Xi’s grip on Beijing and the Global South undermined by Trump’s abduction of Maduro
By Ng Weng Hoong
Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is the latest Global South leader to find out that China cannot be relied upon as an ally, friend, or protector.
But the pain will mostly be China’s following his recent abduction by the United States that has robbed Beijing of an influential Global South ally in a strategic, resource-rich region. His ouster is a hugely costly, but for now an under-rated, defeat for China. It has undermined Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s credibility in Beijing along with his influence in the Global South and attempt to shape the post-global liberal order.
On the evening of January 2, the about-to-be deposed Maduro was in ebullient mood as he talked up “the depth of the China-Venezuela partnership” (1) while hosting a high-profile Chinese delegation in Caracas.
“I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi, Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping,” he wrote on Telegram, according to Turkey’s Anadolu (2) news agency. “We reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.”
These were Maduro’s famous last words as the president of a sovereign country.
Hours later, he was on the U.S. president’s social media account (3), blindfolded and shackled as a captured fugitive of the Department of Justice on alleged drug-trafficking and weaponry crimes.
He and his wife, Cilia Flores, had just been abducted (4) by the U.S. military in a lightning strike (5) ordered by President Donald Trump that shocked the world for its audacity, execution, and violation of all rules of international behaviour and law.
It was as lawless and reckless as it was brilliant.
In losing Venezuela, China was defeated in at least five key areas of battle for resources, territory, and influence with the United States. Significantly, the two superpowers did not fire a single shot at each other.
The oil defeat
Until January 3, China had direct, almost unfettered, access to the world’s largest nationally owned oil reserves, estimated at 303 billion barrels.
Since the turn of the century, China has risen from fringe player in Venezuela to the unprecedented role of influencer over a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Country (OPEC) cartel. At its peak, Beijing’s grip on Caracas meant that as much as 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil production (6) went to China, at huge discounts, and on terms that favoured the buyer.
With the U.S. now “in charge” (7), China has lost a guaranteed source of cheap oil supply. According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration’s appointed oil traders have reduced the discount (8) on Venezuelan crude sold to Chinese buyers from US$15 to US$5 a barrel.
The Chinese discount was bigger than that, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (9). And it was all at the expense of the Venezuelan people.
“China was receiving oil at a huge–about US$20 a barrel–discount, and they weren’t even paying money for it.” he told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela on January 28.
“It was being used to pay down debt that they were owed. This is the oil of the people of Venezuela, and it was being given to the Chinese as barter.”
Some reports have downplayed (10) China’s loss, arguing that Russia, the Middle East and even Africa are far more important and bigger suppliers. After all, Venezuela accounted for just 4 to 4.5 percent (11) of China’s seaborne crude oil imports.
This narrative is flawed as 500,000 to 600,000 b/d of guaranteed oil supply at heavily discounted prices that went on for years is nothing to sniff at, even for a giant consumer with a 16.8 million b/d appetite. Caught up in a costly trade war with the U.S., China will be regretting even the loss of the relatively small annual saving of US$4.3 billion on oil imports for its heavily indebted economy.
For the Chinese leadership, the broader picture is deeply troubling. In one fell swoop, China has lost its influence over 17 percent of the world’s total oil reserves that immediately went over to its biggest adversary. The loss of a vital resource of this size will be a key factor in any war scenario planning.
Even before January 3, China was already running behind the U.S. in the race for oil self-sufficiency. China holds about 28 billion barrels of proven reserves (12) compared with America’s 45 billion barrels. China consumes about 16.8 million b/d but produces only 4.3 million b/d at home. To make up for this massive and growing shortfall of 12.5 million b/d, China has had little choice but to rely on imports from politically unstable producers in the Middle East and Africa as well as war-stricken Russia.
By contrast, the U.S. is in a comfortable position as the world’s leading oil producer pumping out 13.2 million b/d. While also the world’s largest oil user at more than 20 million b/d, it has the luxury of importing directly and more securely from less volatile neighbours Canada and Mexico to meet all its demand, and then some.
Attempts to spin China as weaning off oil dependence to become a renewable energy giant (13) are spurious. Wars cannot be fought with windmills and solar panels, and generals will not care about carbon emissions during conflict. The war machine is heavily reliant on fossil fuels for the production, logistics, and use of weapons to do battle.
