On the night before China raised petrol prices on 24 March, Cui Xinming joined the queue at a Beijing filling station. Cui is thirty-seven and drives a petrol taxi for as long as twelve hours a day. A full tank carries him through two days, perhaps two and a half, which means the number above the pump is not an occasional household expense. It is the price of entering his workplace.
Cui had heard that the increase would begin at midnight. Other drivers had heard too, and the line of cars lengthened as each person tried to buy one more tank at the old price. Beijing had already decided to protect them. Under China’s pricing formula, the increase should have been about twice as large, but the National Development and Reform Commission imposed the first temporary intervention since the current mechanism began in 2013. Even after that protection, the maximum retail price of 92-octane petrol in Beijing rose from 7.64 yuan to 8.57 yuan a litre, while diesel rose from 7.34 yuan to 8.31 yuan. Beijing municipal government
Cui told The Guardian that the war worried him, although he trusted the government to contain its effects. Then he placed responsibility with greater precision than most diplomatic communiqués manage: “It’s the US that’s keeping oil prices high.” He could see that China had reserves, Russian supply and an electric future, and yet his own car still burned petrol and his next shift still began at the pump. The Guardian
The war reaches China through the distance between the state’s preparation and Cui’s working day. American and Israeli aircraft struck Iran on 28 February, Iran retaliated across the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz closed, Qatari liquefied natural gas exports stopped, and Beijing responded with stockpiles, regulated prices and an accelerated turn to electric transport, and yet Cui still bought the first Chinese invoice for missiles that landed elsewhere.
For any reader outside China, the task is to stay in Cui’s seat. China is a country of 1.4 billion people, factories that supply the world and drivers whose incomes contract when a government across the Pacific chooses war. Cui’s working day makes the geopolitical relationship legible without moving the article away from the people who experience it.
China’s fuel-pricing system carried the war from Hormuz to Beijing. Domestic ceilings for petrol and diesel follow international crude prices through a state formula, with the NDRC adjusting prices when the moving average changes beyond the formal threshold. The mechanism does not surrender the final price to the market. In March, when the full formula would have imposed a much larger increase, Beijing used administrative power to reduce it.
The state protection reduced the increase but did not cancel it. A driver filling a fifty-litre tank with 92-octane petrol after 24 March paid 46.5 yuan more than before. If Cui filled the tank every two and a half days, the change placed roughly 558 yuan a month onto his fuel bill; if he filled it every two days, the additional cost approached 700 yuan. That is an estimate based on the price change and the schedule he described, not a reported account of his full expenses, and it explains the queue. A state decision cut the increase in half, and yet the remaining half still entered the household of the person whose car could not earn without moving.
On 28 August, the NDRC raised standard petrol and diesel prices again, by 375 yuan and 360 yuan a tonne. The change added about 0.29 yuan a litre to petrol and 0.31 yuan to diesel. It was the seventeenth pricing window of 2026 and the eleventh increase. After increases and reductions were combined, petrol had risen by about 1.35 yuan a litre since the start of the year and diesel by 1.40 yuan. National Development and Reform CommissionMinistry of Commerce price report
For a private motorist, a higher pump price can cancel a weekend journey. A taxi driver has no comparable choice because movement produces the income that must pay for movement. The driver can work longer, search for denser routes, change vehicles or leave the trade. Each response transfers the pressure away from the fuel market and into time, debt or employment.
The driver sees the war more clearly than the strategist. A strategic report counts barrels diverted, tankers insured and reserve days available. Cui counts how long a tank lasts. The Chinese state calculates how much of the international increase it can suppress without breaking the pricing system, while the driver calculates whether the next passenger will cover the fuel burned while waiting for one.
By July, another Beijing driver was living through a different part of the same war. Reuters met a thirty-six-year-old part-time ride-hailing driver, identified only by his surname, Li, at an electric-vehicle charging station. Li did not face Cui’s petrol bill. His pressure came through the fare.
