Diverging Russian and Chinese policies on Iran

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. It is Friday, 23 Aban 1404, November 14, 2025. The Reuters news agency has prepared a report in which it spoke with a number of experts, and the gist of it is that the Islamic Republic has a calculated plan: on one hand it has eased social freedoms, especially the issue of women's hijab, and on the other it has intensified political repression. In my view this analysis is not correct, for the reasons I will explain. First, this was Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani's thesis. He used to say: let us grant social freedoms and

0:56 then open the country's doors. Let foreign capital come in, from the West and from the East, but we ourselves remain in power. This is what is known as the China model: the rulers, even if they crush students in Tiananmen Square, stay in power, but they set aside social restrictions and strictness and open the country's doors. When Mr. Rouhani became president, he wanted to implement this same thesis. But at that very time, the IRGC's political bureau wrote an analysis that was, in a way, correct. In that analysis, written for Mr. Khamenei, they said that if

1:51 this is done, Iran will not become China; it will become the Soviet Union, and the regime will fall apart. For that reason they blocked Mr. Rouhani's path as well. Behind this thinking, in fact, was also Russia, which had experienced collapse, and it effectively blocked the path of rapprochement with the West, of opening up the country, and of easing up on social matters. But what is happening now, especially regarding hijab, is not the result of a government plan. It is the result of the valiant resistance and breathtaking struggle of Iranian women and youth. The events of 1401 [2022], in the glorious Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which cost the lives of more than 500 of

2:54 the country's beloved children, with thousands wounded and tens of thousands imprisoned, and with protests that continued for more than 100 days and created major rifts within the regime, taught the regime a lesson. It is terrified of entering that arena again, now that its situation is far more fragile. In fact, what Iranian women have done is a widespread act of civil disobedience against the compulsory hijab law. Because, according to the principle of numbers in civil resistance, it has exceeded a certain threshold, the regime no longer has the capacity to confront it. Otherwise, if it were up to the mullahs and the current rulers, they would

3:55 love to make women wear the chador, wear the chakhchur, put on face veils, and lock them up in their homes so that not even their voices could be heard by men outside the family. And that is not all: at one point Mr. Khamenei even raised the idea that men should wear a uniform dress, North Korean style. But they cannot overpower the women. If every now and then they say something, like Mr. Mohseni-Ejei's remarks today that "we have told the prosecutors that if there is organized unveiling, they should deal with it," it is mostly to silence the protesting clerics or the die-hard supporters of the regime. Otherwise, it is the assessment of the Supreme National Security Council, which in fact means

4:51 the country's intelligence agencies, that they should not do anything in this area or provoke anything, because they are afraid the protests will spread. And as I said, every now and then they come out and say, "We are going to gather 80,000 enforcers of 'enjoining the good' and do this and that," when they cannot even gather 8,000, and they don't dare to anyway. So this part of the analysis, that there is a plan behind it, is wrong. The regime does not have the strength; otherwise it would do it. But where it does have the strength, and where it is also very afraid, is political repression, because political activists have not yet found broad popular backing such that the regime

5:45 would be unable to confront them. They are mostly like individual shining stars who speak out, oppose, and criticize, and that is why the regime attacks them, arrests them, creates terror and fear, and imprisons them, because it is worried that political critics will gain broad popular bases. For example, today the anniversary ceremony of Dr. Hossein Fatemi, Dr. Mosaddegh's courageous foreign minister, who was executed by the Shah's regime after 28 Mordad [the 1953 coup], was supposed to be held at his grave. Activists of the National Front of Iran and many admirers of Dr. Mosaddegh, Dr. Fatemi, and Iran's nationalists had set out for

6:44 Ebn-e Babuyeh, where Dr. Fatemi's tomb is located. But the regime responded with great violence and prevented the ceremony from being held. What is interesting is that it does this while it wants to profit from claiming to support Dr. Mosaddegh and Dr. Fatemi, and one of Tehran's main streets and its square are still named after Dr. Fatemi. In any case, or, for example, when it wants to return Mr. Tajzadeh to prison within 24 hours, instead of making a phone call or sending an officer with a car to say "get in, let's go to prison," they send five cars, with weapons and a whole show of arrests, to create terror and fear. Or when it wants to arrest activists, intellectuals, and left-leaning economists, it raids their homes