For the U.S., the capture of Venezuela’s giant oilfields along with their distribution channels and supply chains (14) is more than icing on the cake. It puts the Americans in a strategically and psychologically commanding position to fight a protracted war with reduced fears of oil supply shortages crimping their fighting capability or the civilian economy.
China’s military strategists do not have this luxury. Their country’s energy supply lines are a permanent source of anxiety as they run mostly along international shipping routes that are open and vulnerable to disruption. The loss of Venezuela chips away at China’s capacity for war.
Trump even found the opportunity to troll China by offering it to invest in rebuilding Venezuela’s (15) oil industry that the ExxonMobil CEO has described as “uninvestable” (16). Trump knows well that China is unlikely to make further investments in the troubled country as these that can easily be appropriated by the U.S. Already, he has burdened Beijing with trying to recover an estimated US$10 to US$20 billion in outstanding loans made to the Maduro government.
Venezuela is a long way from being investable again. Its politics, economy, and oil industry are in shambles, and will require time and massive amounts of investments to heal. What matters for Trump now is that the country’s oil and other natural resources are now within America’s control. China is unlikely to regain the level of influence that it once held.
The natural resources defeat
Venezuela is a literal gem in the rough.
Apart from oil, its largely unexplored geography hides an abundance (17) of natural gas, coal, iron ore, bauxite, gold, nickel, copper, zinc, tin, tungsten, diamonds, coltan, and rare earth metals. Furthermore, geologists believe that large areas overlapping the country’s borders with Colombia and Guyana contain huge deposits (18) of minerals and metals that already have attracted warring gangs and Chinese investments. With Maduro gone, China no longer has guaranteed access to these resources either. Worse, they may even lose billions of dollars in investments made through Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc (19) and its neighbouring Guyana Shield (20) along with the Lithium Triangle (21) of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, which holds an estimated 60 percent of the world’s reserves of the mineral, are among the continent’s assets that the U.S. and China need in the race to dominate vital industries. Along with silver, copper, and tungsten, rare earths are critical for applications in the defence, healthcare, clean energy, technology, and telecommunications sectors.
From reserves to production (22) and refining (23), China dominates the entire rare earths supply chain. To the consternation of the rest of the world, Beijing has weaponized (24) that dominance by virtually decreeing that Chinese companies have exclusive access to these minerals and at lower prices.
The Trump administration has launched a global fightback with Project Vault (25). On February 4, the U.S. State Department brought together 54 countries and the European Commission to its inaugural critical minerals conference (26).
Without naming China, Rubio (27) said the industry “is heavily concentrated in the hands of one country. And that lends itself to, at worst-case scenario, being used as a tool of leverage in geopolitics, but it also lends itself to any sort of disruptions, like a pandemic or political instability”.
While Venezuela was not in attendance, it will be a vital player in future proceedings, given its minerals potential and geopolitical importance in the region.
Importantly, it has another asset that will be called upon to help unlock the region’s resource wealth. Occupying the northern corner of Latin America with a wide frontage view of the Atlantic Ocean, Venezuela has direct shipping access to the economies of North America and Europe. Its deep-water ports are natural hubs that have traditionally served trade between the continent and the West.
With Maduro gone, China has also lost the potential use of this piece of prime real estate with all its geographical and logistical advantages.
De-dollarization setback
Might Venezuela have a role potentially bigger than even energy and resources security?
This question is tied to the growing movement within the Global South (previously the Third World) to dethrone the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Venezuela was an early supporter.
Today, many Global South countries, led by China, are actively seeking:
– alternatives to bypass the use of the dollar (28) for international trade;
– to avoid using the U.S.-controlled SWIFT (29) system to settle trade payments, and
– to reduce their holding of U.S. debt (30) in the form of Treasury bonds in their portfolio.
De-dollarization (31) has gone mainstream after years of being on the fringes of the ideological left and right.
The left sees the dollar as a tool of imperialism that has enabled the U.S. to borrow recklessly while unloading the country’s debt and inflation onto the Global South.
