FPI / January 7, 2026
China’s official Xinhua news agency slammed the Jan. 3 U.S. attack that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro as “naked hegemonic behavior.”
But in an indication of how seriously the U.S. operation impacted Beijing, the Chinese government-controlled social media site Weibo included numerous posts saying that Beijing’s rulers should learn from U.S. President Donald Trump’s successful operation against Maduro.
The CCP-affiliated Global Times quoted Chinese military expert Zhang Junshe as saying the raid was a case study in military operations and highlighted American intelligence prowess.
What it also showcased was Trump’s unpredictability as just hours prior to his capture, Maduro had “gleefully” reaffirmed Venezuela’s strategic ties with communist China.
Retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noted: “It is really clear that Trump is hard to predict and we have moved from strategic ambiguity to strategic uncertainty under Trump — this could have a deterrent effect on a cautious, deliberative state like CCP.”
China “looked impotent in the face of U.S. power in South America — a reminder to any South American partners that when it comes to hard power, there is only one big dog in the Western Hemisphere,” Montgomery said according to a Washington Times report by security correspondent Bill Gertz.
The military operation revealed to Chinese Communist Party supreme leader Xi Jinping that American military power “humiliatingly invalidated” Venezuela’s Russian-made S-300 air defense system, China’s deployed and supposedly fail-proof JY-27 air defense array radar, and Iran’s Shahed drones in Caracas during the nighttime raid, said Miles Yu, a former U.S. State Department policymaker on China.
With Maduro’s ouster, China is losing a key regional ally and major source of oil.
Asked about the impact of the military strike on U.S. relations with China, Russia and Iran, nations that had close ties to the Maduro regime, Trump said the U.S. would not block them from future Venezuelan oil sales after “we get things straightened out.”
“But in terms of other countries that want oil, we’re in the oil business, we’re going to sell it to them,” Trump added.
A delegation of Chinese officials led by Beijing’s senior envoy for Latin affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, met with Maduro hours before the U.S. raid.
China’s oil purchases from Venezuela amounted to about 568,000 barrels per day last year and spiked to more than 900,000 barrels a day in the final months of 2025, according to oil industry reports. The imports accounted for about 10% of China’s oil imports and were sold at discounted rates.
Chinese state-owned oil companies China National Petroleum Corp. and Sinopec Group have invested an estimated $2.1 billion in Venezuela’s oil sector since 2016 and are still operating in the country.
Last month, China issued a government white paper outlining its strategy for Latin America that called for expanding ties to the region as part of its vision of a “shared future.”
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