7:38 to create terror and fear. Otherwise, they could have called them, summoned them, handed them a summons, and they would have reported. For this reason, out of this so-called fear, the regime tries to increase violence. It has increased executions in order to create terror and fear. As stated in a declaration issued by women political prisoners, the number of executions has exceeded the number of people killed in the war with Israel, and they called for a halt to death sentences. The regime's worry is that there are three main grounds on which people are discontented: first, poverty and ever-increasing inflation and people's emptying tables, the empty pots and empty tables; second, corruption, which is

8:43 the great discrimination in society, with the aghazadehs [the privileged children of officials] and the top officials of the regime, the mafias headed by Khamenei himself, and the great injustice in society, which can give rise to major protests; and the third axis is the country's state of limbo, the crisis situation of no war, no peace, sanctions, and "what will happen tomorrow?", which has effectively kept people's lives on hold. On these three axes, it is possible for various tactics and various campaigns to spread widely, and in this way political forces could provide leadership. Therefore, the regime tries, by baring its teeth and claws

9:40 and using a great deal of violence, to prevent these three main axes, these three main grounds, from being exploited and to keep people from joining in. Moreover, we know that when a movement wants to take place, it must move along three paths simultaneously: protests, in the form of street demonstrations, statements, various actions, gatherings, and so on; strikes and paralysis, in the form of civil disobedience, sanctions, boycotts, and so on; and especially defection from the regime in its various pillars, its bureaucratic, cultural, and social pillars, and especially its military pillar. This third part, that is,

10:43 defection from the regime, has a clear curve and clear calculations in civil resistance, and it depends on the other two parts, meaning protests and strikes and paralysis. The more those advance and spread, the more this third one intensifies, and whenever this defection reaches those who bear arms, and especially those in charge of the regime's machinery of repression, the regime is finished. In this third part, there are individual shining stars who inject courage into society. For instance, there are campaigns now in which people come out holding the Lion and Sun flag, the historical and traditional flag of our society, of our Iran, which represents freedom and the unity

11:45 of us Iranians, or they record videos and distribute them, voicing their protest and their criticism, and in this way they inject courage into society. But these actions, which show the courage of the individuals who do them, can bring the regime to the end of the line once they are connected and organized together with protests and strikes. Now, Mohsen Aminzadeh, who was deputy foreign minister for Asia and Oceania during Mr. Khatami's government, spoke at the general assembly of the Islamic Association of University Professors,

12:39 and in part of his speech he said that the Chinese have repeatedly told us that they want very serious economic cooperation with Iran, but they are not willing to pay the price of the Islamic Republic's adventurism. This is an important piece of information that shows what the Chinese approach really is. It is exactly the opposite of Russia, which also has more influence, yet does not have very close economic interests apart from oil smuggling, drug smuggling, and the like. But it plays the Iran card in such a way that the Islamic Republic maintains its current situation, so that it can show the Islamic Republic's adventurism, its killer's knife, and its terrorism

13:36 to the Arabs, Israel, America, the West, and so on, and advance its own policy with this card. For example, today the IRGC seized an oil tanker named Talara, sailing under the flag of the Marshall Islands and owned by a Cypriot company. This tanker, which was carrying high-sulfur diesel, was taken from near the UAE to this side of the Strait of Hormuz and brought to Iran. The Americans have also tracked this, and it has caused an uproar in commercial circles. This is one of those acts that resembles piracy, unless they can present solid legal grounds. This is not the first

14:31 time such a thing has happened, and presumably it won't be the last. It is precisely these kinds of actions that, in my opinion, lead the Chinese to say they are not willing to get involved in these adventures. Meanwhile, Iran's Meteorological Organization has forecast that a precipitation system is approaching from the west and there will be scattered rain, thunder, and lightning, though not much, only a little. But this very news has prompted a group of opportunistic clerics, from among the Friday prayer leaders and others, to immediately start saying, "Let's perform the rain prayer," so that tomorrow they can presumably claim that two drops of rain fell because we performed the rain prayer. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.