Wikileaks: " If you want oil from us ... then you must put more pressure on Iran..."

"... Saudi Arabia and the United States discussed how increasing Saudi crude supplies to China "would have the welcome side impact of reducing Iranian leverage over China," U.S. officials told the Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi in August 2009.

Two months earlier, a senior French diplomat overseeing Middle Eastern affairs told a U.S. embassy official that Saudi diplomats had told China: "If you want oil from us ... then you must put more pressure on Iran."...

Saudi Arabia is now China's biggest source of oil and the kingdom delivers more oil to China now than it does to the United States.

Once Saudi Arabia began stepping up oil deliveries to China, Beijing began urging Iran to take seriously western proposals for ways to end the nuclear standoff.

China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice in a June 2009 meeting that "China urged Iran more than once to be forthcoming with the U.S. 'in many areas'."Yang also said he believed, regardless of Iran's rhetoric, that "deep down" Tehran must be impressed by President Obama's willingness to work together.That meeting was one of several instances which illustrated how China acted as a go-between for Washington with Iran, or was asked to be one.

On October 16, 2009, the U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Glyn Davies, asked his Chinese counterpart Hu Xiaodi to persuade Iran to send a high-level Iranian delegation to an IAEA meeting in Vienna. Hu replied it would be "odd" for China to pass along that suggestion, given China itself was not attending that meeting, according to one diplomatic cable.

The U.N. Security Council has imposed four rounds of sanctions on Tehran for refusing to freeze its uranium enrichment program. The sanctions have so far excluded oil and gasoline exports. However, last year, the United States and the European Union approved a wide range of sanctions that hit the heart of Iran's lucrative energy sector. That has exposed China's dilemma in this issue, as it seeks on one hand to show it is behind international efforts to stop nuclear weapons proliferation, while trying to secure crude supplies and be a major oil player. Chinese companies have stepped up activities in Iran recently. A Chinese company will help develop Iran's giant north and south Azadegan oil fields, an Iranian official was quoted saying in March by the semi-official Mehr news agency. The investment from the company, which he declined to name, would exceed $6 billion. In 2009, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) signed a memorandum of understanding with National Iranian Oil Co, promising to pay 90 percent of the development costs for the South Azadegan oil field while taking ownership of a 70 percent stake. An Iranian official said the project needed an investment of up to $2.5 billion. Earlier that year, CNPC also won a deal to develop the North Azadegan oilfield. That deal was worth $2 billion in its first phase.

The diplomatic cables show China's oil giants maneuvering to ward off any risk Washington could impose unilateral sanctions on them over their activities in Iran..."