Li said ride-hailing prices had fallen by ten to fifteen per cent during the six months since he began. More people were entering platform work as China’s weak labour market pushed workers toward driving, while electric cars reduced operating costs and allowed more vehicles to stay on the road. “Competition is intense,” he said. Reuters
The contrast between Cui and Li explains China’s position better than a speech about energy independence. Cui’s petrol taxi remains connected to the Gulf through every litre. Li’s electric car escapes that direct connection, but he enters a labour market in which low running costs attract more drivers and push down the price of their work. China can reduce oil demand without protecting income, and it can shield the transport system while leaving the person inside the vehicle exposed to another kind of pressure.
In May, passengers took 3.05 billion taxi and ride-hailing trips across China. Trips from March through May were six per cent higher than during the same period in 2025. About half of China’s 1.3 million taxis were electric, according to Ministry of Transport data cited by Reuters, and the share in major cities approached one hundred per cent. Didi reported eight million hybrid or electric vehicles on its platform, with electric vehicles completing seventy-five per cent of all distance travelled. Petrol consumption fell ten per cent in May from a year earlier and diesel consumption fell fourteen per cent, although road freight increased by two per cent and travel during the May Day holiday reached a record. Reuters
Those figures describe a structural defence that no emergency summit could improvise after 28 February. China spent years building batteries, charging networks, electric buses, rail systems and domestic vehicle production. When war disrupted the Gulf, private motorists drove less or chose taxis, and taxi fleets moved people with less petrol than the same volume of travel would once have required. The transport system adjusted because the physical alternative already existed.
The adjustment also produced a cruel market joke. Petrol became more expensive, taxis became cheaper, passengers saved money and electric travel increased, and yet Li’s income per trip fell because too many drivers were chasing the same work. The state had reduced China’s exposure to imported oil without giving the driver any control over the platform fare.
The energy system determines one side of Li’s operating cost and the platform determines his fare, while he occupies the narrowing space between them. Electrification weakens the power of an overseas oil shock over his car, but it does not give him authority over the price of his own labour. China solved one dependency and exposed another.
The geography behind Cui’s petrol taxi begins with a waterway thirty-three kilometres wide at its narrowest point. In 2025, China imported about half its crude oil and almost one-third of its liquefied natural gas from the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar supplied 4.9 million barrels of crude a day, equal to forty-two per cent of Chinese imports recorded by customs. Qatar supplied twenty-eight per cent of China’s LNG. Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy
Iran occupied a different position. Chinese customs had recorded no direct imports of Iranian crude since 2022, but Kpler’s tanker tracking estimated that China received 1.38 million barrels a day from Iran in 2025, about twelve per cent of total crude imports. Much of the oil was relabelled through Malaysia or carried through other opaque origin records, so the customs line disappeared while the physical supply continued.
Iranian oil mattered because sanctions made it cheap and because China’s independent refiners, especially the small operators in Shandong known as teapots, worked with narrow margins. Discounted crude kept refineries operating and gave Chinese buyers an alternative to larger Gulf producers. Tehran received its dominant export market. Beijing received barrels, negotiating room and a practical challenge to Washington’s claim that American sanctions could decide who traded with whom.
The Strait widened the exposure far beyond Iran. Iran sits beside the passage used by Saudi, Iraqi, Emirati, Kuwaiti and Qatari energy exports. A military campaign can damage Iranian terminals, but a missile threat, naval blockade or insurance withdrawal changes the commercial value of every cargo nearby. China therefore faced an attack on one supplier and a disruption to the regional system supplying almost half its imported crude. Cui’s fuel tank contained no visible map of this arrangement, and yet the March price above it traced the map exactly.
By late July, COSCO Shipping Energy Transportation and China Merchants Energy Shipping had stopped sending their tankers through Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, according to Reuters reporting based on Vortexa data and a shipbroker. The two state-controlled companies together operate more than one hundred very large crude carriers, each capable of holding about two million barrels, and before the war they handled about half of China’s Middle Eastern crude imports. Chinese and Hong Kong-owned vessels instead increased ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman to more than 600,000 barrels a day in June and July, after Kpler recorded none in April and May. Reuters
A transfer outside the strait reduces the time a large tanker spends inside dangerous water. It also adds another vessel, another loading operation, another delay and another insurance decision. The crude still moves, but the route becomes more expensive before the cargo reaches a refinery, and that cost then travels through wholesale fuel, freight and factory prices until somebody who never saw Hormuz pays part of it.
