Pakistan’s China trip comes with bigger ambitions than polite briefings
When Pakistan’s foreign ministry said on Monday that Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar would head to Beijing the next day, it used the standard language of long-running partnership. The two countries, it said, would discuss “in-depth discussions on regional developments, as well as bilateral and global issues of mutual interest,” because they enjoy an “all-weather strategic cooperative partnership.”
That is the sort of phrasing diplomats use when they want to sound steady while the region outside remains in various stages of turmoil.
Dar’s visit to China is happening as Islamabad tries to manage the instability around it, not any particular problem with Beijing. Over the weekend, Pakistan hosted the foreign ministers of Turkiye, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for a quadrilateral meeting focused on pushing the United States and Iran toward negotiations. The meeting came a month into a war that has spread across multiple theatres in the Middle East, driven up energy prices and raised fresh worries about a global recession. Minor details, as ever.
Dar’s trip has also been given an added sense of urgency by his own circumstances. He is travelling despite medical advice to rest after suffering a hairline shoulder fracture on Sunday, when he slipped while receiving Egypt’s foreign minister in Islamabad. Apparently diplomacy does not wait for the shoulder to heal.
China has already signalled support for Pakistan’s efforts. In a March 27 call, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Dar that Beijing appreciated Islamabad’s “untiring efforts to cool down the situation”. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning later said China “commends and supports Pakistan’s mediation effort for de-escalation and stands ready to enhance communication and coordination with Pakistan and others to jointly work for a ceasefire and peace in the region”.
But analysts say Dar is not travelling to Beijing just to collect another round of encouraging statements. The real question is whether Pakistan can persuade China to go beyond supportive language and take on a more meaningful role in the mediation effort, at a moment when US President Donald Trump shifts, sometimes daily and sometimes hourly, between talking diplomacy and threatening military escalation against Iran, while Tehran remains deeply suspicious of Washington’s intentions.
Coordinating positions
Baqir Sajjad Syed, a former Pakistan fellow at the Wilson Center, said Dar’s trip is primarily meant to brief the Chinese leadership on the recently concluded quadrilateral meeting in Islamabad.
He said the visit could also help sharpen five principles for any future US-Iran dialogue: an immediate ceasefire, the resumption of talks, protection of civilians, maritime security and adherence to the United Nations Charter.
“These principles were first discussed in the Wang Yi-Dar telephone conversation last week,” Syed told Al Jazeera. “One of the main objectives of this trip is to translate these into a more concrete framework or outcome document. Last week’s phone call was preliminary. In-person engagement allows more detailed coordination, possible alignment on parameters, and consideration of a joint statement,” he said.
A few hours later, China and Pakistan announced those five principles as the basis of their mediation effort.
Ishtiaq Ahmad, emeritus professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, sees the trip through Pakistan’s familiar role as intermediary.
“Pakistan normally takes China into confidence since China is a permanent ally with a different profile from the US,” he told Al Jazeera.
“This is classical intermediary behaviour, a country that sometimes signals its own interests and expectations in return for facilitating others. Pakistan is trying to remain relevant, and this is how it does so,” Ahmad said.
Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, drew a firmer line between what Islamabad can do and what Beijing is likely to do.
“Pakistan can mediate between the US and Iran,” she said. “China cannot. Most of the calls China has made are with Gulf countries and Iran.”
The guarantor question
One of the more closely watched readings of Dar’s trip came from Vali Nasr, a former US State Department official and a leading Iran expert.
“Iran has asked for guarantees in any deal with the US,” Nasr wrote on X on Monday. “Word is that Pakistan Foreign Minister is going to Beijing to get a guarantor for the potential deal. Likely that is Iran’s condition for talks with US. And FM would not be going to China without having floated the idea with both Washington and Beijing. No guarantees of China biting but Beijing is now the front line in the diplomatic effort.”
Ahmad was unimpressed by that theory.
“The assumption that Beijing would step in as a guarantor for Tehran is analytically weak,” he said.
“Guarantees are extended by strong, stable actors seeking to preserve order, not by powers aligning themselves with a regime whose position is visibly eroding. Iran’s operational space has narrowed largely to Strait of Hormuz disruptions and Houthi activity. No serious power, least of all China, underwrites the interests of a declining actor,” he said.
The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman, carries roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil and gas supplies. It has been effectively disrupted since the war began on February 28, following US-Israeli attacks on Iran that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and political leaders.
Syed took a different view. He said Beijing is “well-positioned and increasingly willing to act as a credible underwriter of this process,” pointing to its economic links with Iran, generally stable relations with the major parties and its financial and diplomatic influence.
