves will only last about 100 days, which is not a long time, given how long this war could actually last.

[00:07:44] David Kang: I don’t think any country has the kinds of reserves that they wish they had. So China will have to do something. But I think here as well, when we think about what China can do, getting involved in the war is probably one of the least likely options. What China has tried to do for a long time is to avoid getting involved in these kinds of regional entanglements. And again, as we were talking about the first time I was on your podcast, most of what China is really committed to doing is being involved in its near abroad, on its borders, with its sovereignty. So although it has many economic relationships and diplomatic relationships in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in Africa, I don’t see any actual Chinese intervention. I can’t see that happening.

[00:08:39] Jeff Schechtman: Does it change the equation at all with respect to what China may or may not do vis-à-vis Taiwan?

[00:08:46] David Kang: That’s one of the questions that people always ask. They used to ask this about the Ukraine war. What lessons did China learn from the Russia-Ukraine war? People will say things like, if the US military is so clearly tied up and diverted over in Iran, maybe this is the window of opportunity for China to invade Taiwan and try and take it back. There’s talk of how at some point the US munitions and its actual military forces might be diverted from the Pacific to the Middle East because of the ongoing war with Iran. My response to that has been the most important factor that will trigger Chinese action is what Taiwan does. It’s a local issue. It’s not that China is sitting around ready to invade at any moment, just waiting for the window of opportunity. What the Chinese have said continuously has been, we reserve the right to use all options if Taiwan declares independence. That clause, that if Taiwan declares actual independence, would be the real trigger for China to do anything, whether it’s military or diplomatic or economic. Obviously, the Chinese military is going to try and learn lessons about the US military. There are things that they will learn about what’s happening. But the fundamental calculus on Taiwan for China hasn’t been changed by the Iran war.

[00:10:21] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about that because it was exactly where I wanted to go with you next. What the Chinese might learn from what they’re witnessing in US action in Iran right now?

[00:10:30] David Kang: Obviously, the war is very new. But the longer it goes on, what happens is all the militaries around the world will find out what the US is good at, what the US is not good at. Warfare is evolving so quickly now. One of the big ones, of course, is drones. Ukraine is now the world leader. Ukraine and Russia are world leaders in drones and warfare because they’ve been doing it right now. Countries like China will learn from the US how good they are with drones, how good their actual air defenses are, what their operational capabilities are like. So there’s a lot of things that countries are going to learn about how the US military operates. The other thing that the Chinese will find out, of course, is how much back munitions the US has. There has been talk of, for example, taking the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defense) batteries from Korea over to the Middle East because they’re running out of air defense batteries there. So the Chinese military can learn a lot. But again, the Taiwan Strait is such a specific issue that these would be sort of general lessons, but I don’t think there’s anything specific about what China could do toward Taiwan, or what the US would do in Taiwan.

[00:11:51] Jeff Schechtman: With respect to the Chinese military, we’ve heard these stories in the past 18 months or so that Xi has gotten rid of about 48 out of 50 of his top generals. What’s going on there?

[00:12:06] David Kang: It is unprecedented, and I use that word carefully. This is a purge of China’s top leadership, military leadership. Mao did something like that in the 1960s. Deng Xiaoping did something like that in the late 1980s or the 1990s, but nothing where, for example, many of the top leadership have been removed. The Central Military Commission is the top group committee of Chinese leaders. There is only one general who’s still there since 2022. The other eight have been purged. So everybody’s new, or everyone is gone. All the old leadership is gone. In the last couple of years, over 100 generals have been purged across the various leadership commands. We are all speculating about what’s actually going on. Is this anti-corruption? Is this Xi trying to consolidate power? I would be the last person to tell you that I have any idea what Xi Jinping is thinking right now or what the motives are. So I want to be very humble here. But with that many new generals and leadership across the various commands, there’s a real question of whether they would be able to do something like an invasion of Taiwan tomorrow, given that these are so many new leaders in so many different types of commands.