The right blames the unshackled dollar for abetting the fiscal irresponsibility of liberals in running up massive debts and deficits to crush the U.S. economy. The right wants to restore the gold standard that had tied the dollar to a fixed value in 1944 until President Richard Nixon (32) removed it in 1971 to allow the government to spend freely, then recklessly.
In 1974, the Nixon administration apparently struck a deal with Saudi Arabia that would turn the dollar into a pillar of U.S. global power. After the dollar devalued with the loss of its gold anchor followed by the two oil shocks of the 1970s, inflation in the U.S. took off. The U.S. desperately needed a new anchor for its crumbling currency while the Saudis needed a new home for their sudden wealth when the oil price quadrupled.
While there is no documentation of a formal agreement, what transpired turned out to be a tremendous piece of business for both countries and a key moment in global financial history. Saudi Arabia began recycling billions of dollars of its new oil wealth into Treasury bonds and assets in the U.S. in exchange for American military and security protection. The rest of the Middle East’s oil producers were soon on board the bandwagon.
The term “petrodollar”, already in use before the 1970s, took flight with the U.S.-Saudi alignment. In Europe, the influx of new petrodollars combined with the existing dollar deposits of Russian companies were loaned out to greatly expand the greenback’s international reach. The unique identity of U.S. dollars coming out of European banks was reflected in its name: the Eurodollar. It was still the dollar, but Europe was stamped all over the currency’s hegemonic entrenchment in global commerce.
“Eurodollar lending, meaning the unregulated creation of new US-dollar means of payment by private banks outside of the United States, is fundamental here,” the financial historian Mark Metzler (33) noted.
The dollar hegemony is now under threat, accelerated by events following Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The West seized Russia’s assets, investments, and funds, sanctioned its trade, and cut Moscow off from using SWIFT.
Despite their sympathies for Ukraine, many Global South countries were also alarmed by how the U.S. had weaponized the dollar-based economic order to punish Russia. Worried that they too could be sanctioned for future infractions, China (34), Saudi Arabia (35), India (36), Brazil, and South Africa are exploring the development of alternative payment systems (37), new currencies such as the digital yuan (38) and the BRICS+ Unit (39), and the use of their national currencies to conduct multilateral trade within the group. The long-term goal is to reduce (or even cut off) the dollar’s role in trade and investment among participating countries.
Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president from 1999 to 2013, was a pioneer in the de-dollarization (40) movement. His successor, Maduro, elevated it into an international financial war with the support of Iran, China, Russia, and India over the past decade.
While Chavez boosted ties with Iran and helped its expansion in Latin America (41), it was Maduro who forged the all-important business dealings with Tehran to evade U.S. sanctions and the dollar’s use in their bilateral trade. The methods were complicated, costly, and problematic but they generated enough value to sustain both embattled regimes. Among the deals that they developed to bypass the dollar’s use:
– Oil swapping and blending (42). Venezuela mixed its extra-heavy crude with Iran’s extra-light condensate for a medium blend that hid the parentage of the sanctioned oils and made the offspring marketable to third countries. They also swapped a range of oil products and fluids.
– Bartering (43) of goods and services. Iran supplied technical support, spare parts, and fuel to help maintain Venezuela’s crumbling refineries and oil infrastructure. Venezuela paid Iran in gold and commodities.
– The use of ‘ghost’ fleets to store and move oil in secret. Iran (44) and Venezuela (45) have developed access to thousands of vessels, owned by shadowy companies, that specialize in evading U.S. sanctions. In learning from them, Russia (46) has grown to become the world’s largest owner and user of ghost ships that are now a vital tool to finance its war on Ukraine.
In 2025, ghost ships delivered as much as US$100 billion worth of oil (47), almost all of it conducted without using the dollar and SWIFT.
China, and, to a lesser extent, India underwrote the roaring success of this shadow trade as they were the buyers of most of that oil at hefty discounts.
China’s de-dollarization mission will sorely miss Maduro’s support.
For the first time in years, Venezuela’s oil is openly available (48) to international buyers, albeit under American guidance. Importantly, it is once again traded in dollars and on competitive terms. The first sale brought in US$500 million (49), with US$300 million immediately disbursed to Caracas to meet “the needs of the Venezuelan people”, said the U.S. Secretary of State. Another US$5 billion (50) is on the way with more in the pipeline.
