<![CDATA[This study examines how the historical continuity of China-Iran relations since the Silk Road era is mobilized in China's contemporary Middle East policy, and how it relates to China's stance on Palestine, using realism, energy geopolitics, and hedging theory as an integrated framework. Using Qualitative historical research based on a corpus of 34 primary and secondary sources (2015-2026, with classical Silk Road sources as an exception), analyzed through heuristic, source-criticism, interpretive, and historiographic stages. China-Iran relations, rooted in Silk Road era exchange, evolved into a partnership anchored in energy interdependence: China absorbs an estimated 80-90% of Iran's oil exports and anchors the 2021 25-year cooperation agreement, while withholding explicit political and security commitments an asymmetric hedging pattern that grows structurally harder to sustain as dependence deepens. China's Palestine stance follows a parallel logic: consistent normative rhetoric and repeated UN votes favoring an immediate Gaza ceasefire are unmatched by material intervention, indicating calculative diplomacy and selective geopolitical posture rather than ideological solidarity. The study connects Islamic civilizational history with geopolitical analysis. It relies on documentary and secondary sources rather than diplomatic interviews or systematic trade/voting datasets, which future research should incorporate. This is the first study to place China-Iran relations and China's Palestine policy within a single hedging framework, showing both are expressions of the same selective legitimacy logic.]]>
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