On 14 and 15 May 2026, President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping met in Beijing in the first state visit to China by a United States president since 2017. The summit had originally been planned for March and was deferred after the United States and Israeli strikes on Iran. The Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz closure were, in the public framing of both governments, the most consequential agenda item alongside trade, technology, and Taiwan. The joint statement and the post-summit public commentary contain two specific elements on the Strait of Hormuz that this post reads in detail.
The first element is the joint position. China, in the joint communique and in President Xi’s public commentary, supports the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, agrees to encourage Iran to participate in negotiations, and commits not to supply military equipment to Iran during the present crisis. President Trump, in his public commentary on the summit, characterised Xi’s commitment as: “I would love to be a help, if I can be of any help whatsoever.” The second element is a specific phrase that has appeared in reporting and commentary on the joint statement: the strait, in the Chinese view, “should never be a charge for transiting through it.” This second phrase deserves direct treatment, and the rest of this post is structured around what it does and does not mean for the institutional argument the site has been carrying.
What the summit changes operationally
Operationally, the summit produced a degree of United States-China alignment on the basic question of whether the strait should be open to international transit traffic. Both governments are publicly committed to the strait being open. Both governments have public commitments to encouraging the diplomatic process mediated through Pakistan, analysed in the Pakistan mediation post, to produce an arrangement under which the strait reopens. The 5 May United States-Bahrain UN draft resolution on freedom of navigation, analysed in the GCC long-term arrangement post, now has, on the public reporting, China indicating it will not block the substance of the resolution if the procedural and diplomatic context is acceptable.
President Trump has, in connection with the summit, indicated that he is considering easing some of the United States sanctions on Chinese refineries connected with Iranian crude purchases, specifically the OFAC designations of Hengli Petrochemical and the four other refineries that became the subject of the post on China’s 2 May Blocking Rules order. If those designations are lifted in some form, the buyer leg of the four-leg toll architecture analysed in the 25 April Hengli post partially reopens, with the bifurcation between inside-China and outside-China compliance environments narrowing. China has, in turn, committed to purchasing United States crude through ports in Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, on terms still to be worked out commercially. The two moves together reshape the marginal economics of the Iranian-crude-to-Chinese-refinery channel without resolving the institutional configuration of the chokepoint itself.
The “no charge for transiting” line, on a careful reading
The phrase that should never be a charge for transiting through the strait is, on its face, in tension with this site’s argument for a treaty-backed Hormuz transit authority that recovers institutional operating cost via a per-transit tariff. The tension is real and worth being precise about, because the precision matters for the substantive design of any working configuration that will emerge from the diplomatic process.
The relevant legal framework is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982. Article 26 of UNCLOS prohibits charges “levied upon foreign ships by reason only of their passage through the territorial sea.” Article 38, on transit passage through straits used for international navigation, applies similar restrictions. Charges for specific services rendered to the vessel — pilotage, towage, traffic management, infrastructure use, safety coordination, dispute resolution — are not, by the established practice of the Suez Canal Authority and the Panama Canal Authority, treated as transit-passage charges in the prohibited sense. They are treated as services charges in the ordinary commercial sense, recoverable from the user of the services on the principle that the operator of the chokepoint infrastructure bears costs that have to be recovered from somewhere.
The Suez Canal Authority’s tariff is, in this reading, not a transit-passage-as-such charge. It is a charge for the integrated services the Authority provides to vessels using the Authority’s infrastructure: convoy scheduling, transit management, pilotage where applicable, safety and traffic services, casualty response capability, and the standing administrative apparatus that makes routine transit possible. The Panama Canal Authority’s tariff is the same kind of charge under Title XIV of the Panamanian constitution, with the locks-and-water-management infrastructure adding a further set of services to the bundle. Neither tariff has been treated by the international shipping community, the IMO, or the operator class generally as a violation of the UNCLOS Article 26 prohibition. Both have operated for decades as the institutional cost-recovery mechanism for their respective chokepoint authorities.
The Chinese joint-statement language, on the careful reading, is consistent with the UNCLOS Article 26 framework. It prohibits transit-passage-as-such charges, which is what the Iranian unilateral framework analysed in the new-chapter post proposes by way of sanctions-country-surcharge differentiation. The Chinese position rejects the sovereignty-asserting toll structure of the unilateral framework. It does not, on the language available, reject the Suez/Panama-style services-fee structure. The two structures are, in substantive design, different things; conflating them obscures what the negotiation is actually about.
The Iranian sanctions-country surcharge specifically
The clearest substantive target of the “no charge for transiting” phrase is the Iranian unilateral framework’s sanctions-country-surcharge element. The framework, as analysed in the new-chapter post, proposes that countries Iran identifies as having taken hostile actions against the Islamic Republic — a category that includes the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union member states, and a number of other Western governments — pay an additional compensatory surcharge for transit. The surcharge converts the toll from a services-fee for chokepoint operations into a political instrument of the host state. The Chinese position, on its joint-statement language with the United States, rejects that conversion explicitly.