If Rubio’s plan (51) succeeds in infusing the Venezuelan economy with sustained cashflow, it will speak louder than any messaging out of Beijing about the evil of the dollar. For Venezuelans crushed by hyperinflation and daily shortages under Maduro’s government that will forever be associated with China, the contrast is stark and immediate. Since his departure, cautious optimism (52) has begun seeping into Caracas with one economist believing Venezuela’s economy (53) could even register double-digit growth this year.
Longer term, there is the intriguing possibility of the U.S. doing a Saudi-type deal with Venezuela. Could the U.S. offer military and security protection and economic development to Venezuela in exchange for Caracas permanently pricing the world’s largest oil reserves in dollar?
For now, Petrodollar 2.0 may seem far-fetched in view of Venezuela’s struggles. But it cannot be ruled out in the context of the escalating de-dollarization war.
The U.S. would be negligent to dismiss a new petrodollar anchor amid concerns that Saudi Arabia is wavering (54) over their 1974 deal. Riyadh is openly looking into a long-term role for pricing oil in the Chinese currency (55) that might result in a “petroyuan” and possibly weaken the kingdom’s allegiance to the dollar.
Both Trump and Rubio are acutely aware of China’s threat to the dollar’s supremacy. In 2023, they separately denounced China for waging a global campaign against the greenback.
“China is trying to displace the U.S. dollar as the number one currency throughout the world,” Trump wrote (56) on April 5, 2023.
Days earlier, Rubio accused (57) China and Brazil of plotting de-dollarization through the use of their national currencies for bilateral trade to create a “secondary economy”.
Trump was then eyeing a return to the White House after losing the 2020 election, while his future Secretary of State was the senator for Florida known increasingly for his anti-China stance. Their convergence on the urgency to bounce China from the region translated into policy more than two years later when Trump was back in power.
The National Security Strategy (58), released in November 2025, spells out the administration’s view of the Western Hemisphere as being squarely in the U.S. domain of influence. The references and warning to China are unmistakable.
“We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations,” it said on page 5.
Maduro’s ouster will strengthen Trump’s hand to weaken China’s influence operations across Latin America. He will also be looking to spoil the de-dollarization process in the region that is tied to attempts now underway (59) across the Global South to dump the dollar. Whether he succeeds or not on the global front is a separate topic.
The BRI’s defeat
Along with Pakistan, Venezuela is on course to become a monumental graveyard for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investments.
Unveiled shortly after he came to power in 2012, the BRI is Xi Jinping’s vision to “integrate” the world through a series of inter-connecting China-funded infrastructure projects. Most Global South countries welcome Chinese investments as Western governments and the institutions that they support such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have failed to meet the infrastructure needs of the developing world.
Xi (60) himself and China’s state media (61) have often criticized the West for failing its former colonies and supposedly blocking their economic development. But of late, China has found itself the target of criticism for failing those it purports to help.
Two of Xi’s biggest bets to prove his nation-building prowess, Pakistan and Venezuela, have turned into total political disasters and financial black holes.
Chinese firms account for the bulk of the investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), estimated at between US$25 billion (62) and US$33 billion (63). The sums are moving targets owing to the project’s lack of transparency and proper accounting.
Unveiled in 2013, the proposed US$62 billion corridor (64) is the BRI’s biggest standalone project. When he took the world stage, China’s new leader wanted to show that he could turn the politically unstable and economically primitive province of Balochistan into a prosperous hub of industrial activity and regional trade. Instead, CPEC has become a showcase in Chinese mismanagement, with both sides trading blame (65) for missed opportunities and unrealistic expectations. The corridor’s viability (66), in doubt right from the start, is now at the mercy of the Baloch Liberation Army (67) and local gangs (68) terrorizing and killing Chinese workers in western Pakistan.
Venezuela is the fourth largest recipient of China’s generous outflow of loans and grants since the start of the century, according to U.S.-based AidData, which studies Chinese aid, investments, and soft power activities. Between 2000 and 2023, China doled out a total of US$106 billion (69) to Venezuela’s oil industry and infrastructure sector covering power plants, telecommunications, surveillance systems, highways, and railway networks. The bulk of the funds (70) were loaned out during Maduro’s rule.
