CCP officials are scrambling to ensure loyalty, ideological alignment amid Iran strikes, a former Chinese official said.
Internet censors are working overtime. Political study sessions are intensifying. Behind closed doors, officials are calling on military personnel—one by one—asking them to clarify their stance on Iran.
The U.S.-led Iran strikes and death of the Iranian leader have rattled Beijing. Authorities are worrying about a chain reaction that could threaten the Chinese regime’s own stability, multiple sources told The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity.
In the days since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, top Chinese officials from the Politburo, the political power center in China, have called multiple secret meetings over the situation in Iran, according to one source with knowledge of the discussions.
High-ranking officials are repeatedly being instructed to draw lessons from the Soviet Union’s collapse, the source said. This type of historical comparison isn’t common in internal discussions, but in recent meetings, it has come up time and again.
The authorities are worried that Iran’s antigovernment protests could reverberate in China, the source said.
Several different sources confirmed that Beijing is on high alert after the death of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei.
According to one source who was formerly in charge of propaganda affairs, Beijing considers the killing of Khamenei as one of the most significant geopolitical upheavals in the past two decades.
‘Strategic Miscalculation’
China’s authorities had underestimated the chance of a U.S. military offensive, two separate inside sources previously told The Epoch Times.
While Western allies reacted quickly to the strikes, China’s foreign ministry didn’t respond until about seven hours after the first strike, with a roughly 80-word statement calling for “an immediate stop to the military actions.”
The muted statement was a “downgraded version” after multiple revisions, and after pointed criticism of the United States and Israel had been “deleted line by line,” a person close to individuals in Beijing’s diplomatic system said.
Chinese narratives prior to the conflict align with what the sources said.
In the days before missiles hit Tehran, prominent Chinese academics who act as state policy advisers openly derided the United States, saying that Washington would not dare attack Iran.
“The United States cannot afford the fight, cannot sustain it, and cannot win it,” retired Maj. Gen. Jin Yinan declared in an interview with a Chinese media outlet.
On the morning of the strike, Hu Xijin, former editor for Chinese state media Global Times, posted a video claiming that the “decapitation plan had fallen through” and that Iran’s supreme leader and president were safe. The video was quietly deleted.
The collective blunder isn’t merely a coincidence, according to China analyst Heng He.
“They got to the conclusion first, before looking for supporting evidence,” he said, and the conclusion “came from the top.”
Part of the misjudgment stems from its established mode of thinking, according to one source close to the Chinese foreign affairs system.
Beijing, despite having conducted comprehensive assessments on Iran, had leaned on an analytical framework used in the past few decades, according to one source close to the Chinese foreign affairs system. The reasoning goes that even though Iran has faced sustained U.S. military threats, none had evolved into full-sized kinetic attacks.
As a result, he said, fewer Chinese diplomatic personnel had evacuated from Tehran as compared with the Venezuela raid in January.
“This is a serious strategic miscalculation,” he told The Epoch Times.
By Eva Fu