You can follow that cost without knowing the name of a tanker. It enters the taxi taking a nurse to a night shift in Beijing, the truck moving chemicals from Xi’an to Leshan, the container leaving Ningbo and the factory order priced for a customer overseas. A foreign reader enters the article at the far end of that Chinese production chain, but the journey begins here, with Chinese workers and companies paying more to move the goods the world expects them to keep producing cheaply.
China’s official position begins by assigning responsibility. In an explanation to the United Nations Security Council on 7 April, China’s permanent representative Fu Cong called the United States and Israel the initiators of the war and said their military action against Iran, undertaken without Security Council authorisation while negotiations were in progress, violated the UN Charter and basic rules of international relations. He also rejected Iranian attacks on Gulf states and Iran’s closure of Hormuz. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
That position refuses the choice often imposed on China from outside: accept American military action or be treated as an apologist for every Iranian response. Beijing identifies the initial aggression, opposes the expansion of the war, defends Gulf sovereignty and demands that the waterway reopen. It does not need to declare Iran blameless to state who began the conflict.
The distinction reaches the road. Cui is paying more because military force disrupted a waterway central to Chinese energy supply. Beijing then has to spend reserves, suppress part of the price increase, reorganise shipping and protect industrial output from a conflict it did not initiate. China sees an external power imposing costs on Chinese development while claiming the authority to define the resulting insecurity.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning made the causal argument on 2 April after President Trump suggested that countries dependent on Hormuz should secure the strait themselves. Mao said the obstruction began with illegal US and Israeli military action against Iran and that only a ceasefire and restored Gulf stability could protect navigation. The answer refused Washington’s invitation to make Asian energy importers responsible for policing the consequences of Washington’s war. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
China’s concern is larger than the price of Iranian oil. It concerns whether a military power can attack a state beside Asia’s principal energy route, destabilise the passage, sanction the trade used to work around that instability and then instruct the affected importers to defend the route themselves. Cui meets that hierarchy in miniature: someone else chooses force, China manages the disruption, and the driver pays what management could not remove.
Taxi drivers show the household calculation. Truck drivers show how quickly the same cost reaches industry.
In April, Le Monde met Yang Dong and Yu Qiuxiao at a Sinopec station in Meishan, Sichuan. The married couple drove together and had carried chemicals almost nine hundred kilometres from Xi’an to Leshan. Their red truck ran on LNG. They received a fixed salary of 3,000 yuan a month, but completed routes normally lifted their income to about 10,000 yuan. Their operator had no new assignment waiting after the current delivery because it was losing more than 2,000 yuan on each trip. Le Monde
The company could raise freight prices and risk losing customers, absorb the fuel increase and lose money, or stop sending trucks. It chose the third option. Yang and Yu would keep the 3,000-yuan base for the time being, but lose most of their normal income while supporting two children. The chemical cargo reached its destination and the company remained intact, and yet the route ended in the drivers’ household budget.
Another driver, Geng Yuepeng, was carrying steel beams from Chengdu to Kunming for an airport expansion. He was forty-two, ate takeaway food in his cab during the stop and expected to continue because driving was the work available to him. These are the people hidden inside a sentence such as “higher energy costs affect Chinese manufacturing.” Chemicals do not move between plants by declaration. Steel beams do not reach an airport through a five-year plan. A driver moves them, and the driver’s pay depends on the margin remaining after the fuel bill.
Chinese factories were already fighting for orders in an economy of weak domestic demand and severe price competition. Exporters feared that higher freight rates would make their products less competitive, while hauliers could not carry the full increase without suspending routes. The state could regulate the pump price, but it could not order every shipper, factory and logistics firm to retain the same margin at the same time. Somewhere in the chain, the loss had to land.
A foreign reader may meet that loss weeks later, after Yang and Yu have disappeared from the transaction. A factory in Sichuan pays more to receive chemicals. A container reaches a Chinese port with added inland cost. A ship crosses a longer or more expensive route. The importer, warehouse, delivery network and shop each decide how much to absorb, and the final product arrives with a higher price or a smaller margin attached to it. The customer never sees the Chinese driver whose lost route entered the price.
