BEIJING — Chinese independent refiners restarted Iranian crude lifting at the steepest discounts in three years this week, ship-tracking and trade data showed Saturday, as Beijing moved to lock in cheap barrels while Tehran’s economy reeled from a war that has left its export infrastructure intact but its bargaining position collapsed.

At least 11 very large crude carriers and Suezmaxes carrying a combined 18.4 million barrels of Iranian crude completed ship-to-ship transfers off the coasts of Singapore and Malaysia between Monday and Friday, according to data compiled by Kpler and Vortexa and cross-checked against Iranian export terminal calls at Kharg Island. Almost all of the cargoes were ultimately discharged at the so-called teapot refineries clustered along the Shandong coast, with Rizhao, Qingdao and Yantai accounting for the bulk of unloadings. Trading desks in Singapore and Geneva said the cargoes priced at $13 to $16 a barrel below dated Brent, a discount unseen since the early months of 2023 and roughly double the levels that prevailed before the Iran-Israel war began in early March.

The flows mark the first sustained, openly tracked resumption of Iranian crude lifting since the Islamabad ceasefire took effect April 15, and they offer the clearest signal yet that Beijing intends to use the post-war moment to secure long-dated supply at terms Tehran could not have countenanced six months ago. They also complicate the diplomatic choreography unfolding this weekend in Geneva and Brussels, where European foreign ministers are weighing conditional sanctions relief in exchange for Iranian compliance with the verification regime that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors began executing at Natanz on Friday.

“What you are watching is a buyer’s market reasserting itself with unusual speed,” said Wei Liang, an energy economist at the Center for International Energy Strategy in Shanghai. “Iran needs hard currency. China needs cheap feedstock for refiners that are running far below capacity. The war removed every diplomatic reason for Tehran to hold out for a better price, and Beijing’s traders are extremely good at reading that kind of moment.”

The political backdrop in Tehran sharpens the calculation. Iran’s central bank governor, Mohammad Reza Farzin, told a closed session of the Majlis economic committee on Wednesday that foreign exchange reserves usable for current-account financing had fallen to “the lowest operative level in fifteen years,” according to a summary circulated among reporters in Tehran by two parliamentary aides. The rial, which slid past 980,000 to the dollar on the unofficial market Thursday before steadying Friday, has lost roughly a quarter of its value since the start of April. Each cargo lifted by a Chinese refiner under a long-tenor prepayment arrangement is, in the calculus of Iranian officials, a deferred crisis.

Chinese officials have said little publicly. A Ministry of Commerce briefing in Beijing on Wednesday described “normal commercial cooperation” with Iran and declined to address the specific volumes reported by trade analytics firms. A senior Chinese trading executive at one of the state majors, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss commercially sensitive arrangements, said the company’s term contracts with the National Iranian Oil Company had been quietly renegotiated during the war to include “structural discount clauses” linked to dated Brent and a force-majeure ladder tied to Strait of Hormuz transit conditions. “The clauses survive the ceasefire,” the executive said. “They were drafted with the ceasefire in mind.”

The behavior of the teapot refineries is itself a reliable signal. The independents, which together represent roughly a quarter of Chinese refining capacity, have historically been the country’s most opportunistic buyers of sanctioned barrels. Their utilization rates collapsed during the war, with several Shandong plants running below 55 percent of capacity in mid-March, but run rates at the cluster averaged 68 percent in the week ending Friday, the highest since January, according to surveys published by Beijing-based consultancy Sublime.

For Tehran, the trade-off is uncomfortable but, by the admission of officials, unavoidable. A senior Iranian oil ministry adviser, reached in Tehran by telephone Saturday and speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were continuing, said the post-ceasefire pricing reflected “a temporary asymmetry that we expect to narrow as European discussions advance.”

The flows also reshuffle competition within Asia. Indian state refiners, which had cautiously lifted small Iranian volumes during the war under a rupee-based clearing mechanism through UCO Bank, have signaled they will not match the deep prepayment commitments Chinese refiners are now writing. “We are not in a position to lock in two-year tenors against barrels that may be subject to a different European posture in six weeks,” a senior Indian refining executive told reporters in Mumbai on Friday. South Korean and Japanese refiners, bound by U.S. sanctions exposure that the Chinese teapots are willing to ignore, remain absent from the bid stack.

Several analysts said the resumption of Chinese lifting, combined with the OPEC+ output increase agreed in Vienna on April 1, was a key reason Brent had drifted toward $99 over the past week. “The market has decided that Iranian barrels are going to keep moving,” said Hannah Reilly, an oil strategist at Standard Chartered in Singapore. “Whether or not the European Union eases sanctions, the physical flows are normalizing.”

European diplomats appeared aware of the dynamic. A senior official in the office of EU High Representative Kaja Kallas, speaking on background in Brussels Friday, acknowledged that “the commercial reality is moving faster than the diplomatic process” and said the bloc was studying whether to attach explicit traceability conditions to any future relief package. In Washington, a senior Treasury spokesperson said the department was “monitoring the flows closely” and would “continue to enforce the sanctions framework as written,” without elaborating on whether secondary measures against Chinese refiners were under active consideration.

Trade data due next week from Chinese customs is expected to confirm a sharp rebound in March-loaded Iranian volumes arriving in April, with several analysts projecting figures of 1.6 million barrels a day or higher — levels that would mark the strongest month on record. Officials in Beijing said additional commercial announcements tied to Iranian energy and petrochemical cooperation would be made in coming weeks.