The Iran war, now in its third month, provides China with a window into how U.S. military power performs under fire and a useful reminder that its adversaries always have a big say in the outcome on any battlefield.
CNN spoke to a variety of experts on China, Taiwan and elsewhere about how the past two months of fighting in and around the Persian Gulf can inform us about what will happen in a potential conflict that pits Beijing and Washington against each other.
They warned that China misread its strengths, lacked experience and held too narrow a view of the conflict and its outcome.
Fu Qianshao, a former Chinese Air Force colonel, said the main lesson from the battle so far is that the PLA must not forget about defense, noting how Iran has found ways to evade U.S. anti-missile systems such as the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles (THAAD).
“To ensure that we remain invincible in future wars, we need to make significant efforts to identify weaknesses in our defenses,” Fu told CNN.
The People’s Liberation Army has rapidly expanded its offensive firepower capabilities in recent years, adding missiles with hypersonic gliders that can evade interceptors and platforms capable of launching them.
The People’s Liberation Army Air Force is rapidly adding fifth-generation stealth fighters and plans to field around 1,000 J-20 jets, roughly equivalent to the U.S. F-35, when operating in long-range precision strike mode, according to British think tank RUSI.
China is developing a long-range stealth bomber similar to the U.S. B-2 and B-21.
But its defense is another matter.
Analysts say Iran was able to penetrate U.S. air defenses in the Persian Gulf with relatively primitive technology, such as the low-cost Shahed drone and low-cost ballistic missiles.
Meanwhile, the United States launched an air campaign against Iran using far more sophisticated weapons like the F-35 and B-2, combined with cheaper, less high-tech guided missiles dropped by B-1s, B-52s, and F-15s. They have destroyed everything from missile launchers to naval ships to bridges.
This is a combination that the Chinese government must plan for, Fu said.
“We need to dig deeper to effectively protect key sites, airfields and ports from attacks and raids,” he said.
When it comes to potential U.S.-China conflict, Taiwan is often seen as a potential flashpoint.
China’s ruling Communist Party has vowed to “unify” Taiwan with the autonomous democratic nation, even though it has never ruled it. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has not ruled out using military force for this purpose.
In Taiwan, analysts believe China is building a military that rivals the United States in high-tech precision weapons and Iran in low-cost, high-volume drone warfare.
“Long-range rockets and drone swarms will definitely play an important role in China’s joint military operations against Taiwan,” Chieh Chung, an associate researcher at the Taiwan Institute for Defense and Security Studies, told CNN.
But will that critical role be enough to win a war across the Taiwan Strait?
Analysts say China is the world’s leading drone manufacturer, and the number of unmanned weapons systems that Chinese manufacturers can produce is staggering.
A 2025 report on China’s drone program from the analysis platform War on the Rocks states that “Chinese private manufacturers have the capacity to equip themselves within a year and produce one billion weaponized drones per year.”
Some warn that Taiwan is not ready to face such numbers.
A recent report from a government watchdog said Taiwan’s military’s current countermeasures against drones are “ineffective” and pose “significant security risks” to critical infrastructure and military bases.
To be fair, Taiwan is not standing still and is taking steps to tighten its defenses.
Gene Hsu, managing director of Thunder Tiger, Taiwan’s leading drone manufacturer, called for further investment in Taiwan’s drone mass production capacity. “We need to continue producing day and night to counter our enemies,” he said.
The United States is also learning, recognizing that in a conflict in the Pacific, it could be the defender rather than the aggressor.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told a U.S. Senate hearing in April that drones make war much more costly for attackers.
If fighting over Taiwan were to occur, the island or the United States could use drones to target, attack and seize Chinese ships and aircraft carrying perhaps hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers across the Taiwan Strait.
Each ship or plane, and the troops it carries, are much more expensive than the drones that could destroy them. This deterrence effect was also evident in the Iran War, where the US Navy, wary of Iran’s asymmetric warfare, rarely sent ships to the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
Beijing is almost certainly taking note of Paparo’s claims that he would target the Chinese military by filling the Taiwan Strait with thousands of drones in the air, on the water and under the sea, making it difficult for the People’s Liberation Army to cross the waterway and enter Taiwan.
That’s important for all militaries to learn lessons from the Iran war. The enemy is also learning. And those lessons may be applied in unexpected ways.
More than two months into the Iran war, many analysts are still puzzled by how wartime leaders in Washington did not plan for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Others wonder how Iran’s government continues to function in the face of military blowback, but see it as a clear lesson for Beijing.
“Tactical victories do not equate to political outcomes,” Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told CNN.
“Military pressure…does not translate neatly into a durable political solution.
“For China, it reinforces a core lesson that battlefield success does not automatically produce the desired end state.”
What the Chinese military lacks is combat experience. The People’s Liberation Army has not faced a heavy attack since the war with Vietnam in February 1979. Since then, U.S. forces have conducted two major operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and rapid combat operations in Kosovo and Panama, to name a few.
“This is what real war looks like,” Chinese military analyst Song Zongping said of the Iran conflict.
If China were to enter into a conflict with the United States within the next decade, Washington would likely retain large numbers of personnel who faced combat or participated in operational planning in the current Persian Gulf conflict.
They lost comrades, lost property, won overwhelming victories, and executed high-level precision warfare.
And they have made adjustments — from punishing airstrikes to blockading Iranian ports, for example, to shoring up aircraft shelters when critical equipment, such as AWACS radar planes, was lost.
Analysts said it remains to be seen how quickly the PLA, which is under fire, can adapt to a similarly changing battlefield.
Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Relations, gave a historical example from the last time the United States and China engaged in combat during the Korean War.
China had a better fighter, the Soviet-made MiG-15. However, American pilots fared better, even though they were flying inferior F-86s, as many brought their World War II experience to air combat.
The lesson, Thompson said, was that “a good pilot in a mediocre airplane will always beat a mediocre pilot in a good airplane.”
Another lesson to be learned from Iran is that a war at this level involving a major power and a minor power is not necessarily a formal operation that ends with the president being kidnapped by special forces in the middle of the night. (See Venezuela.)
“Iran’s ability to exploit choke points and introduce risks into global supply chains demonstrates how localized conflicts can quickly become international,” FDD’s Singleton said.
“For the Chinese government, this is a warning that any scenario for Taiwan would immediately impact global trade, energy flows, and third-party stakeholders in unimaginable ways.”