[00:13:45] Jeff Schechtman: Of course, the other side of that is that he’s looking for the ones that will do his bidding and do something with respect to Taiwan.

[00:13:52] David Kang: Exactly. But are they experienced enough to do it and pull it off? This would be a question. But yeah, about half of the top leadership has been replaced. So he’s either getting more loyalty or he’s getting rid. And the other thing is that everyone knows that PLA is totally corrupt. So claiming that you’re getting rid of someone because they’re corrupt is not the real reason. Something else is going on. And so, we can speculate what Xi is doing. But I would go back to our knowledge — and this is from our reading of all those various Chinese texts — the Chinese do not have a plan to invade Taiwan by 2027, as has often been said, or by 2049, the anniversary of the unification of the mainland. There are things that the Chinese are doing to prepare to be able to, among many other options, have a military option on Taiwan. But nothing I’ve seen says they have some arbitrary deadline that they are going to attack by.

[00:15:05] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the PLA and the structure of it and whether it is part of the state apparatus or whether it’s part of the CCP. And does that make any difference?

[00:15:15] David Kang: Well, I mean, this is one of the interesting things about any sort of communist or Leninist state. You have a government, and then you have the Communist Party. And so, for example, Xi Jinping right now is like president of the government, but he’s also the head of the party. And of those two, he’s actually head of the Central Military Commission as well, which is officially part of the government overall. But when Xi Jinping wears all three hats, it doesn’t really matter. The least important hat is probably president of the government. It would not be surprising to me if Xi Jinping gave up that hat but kept head of the party and head of the military as two of the hats. And so, he can look like he’s not clinging to power, but he can still basically wield power. To that end, the PLA, it’s never really clear how this works because there’s a formal organizational structure. But then you’ve got Xi Jinping who’s in charge of all of them, and that’s actually what really matters more. Does that make sense?

[00:16:26] Jeff Schechtman: Yeah. There is a lot of talk that you hear. I mean, and this is counter to so much of what we’re talking about now, that there are those in defense circles that really do believe that part of the attack on Iran and part of the attack on Venezuela was in some ways a way of either neutralizing or sending a message to China because of concerns about China’s potential to attack. Talk about that.

[00:16:53] David Kang: First of all, I think that’s assuming far too much strategic thinking for the current US government. There’s all this talk of Trump is playing chess and 3D chess and stuff like that. And everything I’ve seen about the attack on Iran is that they don’t even know their own justification. They’ve said it was nukes, then they said it wasn’t nukes. They said it was to regime change, and then he said it wasn’t regime change. So I think it’s fairly clear that it’s not. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz was one of the most predictable things that you could have guessed at. And yet the US seems to have been completely unprepared. So I’m not sure that this is sort of sending a message or preparing or softening up China or anything like that. I don’t think they’ve thought that far in advance. The other point I would make is even if they did, these are very, very different countries than China and the PLA. So however the US military does with a quick decapitation in Venezuela, or even this very substantial military engagement in Iran, is not the same as what would happen if the US were to engage a nuclear-armed, massive, gigantic superpower on its own shores that has been preparing to defend itself for the last 60, 70 years. I think the situations are so different; I’m not sure that the US is going to get any leverage out of that with China.

[00:18:24] Jeff Schechtman: What is your sense of what’s been going on with respect to Xi Jinping and the conversations that have been happening ostensibly about trade with Carney in Canada, with Starmer in the UK, and with Macron in France? Talk about that.