China entered the war with time stored in tanks. Kayrros estimated that the country held 1.39 billion barrels of oil on 2 March, enough to cover about 120 days of net crude imports at the 2025 rate. More than forty-six million barrels of Iranian oil were already in floating storage in Asia, with additional Iranian crude held in bonded tanks at Dalian and Zhoushan. Saudi Arabia and the UAE could also reroute a combined five million barrels a day through pipelines that avoid Hormuz, although that capacity was not reserved for China. Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy
Reserves prevented immediate panic, price controls limited the first blow and electric transport reduced consumption. Russian oil and pipeline gas, domestic coal, renewable generation and alternative crude from outside the Gulf gave Beijing options unavailable to smaller Asian economies. These measures explain why Cui could say China would not face a major energy crisis while standing beside a petrol taxi.
They also define the limit. A reserve can replace delayed oil for a period. It cannot relocate the Gulf. Electric taxis can remove petrol from urban passenger journeys, but they cannot fuel aircraft, ocean shipping or the existing diesel freight fleet, and electricity does not replace crude used in petrochemicals and industrial feedstock. China can buy Brazilian and West African grades, but the voyages are longer. It can buy more Russian supply, but deeper dependence on Moscow creates a different exposure.
Gas gives Beijing less room. About thirty per cent of China’s LNG imports normally pass through Hormuz, principally from Qatar and the UAE. The existing Power of Siberia pipeline was already operating slightly above capacity when the war began. The Far Eastern Route was not expected to begin before 2027, and Central Asian pipeline supply faced infrastructure and production limits. In the short term, China could reduce gas use or outbid other buyers for cargoes. Both choices carry domestic costs.
Beijing’s official account places the emphasis on resilience. That claim is supported by the record. Few states could lose access to a route carrying nearly half their imported oil and maintain urban transport at this scale. The same record also shows who makes the resilience visible: Cui pays more for petrol, Li accepts lower fares, and Yang and Yu lose routes. The shield protects the economy in aggregate while workers stand beneath it at different heights.
China’s resilience can only be judged by following protection to the end of the route. The state contained part of the market shock, kept the transport system moving and reduced oil consumption, but Cui still paid more, Li still faced falling fares, and Yang and Yu still lost routes. The national shield worked, and yet its coverage was unequal.
Chinese drivers do not all describe the war in the same language. Cui blamed the United States for high prices, trusted Beijing’s ability to regulate the shock and expected petrol taxis to disappear. Li spoke about competition rather than Hormuz because his electric car had already moved him beyond the pump. Geng Yuepeng watched news from the cab and said that living in peace remained a privilege, even while the war damaged the work in front of him.
Their statements do not prove that Washington and Tel Aviv began the war solely to contain China. Iran has its own political order, regional strategy and record of force. Israel has its own war aims. The United States has spent decades constructing the sanctions, military bases and alliances now used against Tehran. Reducing Iran to a piece on a Chinese-American board would erase the people facing the bombardment and the state decisions that brought the region here.
The drivers establish a narrower and more serious conclusion. American military action around the Gulf places a price on China’s access to energy, American secondary sanctions place a price on Chinese commercial independence, and control over maritime routes gives Washington influence over costs inside an economy it cannot command directly. The pressure does not have to stop every tanker. It works when a Chinese refiner pays more for a cargo, a logistics company cancels a route or a taxi driver fills up before midnight.
China’s response is also visible from the road. It regulates prices, stores crude, builds pipelines, electrifies vehicles and uses public power to change the structure of demand. On 25 August, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian called the American campaign “economic warfare and maximum pressure” and said Chinese cooperation with Iran “should not be disrupted.” The language defended Iran only in part. Its central subject was China’s right to purchase energy without Washington deciding the permitted seller. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The open question sits between Cui’s petrol taxi and Li’s electric car. China has shown that a state can build its way out of part of an imported-energy trap, but will the transition improve the driver’s working life or replace the oil company’s claim on his income with the platform’s control over his fare?