China ponders its role amid Iran nuclear quandary

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Contention over Iran's nuclear plans has thrown into sharp relief China's uncertain role in the crisis as a big economic partner of the Middle Eastern power that is nonetheless reluctant to rile the United States.

After a U.S. intelligence assessment released Monday said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons programme four years ago, China's stance has been ambiguous.

Beijing's ambassador to the United Nations said that after the report "things have changed", suggesting his country may not back fresh sanctions on Iran demanded by Washington.

Since then, however, Chinese diplomats have retreated to cautious calls for negotiations, leaving unclear whether Beijing would wield its power as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to veto the new sanctions pressing Iran to stop uranium enrichment that Washington and its allies still want.

Beijing's tight-lipped leaders appear to be weighing how the Washington announcement feeds into their delicate diplomatic and economic calculations, said Chinese experts on the Iran dispute.

"We don't want to base our foreign policy on a unilateral U.S. intelligence estimate," said Shen Dingli, a nuclear proliferation scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai.

"If we accept the report, we're saying that Iran most likely doesn't have a nuclear weapons programme now, but we're also saying they did have one until about when the Iraq War began and fooled all of us, including China."

Analysts offered varied views on whether China would support new U.N. sanctions.