[00:18:40] David Kang: Well, I think this is in some ways, again, a reflection of the fact that, in the United States, we view China as this inevitable threat, this rising threat, this expansionist power. And basically, as we talked about last time, both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans in DC, basically don’t question that China is a grave threat to the United States. I disagree. My coauthors and I disagree, but many of the countries around the region, even Canada, are clearly not on the same page with us on that. And as the US becomes a less reliable trading ally, trading partner, as the US engages in some more unexpected foreign policies like they have with Venezuela and Iran, countries like Germany, the UK, and Canada, are making nice to China. I think the overall Chinese approach over the last year or two with Trump has been, we are now much more prepared to push back if we have to, which is where both the US and China were threatening each other with tariffs. But also, if the US is digging a hole, we are not going to do anything. We’re just going to sit back and let the US dig a hole. So Canada going to China and saying, hey, let’s start buying your EVs, your electric vehicle cars, is about a 180-degree switch from a couple years ago, when under the Biden administration, Canada went along with restrictions on Chinese EV imports into Canada. It’s a 180-degree switch. And the Chinese are saying, okay, great, let’s do business. Let’s do it. South Korea has done that. The South Korean president went with about 25 business leaders. So these other countries are moving not necessarily closer — that’s the wrong way to think about it — but making better relations with China, especially on trade and investment, as the US becomes less reliable and more unpredictable.

[00:20:44] Jeff Schechtman: And as the US becomes less reliable, is there a sense that Macron and Starmer and the Germans are talking to China as a security partner or just a trading partner?

[00:20:57] David Kang: Right now, I think it’s mostly about economics. It’s mostly about business. For 30 years, I’ve been reading predictions of Chinese economic collapse. “It’ll happen. It’s going to happen.” It hasn’t happened yet. And its economy becomes stronger and more diversified and moves up the production chain. And so, countries are dealing with it more and more. It’s transactional. It is very transactional. But you’re getting an expansion of economic relations between many countries that are ostensibly close US allies that are moving to get EVs and batteries and everything else from China.

[00:21:43] Jeff Schechtman: And when Trump goes to China in April, I guess it is, if that all happens as scheduled, what does that look like, do you think?

[00:21:51] David Kang: Well, this is what we’re speculating about right now. The Chinese as yet have not, I think, formally confirmed the visit. Everyone’s been building up toward it. It was going to be about trade and trying to come to some modus vivendi of something, this, that, or the other thing. I’m not sure now, given what’s going on with the Iran war. I would suspect that Beijing will still want to visit with Trump, but I don’t think it’ll be focused nearly as much on the economic relationship as it will be some kind of a far less substantive, probably far less pompous circumstance and more about trying to just be able to meet and simply be able to be in the same room together and talk about their differences over Iran or various things. I think the chance for economic substantive agreements is probably much lower simply because of the US war with Iran.

[00:22:55] Jeff Schechtman: Given what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine and the US and Iran, does China view itself as we might see it as kind of the grown-up in the room?

[00:23:09] David Kang: I’m not sure they would call themselves the grown-up in the room. I mean, that’s a little too much. I don’t think the Chinese top leadership is that confident, but I do think they are trying to be the predictable partner. I absolutely think that the Chinese are happy to let the US dig a hole, are happy to let the US make these kinds of, you know, getting mad at allies and threatening tariffs, invading various countries, threatening to invade Greenland. All of this makes China, simply as long as it’s not doing dumb stuff, look that much more reliable and predictable and a country worth doing business with. And so, in that sense, I think they view a lot of these as self-made errors by the United States, and they don’t really need to do much to exploit. One of the things that’s interesting is that Wang Yi is the top Chinese diplomat, and he’s been very critical of the US over the invasion of Iran. But that’s about all they’ve done is they’ve said, you know, this is awful, et cetera, et cetera. They are much more muted in what they’re doing than trying to take advantage. I think they’re just going to sit back, manage, again, their own domestic economy, try and figure out what’s going on, and let the US be the one that’s making the mistakes at this point.

[00:24:27] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about Japan and other Asian countries and how they view all of this vis-à-vis China.

