This sprawling Chinese refinery is bankrolling Tehran

Chinese leader Xi Jinping last year summoned dozens of leaders from the nation’s top private companies to a rare meeting, calling on them to help China navigate economic difficulties. Sitting with luminaries such as Alibaba’s Jack Ma and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, according to state media, was a 55-year-old man named Chen Jianhua, founder of a company called Hengli Group. To the outside world, Hengli—which in Chinese means “eternal strength”—may not ring a bell. But inside China, it has become an industrial juggernaut. With operations spanning petrochemicals, textiles and shipbuilding, it employs more than 300,000 people and records revenue north…