This rejection is in fact useful to the institutional argument the site has been carrying. The Iranian unilateral framework’s sanctions-country surcharge has been one of the four elements that, on the site’s analysis, separate the framework from a working treaty-backed authority on the Suez or Panama model. The Trump-Xi joint position now provides multilateral institutional support for removing the surcharge from any working configuration, because both the United States and China are on record as opposed to it. The 5 May UN draft resolution’s freedom-of-navigation language is reinforced by the summit’s “no charge for transiting” language. The negotiating space narrows around the configurations that exclude the sanctions-country surcharge.
What the summit does not change
The summit does not resolve the institutional configuration of the chokepoint. The joint statement supports a particular operational status (open strait) and rejects a particular tariff structure (sovereignty-asserting differentiation). It does not name the administering body. It does not propose a tariff schedule on the Suez/Panama services-fee model. It does not establish a dispute-resolution forum. It does not establish a standing statistical-bulletin and reporting apparatus. The configuration questions that the 15-vs-14 geometry post identified as the negotiating space remain open. The summit places the United States and China in alignment on two specific points within that space; the remaining points still require the bilateral United States-Iran negotiation, mediated through Pakistan, to produce substantive answers.
The reading is, in summary, that the Trump-Xi summit is genuine institutional progress in a particular dimension. It narrows the space of acceptable configurations by excluding the Iranian sovereignty-asserting toll structure from the multilateral consensus. It commits the world’s two largest economies to the operational target of an open strait. It modestly reshapes the buyer-leg economics of the Iranian crude channel through the sanctions-easing discussion. It does not produce an institutional configuration. It is, in this respect, the multilateral version of the same pattern the GCC’s post-Jeddah trajectory displayed at the regional level: institutional positioning that supports an answer of the kind a treaty-backed authority would constitute, without itself constituting the authority.
The services-fee question on its own terms
It is worth being direct about the services-fee question, since the site’s name and the rate schedule place a tariff at the centre of the proposed configuration. The argument the site has been carrying is that a working Hormuz transit authority will incur the same kinds of standing institutional costs that the Suez Canal Authority and the Panama Canal Authority incur, and that those costs have to be recovered from somewhere. The mechanisms available are: a per-transit services fee on the Suez/Panama model, a host-state subsidy from one or more of the riparian states, a multilateral subsidy from the principal user states, or some combination. The site’s preferred mechanism is the Suez/Panama services-fee model because it is the empirically-tested mechanism that has supported two working chokepoint authorities for decades on a basis that the operator class has accepted and the underwriter class has been able to price against.
The Trump-Xi summit language is, on the careful reading, not inconsistent with this. It excludes one particular tariff structure (the sovereignty-asserting differentiation) and is silent on the others. The site’s reading, post-summit, is that the negotiating space remains open on the services-fee question and that the design work on a Suez/Panama-style tariff is the practical work of the coming weeks if the diplomatic channel produces a framework agreement of the kind the 14-point proposal mechanism language placeholders for. The comparison page sets out the structural arithmetic. The rate schedule proposes the tariff in services-fee terms. The calculator prices a transit against it. None of those tools is challenged by the summit’s “no charge for transiting” line, properly read.
The summit is one of the most institutionally significant events in the present crisis. It moves two of the four largest counterparties to the chokepoint dispute into formal alignment on the basic configuration questions that any working settlement will have to address. The work that remains is the substantive design of the configuration. The site’s reading of where that work sits is unchanged.
Sources: Time, “Trump Says Xi Offered To Help Broker Peace With Iran,” 14 May 2026; Al Jazeera, “Trump-Xi summit: China’s help in Iran may require US concessions,” 13 May 2026; Al Jazeera live updates on the Trump-Xi summit, 14 May 2026; Euronews, “Trump and Xi wrap up summit claiming progress in stabilising ties but differences remain,” 15 May 2026; CNN Politics, “Live updates: Trump-Xi summit ends on cordial note but no breakthroughs announced yet,” May 2026; Bloomberg, “Trump Says He May Remove Some Iran-Linked Sanctions on China,” 15 May 2026; CNBC, “Trump says he will soon make a decision about sanctions on Chinese companies buying Iranian oil,” 15 May 2026; CNBC, “China to buy U.S. oil to feed its ‘insatiable appetite,’ Trump tells Fox News,” 15 May 2026; CNBC, “China presses Iran against resuming war, urges Hormuz reopening ahead of Trump-Xi summit,” 6 May 2026; Council on Foreign Relations, “At the Trump-Xi Summit, China Will Have the Upper Hand”; CSIS, “Trump-Xi Summit in Beijing: Managing the World’s Most Important Relationship”; United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982, Articles 26 and 38; Suez Canal Authority statutory framework and tariff publications; Panama Canal Authority constitutional and tariff documentation under Title XIV of the Panamanian constitution; this site’s prior analyses on the Hengli buyer-leg (25 April), the new-chapter framework (30 April), the 14-point mechanism language (4 May), the 15-vs-14 geometry (4 May), Pakistan mediation (4 May), China’s Blocking Rules order (11 May), and the GCC long-term arrangement (11 May).