“Chinese officials clearly link Beijing’s support for Pakistan’s mediation to ‘restoring Hormuz transit’ and ‘regional peace and stability’,” he said. “China will not be a neutral bystander. It would rather see a stabilised Iran-US track as serving its core interests.”
What China has to gain
Even if Beijing never becomes a formal guarantor, it has obvious reasons to want the war to end.
According to tanker-tracking firm Kpler, China imported about 1.38 million barrels per day of crude from Iran in 2025, roughly 12 percent of its total imports.
The stakes at Hormuz are far wider than a bilateral oil trade. The US Energy Information Administration says about 20 million barrels per day flowed through the strait in 2024, close to 20 percent of global petroleum consumption.
The International Energy Agency estimates that nearly 15 million barrels per day passed through the strait in 2025, with China and India accounting for 44 percent of those imports.
Researchers at Columbia University estimate that between 45 and 50 percent of China’s crude oil imports move through the strait, making any disruption a direct threat to Chinese energy security.
The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission says total China-Iran trade, including unreported oil imports, reached about $41.2bn in 2025.
Back in 2021, Iran and China signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement under which Beijing pledged up to $400bn in investment in exchange for discounted Iranian oil. A sizeable share of that investment has not materialised, largely because US sanctions on Chinese firms make life inconvenient for everyone involved.
For Syed, China’s motives are straightforward.
“These include protecting energy security, safeguarding BRI and CPEC investments across the region, and burnishing its image as a global peace broker. A prolonged war and high oil prices directly hurt China’s economy,” he said.
The Belt and Road Initiative is Beijing’s vast network of infrastructure projects across more than 150 countries. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a key part of that initiative, is valued at about $62bn and links China’s Xinjiang region to the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar.
“Islamabad’s on-the-ground shuttle diplomacy gives China a low-risk, credible face to push de-escalation without direct engagement with Washington on this issue,” Syed said.
Ahmad sees the Chinese position as more restrained.
“The Chinese are very pragmatic and calculated. They will assess where things are heading, and at the end of the day, China would not want Iran to become a Venezuela with Americans at the door,” he said.
He added that Trump has made Washington’s appetite plain enough.
“Trump, ruthless as he is, has been transparent about it, openly saying they want Iranian oil. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is affecting Asia and Europe most acutely, and China will feel that impact,” he said.
Syed expects China to lean on familiar tools such as “public endorsements, envoys, joint framework-building”, along with economic leverage that could include “trade and investment incentives or quiet pressure on Iran” to bring Tehran to the table, while staying away from any direct military role.
Ahmad agreed on that last point.
“I do not think China will do anything militarily. Economically, they have wider interests and will make their expectations clear to Pakistan,” he said.
Watching Washington and Beijing
Before the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Trump had been due in Beijing from March 31 to April 2, but that visit was postponed. The summit is now expected on May 14 and 15. Chinese President Xi Jinping is also expected to visit the US later this year.
Ahmad said those meetings may reveal more about how Washington and Beijing are positioning themselves.
“Two trips are planned this year: Trump to China and Xi to the United States. If they meet twice, there is clearly some degree of understanding between the two great powers. And what you see right now under Trump is, in a way, more transparency; he says what he means. That dynamic is worth watching carefully,” he said.
Meanwhile, the military buildup continues. An amphibious task force of about 3,500 US Marines and sailors, led by the USS Tripoli, has arrived in the Gulf. Another 2,200 Marines are heading to the region, along with 2,000 soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
Trump has also left the door open to military action, with reports saying the Pentagon is preparing for possible ground operations that could last weeks.
China’s deeper calculation
Ahmad says Beijing’s stance is rooted in long-term strategic interests rather than any appetite for conflict.
“It is in China’s core interest for this conflict to end,” he said. “Unlike imperial powers, it has not harboured expansionist ambitions. When China has expanded its footprint in recent years, it has done so by developing a greater stake in global stability.”
Beyond Taiwan and the South China Sea, he said, Beijing has little desire to be dragged into military ventures elsewhere.
“Do not expect China to have military ambitions elsewhere,” he added.
Syed argued that China may still become more active if the conflict deepens.
“A prolonged Hormuz crisis, a destabilised Iran, or a wider regional war carries direct costs for China in terms of energy shocks, disrupted shipping, and BRI risk,” he said. “China will not be a neutral bystander.”
Sun, however, urged caution about reading too much into Beijing’s diplomatic posture.
“China does not impose mediation on other countries,” she said. “And China needs to be cognisant of the potential fallout of the mediation and what if it doesn’t work.”
