China has been mostly only rhetorically helping Iran during the theocratic regime’s present crisis. It is very wrong for anybody to be killing Supreme Leaders and instigating regime change, says Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, as if the U.S. and Israel had picked the name “Iran” at random out of a hat.
The rhetoric “is where Beijing’s assistance has ended,” says National Security Journal. Although China has reportedly been planning to send air defense systems and anti-ship cruise missiles to Iran, “there is as yet no evidence coming from the battlefield that such arms have in fact been delivered and deployed” (March 10, 2026).
But China’s past assistance is apparently having an impact.
“Tehran is deploying military-grade satellite-jamming systems to prevent communication via Starlink, cutting satellite internet performance by as much as 80% in parts of the country. It is also engaging in GPS ‘spoofing’—broadcasting false location data to confuse and disable satellite terminals—marking the first documented case of a state deploying this technique against commercial satellite internet. This escalation represents a leap forward in Iran’s censorship capabilities.
“That improvement isn’t home-grown.” Iran is deploying systems that in their sophistication mirror those of China, “a global censorship superpower that has spent decades refining digital control at home and exporting it abroad.”
Perhaps some 50,000 Starlink units have been smuggled into Iran to help people elude the censors.
The jamming is not enabled by tech that is only now being introduced. Iran had already achieved some success blocking Starlink during the January protests.
In that month, The Times of Israel reported that since the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals, likely in a bid to make drones less effective. Starlink receivers use GPS signals to position themselves to connect to a constellation of low-orbit satellites.”
