China’s Help on Hormuz: Reading the Trump-Xi Summit’s ‘Open and Free of Charge’ Line
Trump and Xi met in Beijing on 14-15 May, the first US state visit to China since 2017. The joint position supports reopening the strait and rejects ‘a charge for transiting through it.’ This post reads what the phrase means against UNCLOS Article 26 and the Suez/Panama services-fee precedent, separates the rejection of the Iranian sovereignty-asserting toll from the question of how a working authority recovers its institutional cost, and identifies where the summit narrows the negotiating space.