[00:24:35] David Kang: Japan is very interesting because they have a prime minister, a female prime minister, Takaichi, who is very hardline. She’s very sort of pro-Japanese nationalism, has made a number of very provocative statements about Taiwan and China. For example, she became prime minister last fall and right away said anything that happens in Taiwan is a security concern to Japan, which the Chinese really did not like. She didn’t exactly claim that Japan would defend Taiwan, but no Japanese prime minister has ever linked Japan so closely to Taiwan. She is reportedly planning to go to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which is where Japanese war dead are memorialized, and has talked very hardline about doubling defense spending and all this kind of stuff for Japan’s military. So on the one hand, it looks like your standard thing about where once China gets bigger, Japan is going to get more, will balance against it and be afraid. I’m not sure that’s the act. That’s very easy, and the Americans are all saying that, but I’m not sure that’s the way to look at it. I actually think that what the Japanese are doing right now is hedging, and they’re not hedging China. They’re hedging on the fact that the US is less reliable. So many of the moves that the Japanese are talking about in terms of defense spending and things like that, first of all, they’re real problems with Japan actually doing very much. Their economy is not growing very large. You can’t divert that much from the economy and put it to defense without making the economy suffer worse. The population is declining, so even now the Japanese military is understaffed. They would like to have, I think, about 100,000 more military than they do, and that number is only going to get worse. So there are a lot of reasons to think that there’s a lot of talk about a Japanese remilitarization, but it’ll probably be more muted than we expect. And on top of that, I see these moves by Japan as hedging for an unpredictable United States. That doesn’t mean they’re going to acquiesce to the Chinese, but this I don’t think is a full-throated balancing of China. It’s much more preparing for a US that is distracted, that is possibly not as reliable as they think, and that’s what I would say about Japan right now. I mean, we’ll see, but that’s what I would say about Japan.

[00:27:10] Jeff Schechtman: And as we have Japan, and I assume other Asian nations and certainly the Europeans, as we talked about before, all hedging against the US in their relationship with China. Talk about how you think China sees that. I mean, yes, there’s an element of, you know, letting the other guy keep digging the proverbial hole, but do they see it as part of any kind of a grand plan, or do they just take it as it comes at this point?

[00:27:37] David Kang: Yeah, I think that most of what various leaders, and particularly Xi Jinping over the last 10, 15 years or so, have been focused on has been the domestic politics and the economy of what China is doing first. I think they are still focused on that so that when they wake up, they’re worried about — Is there going to be a real estate bust? What about pollution? What about, you know, various politics and things like that? A rapidly aging society? They are still concerned about sovereignty on their borders. These are China’s prime foreign policy concerns, which are Xinjiang, Tibet, and obviously Taiwan. And of those, it’s really Taiwan, the only one that’s an issue. And then I think that they are focused on having as many economic relationships around the world as possible, and it’s purely transactional. And so, to that extent, there is less pushback on China than we think there is in the United States. And I think the Chinese are simply making relationships with all these various different countries and being willing to be as transactional as possible. It’s not that Chinese believe more in, say, free trade principles or something like that. They’re willing to do a deal. They’re willing to do a deal with South Korea, with the UK, with, you know, Canada. And this is simply the way they’ve always behaved. I don’t see a whole lot different right now.

[00:29:05] Jeff Schechtman: Given then how transactional they are, and how absolutely transactional the president of the United States is, what comes of that that could be positive?

[00:29:16] David Kang: Well, the positive side is that both Trump and Xi Jinping are willing to make a deal, as we saw in the last year at the meeting in Korea and in Busan. And as both sides were threatening and had 145 percent tariffs and stuff like that, they both then backed down and were able to find some “face-saving” way of still having an economic relationship without falling on their sword because they’re so determined on principle. To that end, when I look out to the future, what we really want to see is what’s going to happen on the trade front between the US and China. Because I don’t think military, you know, we’re not going to invade China. China is not going to invade Taiwan anytime soon. So that’s not something I worry about. I look at the economic relationship. I look at what China is going to do on rare earths and what the US is going to do on EVs. There are many, many places that both these countries would be way better off if we continue to trade with each other. And can Xi Jinping and Trump get there? I don’t know, but they are both transactional enough to be willing to try.

[00:30:32] Jeff Schechtman: We will see. David Kang, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today.

[00:30:37] David Kang: Thank you for having me.

[00:30:38] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.