Does China welcome or dread an Iran-Israel war?

It wants American interests to suffer, but not at any price.

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Last month, as tensions escalated between Iran and Israel, China helped organise a five-day Chinese film festival in the Iranian capital, Tehran. It opened with a blockbuster: The Battle At Lake Changjin. The drama portrays the heroism of Chinese soldiers who fought against American troops in the Korean war of 1950-53. "Strike one punch to avoid a hundred," Mao Zedong is shown exhorting his colleagues. Nationalist bloggers in China crowed about the film's showing. "Iran cannot sit idly by, even if the United States is behind Israel!" wrote a widely read scribe.

As Chinese officials ponder the violence in the Middle East since then, they may be less keen on escalation. Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel on Oct 1. Israel has relentlessly attacked Iran's proxies in Gaza and Lebanon. All of that unsettles China, which is by far the most powerful of four countries - also including Iran, North Korea and Russia - that have acquired monikers in the West such as the "axis of upheaval" and the "quartet of chaos".

The four share a contempt for the American-led global order and a readiness to disrupt it. Their security-related dealings with one another are often shadowy. But - notwithstanding its own muscle-flexing around Taiwan - there are limits to China's appetite for conflict.