The majority of Venezuelans, like the Pakistanis, saw little of that money which likely went to the country’s elite and its Chinese partners.
“The economic relationship between China and Venezuela has been harmful for Venezuelan society,” Transparencia Venezuela (71) concluded in a 2020 report after an eight-month investigation. The report criticized Chinese deal-making in the country for their “lack of transparency in decision-making and the gradual elimination of checks and balances on the executive branch”.
“The relationship with China has contributed to growing corruption risks related to bribery, clientelism and political corruption.”
Possibly in response to these criticisms, Beijing stopped making new loans to the Maduro regime after 2017 and began the painstaking process of recovering old loans. AidData estimates that it may have recovered more than of 80 percent of those loans through the notoriously opaque discounted Venezuelan oil deals. But with the Americans now in charge of Venezuela’s oil trade, China could be at risk of losing the remaining US$10 billion to US$20 billion (72).
In recent years, Chinese overseas lending has shifted to favour the developed world. According to AidData, China gave out a total of US$2.2 trillion in loans and grants from 2000 to 2023. The U.S. is the leading recipient with Australia in third place as they offer more attractive opportunities and first-world environments for doing business.
Chinese lenders initially targeted the Global South but found themselves mired in controversy over failed businesses, allegations of entrapping poor countries with onerous lending terms, and corruption.
In an earlier study in 2024 (73) covering 129 countries, AidData found that “79% of leaders surveyed viewed Beijing as actively supporting their countries’ development, and 38% selected the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as their infrastructure partner of choice, outstripping other major powers”.
“The economic gains attributed to the BRI were significant, with leaders reporting improvements in connectivity (58%), trade (47%), technology access (50%), and job creation (49%).”
But the Virginia research group also affirmed well-documented criticisms about China’s conduct in its business dealings abroad.
“Concerns were raised over poor transparency (32%), lower project quality (22%), and minimal capacity building for local partners (32%). Leaders also reported pressing concerns over the BRI’s environmental footprint, highlighting worsening levels of air and water pollution (45%), resource exploitation (49%), and climate vulnerability (42%) as particular challenges.”
While China has enhanced itself in some developing countries, the BRI will always be tainted by the charges of corruption and the lack of transparency and accountability tied to Chinese business practices. The Chinese government does not publish regular reports on funding and implementation details of BRI projects, which explains why there is a role for an external organization like AidData.
Nevertheless, Beijing will persist with Xi’s dream of building “a global community of shared future” (74) under its control. But as it struggles with a slowing, debt-burdened economy, his growing legion of domestic critics will demand greater scrutiny of China’s overseas ventures. Already, this has led to a slowdown in the Chinese gravy train to feed the BRI’s fantasy projects.
Given the grandiosity of Xi’s global ambition, the setbacks in Venezuela and Pakistan are nothing short of colossal defeats for China.
The strategic defeat
Maduro saw himself as the leader of the neighbourhood resistance against the United States. As the self-appointed political heir to Simon Bolivar (75), he often evoked the South American revolutionary to lead the “the oppressed” against Western imperialism.
This fervent ideological stance found favour with Xi who early on sold himself as the leader of a new global “community of common destiny” (76).
Maduro, who was elected president in 2013 after Chavez’s death, quickly became Xi’s favourite runner in Latin America. Instinctively, Maduro undertook the heavy-lifting to create a loose anti-U.S. coalition out of the region’s left-leaning governments.
His subservience to older brother Xi (77) was richly rewarded as Venezuela became the biggest recipient of Chinese investments, loans and grants in the Global South.
China’s political and financial support enabled Maduro to play statesman in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) (78) to promote regional economic development and integration, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) (79) to build “a geopolitical alternative (80) to …neoliberalism in the region.”
With Xi’s blessing, Maduro kept Cuba afloat (81), pushed for closer political and economic ties with Colombia and Nicaragua, courted Russia’s military protection, and supported Iran’s activities in Latin America. Emboldened by the veneer of Chinese and Russian support, he even tried to seize a disputed oil-rich area from neighbouring Guyana from 2023 to 2025. More on this in part two of this commentary.
