5 Charts Show China’s Oil Dilemma After Us Strikes

President Donald Trump’s latest attack on Iran takes a big economic bite out of one of America’s chief rivals: China.

Over the span of two months, the Trump administration has removed the leaders of two countries that both shared China as their most important crude oil customer. Although China buys oil from nations all across the Middle East, Iran was second only to Saudi Arabia as its supplier last year, according to a POLITICO analysis of data provided by market research firm Kpler.

Almost all of Iran’s exported oil, and more than half of Venezuela’s, went last year to China, which remained one of the only purchasers of goods from the two heavily sanctioned nations. The two countries combined represented some 17 percent of China’s overall oil purchases — a meaningful share for the world’s largest importer of crude oil.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Saturday said it was “highly concerned” by the attacks on Iran and called for an end to the war. The squeeze on China’s energy supply also comes just weeks before Trump is slated to hold a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Any new challenges in obtaining oil from the Persian Gulf could drive China to expand its reliance on Russian energy supplies.

“If the conflict drags on for a couple of weeks, the most logical solution for Beijing is going to be to turn to more Russian crude,” said Andon Pavlov, Kpler’s oil and tanker research director.

According to Kpler, China has a significant amount of crude held in storage and had already begun ramping down its imports of Iranian oil in 2026, in exchange for more Russian oil, even prior to Saturday’s fighting.

Following the strikes, ships have begun to avoid the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran — a critical shipping lane for Gulf nations to export oil to Asia. China in 2025 received about half of its imported oil from the six Gulf countries that rely on the strait. Other large crude oil producers in the region — including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates — transport almost all their crude exports through the geographic bottleneck.

Trump did not mention Iranian oil in his address announcing the strikes Saturday, marking a contrast from his remarks after the raid against Nicolás Maduro, when he said that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and have U.S. companies “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Iran exported 520 million barrels of crude oil to China in 2025 — more than three times as much as Venezuela. Another 1.4 billion barrels came from the five other countries that rely on the Strait of Hormuz. In total, more than half of China’s crude oil imports come from countries that now face trade disruptions.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned ships not to pass the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reported on Saturday, and Iran has attacked oil tankers passing through the strait. Ships have continued to avoid that path, and the attacks have also disrupted other major routes with some ships re-routing from the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait out of caution.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates both have alternative transportation routes, including by land, yet these can only manage a portion of their usual cargo, according to Kpler. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical pathway for Qatar's exports, and the country's natural gas production relies heavily on an offshore field it shares with Iran.

The economic ripple effects of the strikes will be felt by several other countries in Asia. While countries sharing land borders with the Gulf states have limited truck routes and underground pipelines to transport oil, seaborne shipments are the primary form of transporting oil to most East and South Asian countries. India is the second-largest importer of oil from Iran and its neighbors, while some smaller countries get almost all their oil from the Gulf.

Escalating military actions and the pressure on China are likely to have consequences for the broader region as disruptions in oil shipments continue, with steeper competition for barrels driving up oil prices across Asia.

The global Brent crude trading price opened at $81.57 a barrel Sunday evening, a 12 percent jump from last week’s closing price. While some oil production has ceased nearby in Iraq due to the strikes, OPEC+ countries affirmed on Sunday that they would boost oil production starting in April by 206,000 barrels daily — a modest increase intended to dampen the war’s effect on prices down the road. The majority of the increase would come from Saudi Arabia and Russia.