How Does the Iranian Uprising Impact the China Transition?

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The Iranian insurrection against the clerical control of the country, underway in earnest for several weeks, appeared by late January to have reached a pause, as the clerics, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, escalated their widespread killings of protesters.

This pause has given significant hope to the disparate leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and to the isolated nominal communist leader, Xi Jinping, who, in recent days, has openly—and with some success—counterattacked his main rival, Gen. Zhang Youxia. The recent message from the Iranian insurgency’s pause and the delay in the U.S.-promised support has shown Beijing that the CCP can undertake further escalated public repression without fear of a response from the international community, particularly the United States.

The reading is: Iran is not Venezuela, and mainland China is not Iran or Venezuela.

The Iranian street deaths and targeted killings by the clerical government were, by Jan. 25, believed to be well in excess of 30,000 civilians, and the crowds had become exhausted and dispirited, believing no relief was in sight except from covert Israeli special operators. The opposition website Iran International claimed that security forces killed more than 36,500 during the Jan. 8–9 clampdown alone.

Moreover, there is widespread belief that the promised support from U.S. President Donald Trump to defend the protesters will not come, and that the Trump administration was now—in the third week of January—already in negotiations with the mullahs and likely to sustain them in office as part of a possible Washington–Tehran deal. Washington has denied this but has admitted to ongoing contact with the clerical administration.

Meanwhile, a major U.S. flotilla—the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group—was, on Jan. 25, moving closer to Iran in the Arabian Sea and possibly into the Persian Gulf, adding heft to Trump’s pressure on the clerics. But the talk on the streets in Tehran and several other cities is that Trump promised more than he could deliver. The failure of the United States to follow up on promised aid to Hungarian protesters in 1956, to Czechoslovak protesters in 1968, and to Kurdish protesters in Iraq in 1991 was an example of false hope given by Washington.

As in those past instances of “false hope,” the questions are being raised as to what the United States could do militarily, in any event, to support the Iranian civilians against the clerical government. The anti-nuclear facilities strikes in 2025 by the United States were not supportive of the civilian population of Iran, but were, rather, seen as a U.S. attempt to tell Israel to stop short of “regime change” in Iran.

So what could the United States do to support the civilians, especially given that Trump had said that he would unleash massive harm upon the clerics if they persisted with the formal execution of arrested protesters? Tehran pulled back from that threat, but escalated street killings.

The U.S. raid by USAF B-2 strategic bombers—as part of a 125-aircraft mission of Operation Midnight Hammer—against Iranian nuclear research facility targets in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22, 2025, proved to be anti-climactic and less supportive of the Iranian popular uprising than the international public believed.

In fact, the U.S. mission seemed more aimed at capping the Israel Air Force and ground force operations in Iran before they could achieve “leadership decapitation.” The Trump administration seemed more intent on striking a deal with the clerics than on destroying the entire governmental apparatus.

Indeed, major U.S. Persian Gulf ally Qatar has indicated that it believes a negotiated settlement can be achieved between the United States and the Iranian clerics, and it is probable that Doha is actually already involved in the negotiating process between Washington and Tehran. This does not bode well for relief for the Iranian civil society protesters.

So the question now is whether the “breathing space” in the Iranian insurrection has given some life back to the clerical leadership, and whether this, in turn, has given Chinese leader Xi Jinping more optimism that he could gamble on a move to recover his power in Beijing without U.S. interference.

In this, both Ali Khamenei and Xi seem to have succeeded.