His influence and success with China rubbed off on Gustavo Petro, the former guerilla fighter who was elected president of neighbouring Colombia in June 2022. Last November, Petro stunned the world by calling for a political merger (82) with Venezuela. He directly referenced Simon Bolivar’s 19th-century plan to unite Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and parts of Peru and Brazil into a single Gran Colombia nation to fight Spain’s colonial invasion. Petro proposed the merger after he and his family (83), like Maduro’s, were threatened by the U.S. for allegedly supporting drug cartels.
Although a merger was never a serious option, Petro’s Columbia was already converging with Maduro’s Venezuela in their world views. Defying strong domestic opposition and U.S. displeasure, he went all in with Maduro to seek deeper ties with China.
In May 2025, he took Colombia into China’s BRI (84) as its 22nd member in Latin America. A month later, it became a member of the BRICS’s Shanghai-based New Development Bank (85) in “a pivot toward Eastern partnerships”. These bold moves were a natural follow-up to his young government’s decision in October 2023 to upgrade China to the status of “strategic partner”.
Colombia’s fast-developing partnership with China and Venezuela alarmed the Trump administration as the region drifted deeper into the Chinese orbit. Colombia is as important as Venezuela in the context of the rivalry between the two superpowers. Apart from its rich natural resource base, the country was until recently a top U.S. security, counternarcotics, and counterterrorism partner in Latin America. In May 2022, the Biden administration even designated Colombia a major non-NATO ally (86), but its relations with the U.S. began deteriorating a month later after Petro was elected president. His left-wing government, Colombia’s first, is likely in possession of intelligence about U.S. activities in the region that could be of value to China.
For the Americans, Colombia’s transition from ally to potential adversary crossed a red line when it began planning for a US$44-billion national railway network (87) with deep Chinese involvement. The cornerstone project is a US$20-billion transportation corridor to serve the shipping trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans and directly challenge the Panama Canal. Already battling to “reclaim” the canal from Chinese control (88), the Trump administration was alarmed by the threat of a potential second front opening up in Colombia.
According to fDintelligence (89), the proposed 198-km corridor will cut through the Darien jungle to connect the port city of Turbo on Colombia’s Atlantic coast to Cupica town facing the Pacific Ocean.
With its deep financial resources and extensive engineering experience, China (90) is, on paper, the perfect partner for Colombia’s most ambitious nation-building project in its 207-year history. The success of the China-backed Chancay port (91) in Peru since 2024 has set the benchmark for the region to look East.
Petro envisioned the upgrade of the country’s rail infrastructure as key to its long-term economic revival, which explains his hurried pivot away to China despite stiff resistance (92) from Colombia’s diplomatic and foreign policy experts.
His plans are likely in tatters now with Maduro’s ouster and Trump’s threats to attack Colombia and Mexico.
On February 3, an anxious Petro was invited to the White House where, to Colombia’s mighty relief, Trump extended a warm welcome (93), praised his guest, and talked business. There were no threats issued pertaining to drug trafficking or regime change. Trump even offered to help mediate Colombia’s trade war with Ecuador. A chastened Petro will have to revise his vision for Colombia to accommodate American demands. A month after losing Venezuela, China may have lost Colombia too.
Next on the list is Cuba, which is closer than ever to societal collapse without the supply of free Venezuelan oil. Trump does not have to threaten military action as starving Cubans are demanding regime change.
Even Peru (94), high from its recent Chinese success, has made a sudden turn against Beijing while the hardcore anti-U.S. regime in Nicaragua (95) is probably having second thoughts about its dependency on China.
Where was China when these watershed events were playing out in the region? It stood aloof as its allies buckled or came under pressure one after another. China watched as if it had no skin in the game.
For Xi Jinping, January 2026 was the start of a decisive defeat of his strategy from which China may struggle to recover. That defeat would have triggered plenty of debate inside Beijing.
Venezuela could well be China’s Waterloo in Latin America. It might have even contributed to the political earthquake now rocking the corridors of power inside Beijing.
Ng Weng Hoong is a Vancouver journalist focused on China and Chinese issues. This commentary first appeared at Wengcouver.Substack.com. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
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DWS News, January 2, 2026. Maduro meets China’s special envoy to discuss energy, trade, and strategic partnerships
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela, January 28, 2026
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