The Associated Press reports that the sanctions “come just a few weeks before President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping are due to meet in China,” a point highlighted in the headline of Fortune’s reprint of the story: “…weeks before he meets Xi Jinping” (April 24, 2026).
President Donald Trump’s administration is placing economic sanctions on a major China-based oil refinery and roughly 40 shipping companies and tankers involved in transporting Iranian oil.
The move, announced Friday and first reported by The Associated Press, makes good on Trump’s threat to impose secondary sanctions on companies and countries that do business with Iran….
Concurrently, the U.S. this month imposed a physical blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf waterway that is crucial to global energy supplies.
The sanctions, which cut off the companies from the U.S. financial system and penalize anyone who does business with them, come just a few weeks before President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping are due to meet in China.
Included in Friday’s sanctions is Hengli Petrochemical’s facility in the port city of Dalian, which has a processing capacity of roughly 400,000 barrels of crude oil per day, making it one of the biggest independent refineries in China….
China is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil….
Iran has previously said that its demands for ending the war include the lifting of sanctions.
Although China is unhappy about this kind of thing, “its major companies and banks still comply with U.S. sanctions because they are more exposed to the U.S.-dominated financial system.”
Earlier in the month Liu Pengyu, who propagandizes on behalf of China’s embassy in Washington, commented on similar sanctions, moaning about how the U.S. sanction regime “undermines international trade order and rules, disrupts normal economic and trade exchanges, and infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and individuals.” Every now and then the Chinese Communist Party, ruthless mass violator of rights, raises the banner for rights.
Meanwhile, the New York Post reports, “Iran is scrambling to get a massive crude carrier to Kharg Island [glimpsed above], in a sign that President Trump’s blockade is bringing the regime’s oil-critical hub—which controls roughly 90% of Iranian crude oil exports—to the brink, according to a report [by Gulf News].”
That the Chinese government dislikes the sanctions may be a source of awkwardness in the Trump-Xi meeting. Probably not a greater source of awkwardness, though, than the American-Israeli war on China’s client state. Anyway, the longer the column of awkward debits on the CCP side of the ledger prior to the big get-together in Beijing, the better.
