President Trump departed for Beijing on the evening of May 12, boarding Air Force One for the first US presidential visit to China in a decade. The summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, originally scheduled for March, was pushed back after the Iran war erupted and rewrote the diplomatic calendar.
Now, it is coming at a time no one in Washington has anticipated. The ceasefire is, in the US president’s own description, “massive life support.” The Strait of Hormuz is still disputed. Iran’s counterproposal has been rejected as totally unacceptable. And the country President Trump is flying to is the largest buyer of Iranian oil, the host of Iran’s foreign minister just days ago, and the one actor with enough economic leverage over Tehran to move the needle.
The three issues likely to dominate the May 14-15 meetings are trade, tariffs, and the Iran war, and in each instance, the two sides bring unresolved tension into the room. But Iran is the one that cannot wait. China sources close to 60% of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which means Beijing wants the strait open as badly as Washington does. But wanting the same outcome and being willing to pay the same price for it are different things. China’s leverage over Iran is real. Its willingness to spend that leverage on Washington’s terms is the question the summit needs to answer.
China has no incentive to publicly commit to pressuring Iran in ways that would embarrass Beijing’s relationship with Tehran. What it can do is give the US enough in private to take home a claim of progress. The true measure of the effectiveness of that private diplomacy is whether it sparks any action by Iran, and that will not be evident in the communique issued as a result of the summit.
The Leverage Problem
In the weeks before the summit, Washington sanctioned four entities, including three China-based firms, for providing satellite imagery enabling Iranian military strikes against US forces. The Treasury Department separately targeted Chinese oil refineries buying Iranian oil and shippers of that oil. Those sanctions came to Beijing before Trump. They are simultaneously a pressure tool and a negotiating liability. It’s not a posture that makes for goodwill in the room to sanction your host’s companies days before your state visit. It does, however, signal that Washington is serious about cutting off Iranian oil revenues, and that China’s continued purchases of that oil carry a cost.
Beijing’s response to US pressure has been to defend Iran’s right to civilian nuclear energy, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi taking that position explicitly during his meeting with Iran’s foreign minister last week. President Xi has also offered implicit criticism of the US over the war, saying international rule of law must not be selectively applied and that the world must not be allowed to revert to the law of the jungle. That language is measured but pointed. China is not neutral on the Iran war. It has a position, and that position is not aligned with Washington’s.
A senior expert on China at the Stimson Centre put it directly, “China might hold a key, but it does not have the ability to dictate what Iran can or cannot do”. The key takeaway is that the question of what Beijing can realistically be expected to do for Washington is framed by that. China’s influence over Iran is real but not unlimited. Beijing can’t rule out Tehran’s calculations, its internal pressures, and its own red lines.
What China can do is make the cost to Iran of intransigence more expensive, by curtailing oil purchases, by slowing financial assistance, and by informing Tehran that defiant behavior could cost it its key economic partnership. Whether President Xi will do any of this, and whether he’ll get concessions in return from the US on trade and Taiwan, is what the next 48 hours will tell us.
President Trump has said he expects great things for both countries from this meeting. President Xi has said very little publicly. That asymmetry captures the dynamic of the summit precisely. The US needs something from Beijing. Beijing knows it. The summit began today. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The ceasefire is still on life support. China is still the only actor that can move Iran without firing a single shot. Whether it chooses to is the only question that matters this week.
