Venezuela is becoming a major testing ground for Donald Trump’s hemispheric ambitions, and emerging as another potential source of rivalry with China.
After announcing plans to seize control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s crude oil reserves, the Trump administration made clear that this was only the beginning. Ahead lies a campaign to expel China and powers such as Russia, which the White House has labeled “malicious foreign actors,” in an effort to ensure that “American dominance in our hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
The next item on Washington’s agenda is an attempt to restructure Venezuela’s debt, which includes billions of dollars owed to China. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday (the 2nd) that Beijing would have no rights to the revenue from the new Venezuelan production — cutting one of the channels for debt payments.
The United States has framed its campaign as the latest chapter of the “Donroe Doctrine,” codified in the White House’s National Security Strategy and asserting the United States’ unilateral right to deny rival powers the ability to own or control “vital strategic assets.” Under this banner, taking Venezuelan oil fields from Chinese companies is a geopolitical opportunity to align them with Washington’s interests.
China has reduced its exposure to Venezuela in recent years, and Trump would likely have difficulty replicating the scale of his actions in Venezuela elsewhere, which means that for Beijing the implications are more political than economic.
An increasingly interventionist United States runs the risk of clashing with broader Chinese interests in South America, said Christian Reyes, a Beijing-based political risk analyst originally from Ecuador.
“Venezuela isn’t necessarily a precedent for direct expropriation, but it could set a precedent for coerced exclusion,” he said. “The United States is increasingly willing to define parts of the region’s economic relationship with China as a security concern and leverage considerable influence to impose these red lines.”
China’s response so far has been relatively measured. Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said that China’s rights and legitimate interests in Venezuela “must be protected,” at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Thursday. “China-Venezuela cooperation is protected by international law,” he added. “This does not concern third parties.”
Ahead of President Xi Jinping’s first State Visit to the United States in more than a decade this month, leaders of the world’s major economies are seeking to avert major conflicts even as they clash over issues ranging from trade imbalances to Beijing’s economic support for Tehran.
It remains unclear to what extent the China-related projects are included in a 100-year concession package announced by Washington. U.S. and Venezuelan officials did not publicly identify the fields covered by the deal. The U.S. government negotiated a 35% stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, controlled by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, a privately held company, earlier this week, gaining access to 17 local oil fields.
The deal “makes debt repayment less likely to come soon,” said Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “It will be interesting to see if this is even discussed this month during the Trump-Xi meeting, but I doubt it.”
For Beijing, Venezuela has become a less important energy source in recent years. The country’s crude accounted for only 4% of China’s total crude oil imports in 2025. No Venezuelan cargo has been recorded arriving in China since the White House took control of the assets after the capture of then-president Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.
The bigger blow may come from the billions of dollars in debts owed to Chinese banks, tied to undelivered barrels of oil. While Caracas stopped publishing detailed information about such liabilities after its sovereign default in 2017, the total debt to China was believed to total at least $10 billion in 2025.
That figure has fallen considerably from its peak. China began financing infrastructure and energy projects in Venezuela in 2007, under then-President Hugo Chávez. Publicly available data suggest that Chinese state banks had extended more than $60 billion in oil-backed loans to the country by 2015.
As U.S. sanctions on Caracas intensified in the years that followed, China emerged as Venezuela’s largest crude oil customer and its most significant foreign creditor. State-owned enterprises, including China National Petroleum Corp., the parent of PetroChina Co., and China National Offshore Oil Corp., developed oil and gas projects in the Orinoco heavy-oil belt and elsewhere.
Private Chinese companies, including Concord Resources, also invested in stakes in upstream assets.
But the operating environment grew increasingly difficult as the Venezuelan economy deteriorated and production facilities operated well below their intended capacity. Such moves accelerated after the United States sanctioned the Venezuelan oil sector in 2019, though some legacy Chinese joint ventures and contractor personnel, including CNPC staff, may still remain in Caracas.
That means that claims of the United States reclaiming oil fields from foreign adversaries will not have a major impact on Chinese companies, which had already scaled back their footprint as Beijing’s strategic priorities evolved.
The bigger blow could be to Chinese refiners, which are already suffering from disruptions to their Iran supply.
Independent processors in Shandong Province, in particular, have long relied on Venezuelan heavy crude as a feedstock for asphalt production. The loss of these supplies tightened the domestic asphalt market, helping push futures prices higher sharply.
For most Chinese companies and creditors in Venezuela, the risks of doing business were already well known, analysts say, meaning that the latest turbulence should not come as a surprise.
“South America has long been a geopolitical crossroads where the interests of China and the United States intersect and, at times, clash,” said Liao Na, founder of GL Consulting, a firm focused on energy research. “Given the importance both powers attach to Venezuela, friction is almost inevitable whenever their interests overlap.”
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