There seems to be some fundamental misreadings on the dynamics of Middle East geopolitics and the goal of China’s ME foreign policy that I feel like it’s necessary to clear the air. A decision by China to disproportionately favour the GCC over Iran and alienate the latter partnership would be, to put it frankly, catastrophic for Chinese foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.
The Iran-China Relationship
It’s important to keep in mind that the heart of contemporary Chinese foreign policy is the promotion of the BRI and the fundamental core impetus of the BRI is not economic development but national security. China’s maritime east, its main route of access to the rest of the world, is under perennial threat of blockade from adversarial activation of the first island chain. This is the background under which the OBOR was uncoincidentally formulated shortly after the announcement of the Obama-era "Pivot to Asia,” because the land route networks that the BRI would establish from Xinjiang and Tibet into Eurasia would ensure China’s immunity from the impact of such a containment scenario. Although there is a “Maritime Silk Road” where the GCC can play a peace-time role through being an intermediary for shipping from the CPEC corridor and acting as crude oil supplier in return, it does not address the security concerns underpinning the BRI project and would only move a maritime blockade from the waters of the SCS and the Strait of Malacca to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.
There are therefore two principal land routes, from Central Asia southwards to Iran and northwards to Russia. Ensuring the stability and cooperation of Central Asia to diversify access routes is therefore crucial, as elsewise, China’s Eurasia routes would be entirely dependent on Russia and at the mercy of volatile Russian leadership attitudes. Establishing an Iranian route, which was the traditional transitory path of the historical Silk Road to the West, gives China the same leverage we see right now in the Russo-Iranian competition for China’s oil import market. Furthermore, the optimal path to keeping Central Asia secure means requiring the partnership of Iran. With Iran, Pakistan and Russia on board, this China-partnered bloc would win the so-called “Great Game” over Central Asia that foreign powers like Britain, the Russian Empire and the United States have been unsuccessfully competing for since the 19th century.
Keeping Iran on board is also necessary to check Turkish and Indian influences on Central Asia, which can both be contiguously blocked from the region with Iranian cooperation. The former under the Erdogan government is a irredentist power whose historically unattainable ethno-nationalist fantasies of Turkism are now a real threat through being co-opted as the vehicle for NATO and American re-entry into Central Asia and infiltrating Xinjiang after their loss of Afghanistan. The latter would be deprived into an outsider looking in position with respect to Central Asia so long as Iran and Russia cooperate with China and Pakistan in keeping it out. This also prevents the latter from "its have your cake and eat it too" attitude of expecting to fully reaping the benefits of accessing those BRI-developed regions despite its own non-participation in BRI and its hostility towards China.
The feasibility of this Central Asian grand strategy can only be made manifest from the cooperation of the state holding Iran’s geographic position and that geographic position alone is frankly all that China really needs out of its bilateral partnership with Iran. Therefore, so long as a Sino-Iranian relationship can sufficiently secure these stated regional security concerns, in the long-term its value to China will actually be more fundamentally important than anything the GCC could provide in the current geopolitical environment, even if Iranian cooperation is a complete wash in other areas like bilateral economic ties.
The GCC-China Relationship
I think the excessive focus and cheery optimism on potential Chinese benefits of the developing GCC relationship, such as the elusive Petroyuan, have made some forget why the Saudis chose to roll out their blue carpet, fire off their 21-gun salute and have their royals greeting Xi like kin in the first place: because, from a geopolitical perspective, the Saudis (and the GCC) have gained something massive from this summit, which is that an invitation of China acts as a guaranteed catalyst for triggering the “Solomon Islands” response from the West. The lackluster state of their relationship with America following the latter’s Asian pivot has coincided with the current US Democratic administration marginalisation of its Middle East allies through its ‘axis of democracy’ diplomatic narrative. Introducing China into the picture recontextualises the ME from the apparent American notion that their withdrawal means the region will simply sink into irrelevance with little geopolitical value, which has led it to so publicly attack its GCC partners like Saudi Arabia. Approaching China therefore reactivates Western interests by exploiting their Cold War “dominos” mentality and this is made obvious by how the entire Western bloc has immediately lined up to reengage the region like clockwork after China’s Dec 7-10 summit.
Dec 14:
Dec 24:
The use of China as a "rebound partner" and as leverage for countries to renegotiate their relationship with the West is often indirectly beneficial to China but it also leads to instances of China being pulled by the nose by “two-faced" leaders using the tactic and then dumping China afterwards without any means of Chinese recourse. This is most evident in its Philippines relationship, where the two Dutertes have continually played the China card, starting with the previous one’s hyped up threat to the US to cancel their Visiting Forces Agreement, which ended up as a big nothing burger episode that merely served to induce American concessions towards furthering their bilaterial relationship. Securing an Iran relationship introduces a means for China to reduce the GCC incentive from expressing such a similar degree of duplicitous insincerity and riding roughshod over China with diplomatic impunity. This is as the threat of alienating China and allowing Iran to gain its full backing would be costly for the GCC’s security concerns (aka the "Ukraine dilemma"). In parallel, securing a GCC relationship bolsters the Iranian impetus to maintain its own China ties through similar concerns of its own.
I am simply unable to catch up with your thought.