Beijing
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As the dust cleared around the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise military strike earlier this month, US officials left little question that they had another target too: China.
A longtime friend to the government in Caracas, China has for years pumped money into the oil fields and infrastructure of the South American country. Maduro’s ouster is a blow to that partnership that could leave Chinese banks facing billions in unpaid Venezuelan debt.
But viewed from Beijing, the stakes are much higher than that. The shake-up was also the loudest warning shot yet of a deeper campaign for the Trump administration: to root out China’s influence across Latin America.
How Trump’s Venezuela strike complicates China’s Latin America strategy
Beijing has spent decades growing its trade ties and bankrolling projects in the region, to boost transportation links and cut energy costs – cementing its own influence along the way.
A US national security strategy released in December pledged to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors” control of “strategically vital assets” in the Western Hemisphere and “make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region.”
Speaking to oil executives at the White House earlier this month about Venezuela, US President Donald Trump spoke more plainly: “If we didn’t do this, China would have been there and Russia would have been there … but they’re not going to be there now.”
Washington’s new assertiveness now has a name: the so-called Donroe doctrine. A twist on an 1823 statement by President James Monroe warning European colonial powers to respect the US’ sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere, the riff was coined by right-wing commentators, and has been used by the president himself.
Now, the question of whether the US could again use force – or tactics like tariffs or sanctions – to strong-arm countries into choosing Washington’s interests over ties with China is a viable risk being evaluated in the region’s capitals.
“There is no doubt that the pressure is on, and the countries are vulnerable to it … and in foreign ministries, people are planning different ways of how to handle this,” said Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador to China.
Beijing is well aware of how US pressure could make governments become more wary of working with Chinese firms or re-evaluate existing ties, analysts in its policy circles say – something that’s already happened in Panama. There, a high court decided Thursday to annul port contracts held by a Hong Kong-linked firm, which the US has wanted to oust from its decades-long operations at the Panama Canal. The court found the contracts were unconstitutional.
“The US shift toward securitizing infrastructure, supply chains, and strategic assets in the Western Hemisphere will certainly raise the political cost of China’s engagement in Latin America,” said Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy in Beijing.
But it’s also clear that the world’s second-largest economy is not preparing for a retreat – setting up the region as a test case for whether an aggressive US policy can counter China’s influence or will drive more countries to hedge their bets with Beijing.
China for decades has cultivated an extensive network of ties across Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that encompasses more than 30 countries and 670 million people.
From an economic relationship that took off in the early 2000s as China looked to resource-rich Latin America to feed its economic boom, the two sides now rack up half a trillion dollars in annual trade. China earlier this month announced the world’s largest ever trade surplus at $1.2 trillion in 2025, with trade to the region up 8% from the previous year – helping Beijing offset the blow of recent trade frictions with the US.
Over the years in Latin America, Chinese firms have financed or built ports and power stations, bridges and roads, wind and solar farms, metro lines and mines – spurred by spare capital and industrial overcapacity in China, and, in more recent years, the global ambitions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to expand Beijing’s global sway.
Overall, financing from China’s official sector has totaled $302 billion between 2000 and 2023, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary university in Virginia.
Today, China-linked firms mine copper in Peru and extract vast amounts of lithium – key for the manufacture of rechargeable electric vehicle batteries – from mines in Argentina and Chile and are working to expand into Bolivia.
Chinese state-backed power companies own and operate parts of power grids in Peru, Chile, and Brazil, while telecoms giants like Huawei and ZTE – blocked in the US over national security concerns – equip digital networks in several South American economies, including some 8,000 kilometers of optical fiber for broadband in the Amazon rainforest.
China’s EV giant BYD last year inaugurated a massive factory in Brazil, built on land vacated by US automaker Ford. Another major Chinese car company Great Wall Motors started production in the country at a plant it bought from the maker of Mercedes-Benz.
The inroads of Chinese firms have not been without controversy or local challenges, but they have closed infrastructure gaps in the region and forged tighter political bonds between governments there and Beijing, allowing China to woo diplomatic allies away from Taiwan and strengthen Xi’s bid to establish his country as a leader among developing economies.
For years, Washington watched this play out with “a lot of hand-wringing,” according to Evan Ellis, a former State Department official and expert on China’s role in Latin America at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.
“We were victims of our own uncertainty … (in the sense of) well, these are sovereign countries, and these are largely commercial projects, even though we’re worried about these things, can we actually stop them? Do we have the right to stop them?” Ellis said.
That strategy appears to have taken a hard turn, as Washington is now looking squarely at what it appears to see as a massive security lapse stretching across the US’ home court.
Trump set that tone in his inauguration speech a year ago when he falsely claimed that “China is operating the Panama Canal” and the US was “taking it back.”
The pressure pushed the Panamanian government to exit Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative – a symbolic blow for Beijing. Panama was the first Latin American country to join the global infrastructure drive in 2017 after dropping diplomatic ties with Taipei.
But extricating the Hong Kong-backed firm operating ports at either end of the canal has been slower work. The case ruled on by Panama’s Supreme Court this week had been pending for months, and Beijing had earlier asserted it must “conduct reviews and supervise” any asset sale by the company, while rejecting US claims of security risks.
At the heart of Washington’s concerns is so-called dual-use infrastructure: projects that may be commercial in nature but can be co-opted for military use in the event of a conflict.
