Trump signals possible delay to Beijing summit as U.S. pressures China to help reopen Strait of Hormuz

U.S. President Donald Trump said his planned trip to China later this month could be delayed as Washington sought to pressure Beijing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, underscoring a renewed flashpoint in an already fragile bilateral relationship.

In an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday, Trump said he expected China to help unblock the strait before he travels to Beijing for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which had been scheduled for March 31 to April 2.

Trump added that the two weeks to the meeting were a “long time” and that Washington wanted clarity before then. “We may delay,” Trump told the FT, without elaborating on timing.

The remarks came as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng in Paris for talks about the planned summit. Beijing has yet to confirm the dates and typically announces such plans closer to their scheduled start.

The visit would be the first for a U.S. president since Trump’s last trip during his first term in 2017. It also comes five months after the two leaders met in the South Korean city of Busan, where they agreed to a one-year truce in a trade war that had seen tit-for-tat tariffs briefly soar to triple-digit levels last year.

Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi said earlier this month that the agenda for the exchange was already “on the table.”

Trump said Sunday aboard Air Force One that China sourced about 90% of its oil through the strait, framing Beijing’s cooperation on Hormuz as a matter of self-interest. The president has appealed to several European and Asian countries, including China, to help open up the chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply passes.

However, the numbers suggest Beijing may be more insulated from the strait closure and surging oil prices than Trump’s comments implied.

China has spent the past two decades diversifying its energy sources and building strategic reserves to cushion the blow of any prolonged disruption. As of January, Beijing held an estimated 1.2 billion barrels of onshore crude stockpiles, enough to meet demand for three to four months.

Seaborne oil imports through the strait now account for less than half of China’s total oil shipments, according to Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think tank. Nomura also estimated that oil flows through Hormuz represent just 6.6% of China’s total energy consumption.

Satellite imagery tracked by maritime research firms showed that Iran has continued to ship large amounts of crude oil to China since the war broke out late last month.

Beijing is unlikely to comply with Trump’s demand to send naval vessels to help reopen the Strait, nor is the president serious about canceling the Beijing summit, said Edward Fishman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Fishman dismissed Trump’s remarks as a “bluff.”

“The bet that China made over a decade ago on clean energy — becoming the world’s biggest producer of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles — is clearly paying off right now,” said Fishman, adding that Beijing stands to gain further as world leaders accelerate their pivot to alternative energy sources in the wake of the Iran conflict.

“And that’s going to give China a huge amount of leverage, because they’re the ones who hold the key to all of those technologies,” Fishman said.

Both sides appeared to ratchet up pressure ahead of the high-stakes summit in Beijing. The U.S. launched trade investigations into a broad swath of countries over alleged excess capacity and failures to address forced labour.

In a statement Monday, China’s commerce ministry said the Trump administration had “once again abused the Section 301 investigation process to override domestic law over international rules,” calling the probes “extremely unilateral, arbitrary and discriminatory.”

Beijing said it had formally lodged representations with Washington against the investigations. “We urge the U.S. side to immediately correct its wrong practices and meet China halfway,” a ministry spokesperson said, calling for dialogue and negotiated solutions.

The ministry said it would monitor the progress of the investigations closely and take unspecified measures to defend China’s interests.

— CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng and Penny Chen contributed to this report.