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Pakistan's PM takes the deal to Beijing

3 min read

16:13UTC

Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to China for a four-day visit, the civilian half of a split delegation briefing Iran's biggest customer on the deal's terms.

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Key takeaway

Pakistan split its delegation, sending its premier to brief Beijing while its army chief worked Tehran.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to China on Saturday 23 May for a four-day state visit⁠¹. The trip is the civilian half of a split delegation: while Sharif and Dar briefed Beijing, army chief Asim Munir carried the deal to Tehran the same weekend. Pakistan has run the war's main US-Iran back-channel for months, and is now dividing its principals by track.

Beijing has a direct stake in the weekend's other developments. China is Iran's largest trading partner, and Chinese banks are the institutions most exposed by the sanctions licence that expired at midnight. The civilian-PM-to-Beijing, army-chief-to-Tehran split sends the commercial and financial questions to China's leadership while the security and mediation questions stay with Iran's. Each principal carries the track that matches his counterpart.

The Beijing leg sits inside an established architecture rather than improvising one. Iran appointed Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf as its special representative for China affairs on 18 May, with dual sign-off from the civilian president and the Supreme Leader. That posting gives Pakistan's briefing of Beijing a defined Iranian counterpart, keeping China inside the negotiating structure as a party to be coordinated, not an afterthought to be informed.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

On 23 May, Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing for a four-day visit. At the same time, Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir was flying to Tehran. Pakistan split its most senior delegation in two: the civilian leadership went to Beijing, the military chief went to Tehran. The Beijing leg matters because China is Iran's largest trading partner, and Chinese banks face direct financial risk from the OFAC sanctions deadline that expired on Sunday 24 May. By briefing Beijing on the deal terms, Pakistan is managing China's expectations and trying to ensure Chinese financial institutions know what to expect. China needs to know what the deal means for its oil imports from Iran, which pass through the same Strait of Hormuz that the deal would reopen.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-left-leaning sources from Qatar

Qatar

Primary parallel: Pakistan's 2011 role following the Abbottabad raid, when ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha flew to Washington and Islamabad simultaneously ran diplomatic damage-control tracks with Beijing and Riyadh, shows the same civilian-military split in crisis diplomacy.

Pasha carried the security-intelligence track, Prime Minister Gilani carried the Alliance-management track to Gulf partners. The architecture succeeded in containing the immediate bilateral crisis but created lasting tensions about which Pakistani principal spoke with authority on which issue.

Counter-parallel: India's 1998 post-Pokhran nuclear tests saw a single track managed by External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, with no military-civilian split in the international engagement. The unified-channel approach was slower but avoided the consistency problem Pakistan faces with its 2026 dual-track design.

The Beijing visit's economic significance is the GL V expiry timing: Sharif and Dar arrived in Beijing on 23 May, the day before the General Licence V deadline that directly exposes Chinese banks to secondary-sanctions risk from Monday. The visit functions as advance coordination: Pakistan briefing China on the deal architecture before Chinese banks must decide whether to freeze Hengli-linked dollar clearing on Monday.

If Beijing concludes the deal will hold and sanctions waivers are coming, Chinese bank compliance departments receive an informal signal to continue operations. A sceptical Beijing reading means Chinese bank compliance departments treat the GL V expiry as a genuine enforcement risk and freeze Hengli-linked dollar clearing from Monday.

China's stake in the deal's success goes beyond diplomacy: roughly 50% of China's crude oil imports transit the strait of Hormuz. At pre-conflict volumes of approximately 11 million barrels per day, every week of continued blockade costs China's refiners roughly $7-8 billion in premium pricing and rerouting costs.

Consensus view: Wang Yiwei at Renmin University's Institute of International Affairs and Lee Jones at Queen Mary University of London both assess that China's acceptance of a Pakistani civilian briefing mission on the same weekend as the MOU announcement reflects a structural preference: Beijing wants to be informed of deal terms that affect its banks and oil trade without being a named party to the agreement.

Sharif and Dar carry information rather than asking for Chinese approval, which preserves Beijing's plausible deniability while ensuring it is not surprised by terms that affect Hengli, Dalian Changxing, and the five NFRA-protected refineries.

Counter-view: Sun Degang at Fudan University's Middle East Studies Institute argues the civilian-military split in Pakistan's delegation is not a deliberate coordination architecture but a pragmatic resource deployment: Munir goes where his IRGC relationships are useful (Tehran), Sharif and Dar go where civilian diplomatic relationships are useful (Beijing).

The split creates a risk that Beijing and Tehran each receive different characterisations of deal terms without a single Pakistani authority responsible for maintaining consistency between the two tracks.

Key tension: Whether China uses the Sharif/Dar Beijing briefing to extract economic concessions on GL V exposure (such as advance coordination on OFAC guidance, or a commitment not to designate additional mainland Chinese refineries) in exchange for endorsing the deal architecture.

First Reported In

Update #106 · Trump says deal; OFAC says nothing

Al Jazeera· 24 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Speaker Ghalibaf made Iran's China envoy

Ghalibaf's China-envoy appointment keeps the Beijing leg inside the negotiating architecture that Sharif's visit briefs.

Occurred 18 May 2026

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Sanctions licence dies in OFAC silence

The GL V expiry exposing Chinese banks (event 2) is the financial stake Sharif and Dar fly to brief Beijing on (event 6).

Occurred 24 May 2026

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This Event

Pakistan's PM takes the deal to Beijing

Splitting the premier to Beijing and the army chief to Tehran routes the commercial and security tracks through different Pakistani principals.

Led to

Sharif, Munir and Xi meet in Beijing

Sharif and Dar's 23 May departure to China opened the state visit that the 25 May Sharif-Xi-Munir meeting is day three of.

Occurred 25 May 2026

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Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.