Key among those are ports – more that three dozen of which across Latin America and the Caribbean are linked to Chinese companies, according to researchers at the Center for Strategic International Studies think tank in Washington. Another is a deep space station jointly run by China and Argentina in the Andean foothills of Patagonia.
The majority of projects linked to Chinese firms are “legitimate commercial projects or legitimate Chinese scientific, technology and other cooperation,” according to Ellis. “The problem is that… the presence and the knowledge and the relationships that that gives China creates all kinds of options for them to exploit in time of war.”
One need only look to the port of Chancay near the Peruvian capital Lima to see another potential target of US concern.
Inaugurated by Xi and then Peruvian President Dina Boluarte in late 2024, the deep-water port is operated by a joint venture between a Peruvian partner and a subsidiary of China’s state-owned shipping giant COSCO, which is the majority shareholder. COSCO is cited by the US defense department as having links to the Chinese military.
But when seen from the vantage of Peru, the $3.5 billion-dollar port is a major economic win: saving money and time by shaving more than a week off cargo transit to China, South America’s largest trading partner. There’s unlikely to be much appetite in the country or elsewhere in the region for an overhaul – especially as China and Brazil are planning a railway corridor linking the country, and its exports like soybeans and iron ore, to the Peruvian port.
“Chancay helps Peru to consolidate its role as a Latin American hub … allowing Peru to become one of the best countries in the region in terms of logistics development,” said Juan Carlos Paz, a former Peruvian National Port Authority president who led the agency at the time of the port’s inauguration.
“Concerns are logical with the political turmoil around the world … but at the same time, I think that these concerns could be eased with transparency and communication,” he said.
Experts say countries in the region will have different calculations when it comes to responding to potential US pressure on Chinese partnerships. But what they will be looking for from Washington are true alternatives to working with China.
Some US diplomats have conveyed a message that they don’t mind Latin American countries continuing to sell their produce and raw materials to China, but they don’t want them to accept investment in infrastructure and energy, according to Heine, the former Chilean ambassador, who is co-author of “The Non-Aligned World,” a book about navigating great power rivalry.
“Now, what is the message? The message is – you stay underdeveloped. You continue to be hewers of wood and carriers of water, forever. We don’t want you to have digital advancement. We don’t want you to have railways. We don’t want you to have up-to-date ports… don’t industrialize and don’t advance any further.”
“That seems to me a very difficult thing to sell to governments in the region,” he added.
China has outspent the US on a three-to-one basis in terms of official lending and grant-giving since 2014 in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to Brad Parks, executive director of AidData in Virginia.
There are signs that Washington is looking to mimic China’s lending model, Parks said, pointing to the decision in December to triple the budget for the US Development Finance Corporation and in October to extend an emergency credit line to the central bank of Argentina, long a major borrower from China.
The US is the biggest investor in Latin America and the Caribbean, dwarfing China in foreign direct investment, according to data from the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America, which notes, however, that only a small proportion of Chinese investments is captured by its current metrics due to how they are structured.
But when it comes to big-ticket projects, experts are skeptical that US private companies have the interest to counter-offer China’s deep-pocketed state-owned enterprises and private firms that pay close attention to the directives of Beijing.
That’s an urgent question in Venezuela, where it remains to be seen whether American oil giants are ready to pony up investment in the unstable country, despite calls from the Trump administration to do so. So far, US oil executives remain deeply skeptical.
China has strongly condemned the US military action there and is watching closely how that develops – including whether it may be able to operate its existing oil projects in the country or recoup what is estimated to be least $10 billion in debt meant to be repaid in oil.
And in the meantime, Beijing has been sending its own signals to the region.
As the US amassed a major build-up of naval forces in the waters of the Caribbean in recent months – positioned to hunt down suspected drug boats and blockade US-sanctioned oil tankers around Venezuela – Beijing quietly dispatched one of its own assets – a People’s Liberation Army navy hospital boat – to the region.
The plan for the tour of the “Silk Road Ark” was set months earlier, but for Beijing its presence weaving between Latin American ports of call and treating patients, has been a timely chance to project itself as a benevolent force in contrast to the new, muscular US approach.
And days after the Trump administration released its national security strategy last month, China released its own new policy paper on the region.
The agenda laid out dozens of areas in which it proposed boosting collaboration from aerospace to law enforcement, and said China had stood with the region through “thick and thin.”
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any adjustment in how its firms proceed there in the face of a more watchful US.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, Beijing’s response is “about reassurance: signaling to Latin American partners that China does not seek military presence or bloc confrontation, but long-term development cooperation and mutual economic resilience,” said Sun, the Tsinghua researcher.
Beijing may look to focus on development-oriented sectors such as green energy, agriculture, industrial parks, public health, and logistics that are harder to frame as strategic chokepoints, he said, adding: “What is more probable is a recalibration in how China operates, not whether it operates.”
And while policy thinkers in China say Beijing is prepared to be flexible in its own approach, they also see an opportunity.
“China will take its cue from how Latin American countries react to the US posture, said Tang Xiaoyang, professor of international relations, also at Tsinghua.
But even if some countries accede to US demands in the short term, he added, “in the long run, they are going to be seeking other possibilities to avoid becoming the US de facto colony… and their desire to work with China will actually grow.”
