Just hours before American commandos seized President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in a daring raid, a senior Chinese official had met the Venezuelan leader at the presidential palace, a show of support for one of Beijing’s closest partners in the Western Hemisphere.
The speed with which US forces acted afterwards to capture Maduro sent a blunt message to Beijing about the limits of its influence in a region that Washington treats as its own. China now risks losing ground in Venezuela after Saturday’s assault in Caracas, despite decades of investment and billions of dollars in loans.
But the assault also reinforces a broader logic that ultimately favours President Xi Jinping’s vision of China and its status in Asia: when powerful countries impose their will close to home, others tend to step back.
The White House has framed the Maduro operation as part of an updated Monroe Doctrine, or as US President Donald Trump describes it, the "Donroe Doctrine". A globe carved into spheres of influence — with the US dominating the Western Hemisphere and China asserting primacy across the Asia-Pacific — and where might makes right, regardless of shared rules, could benefit Beijing in a number of ways.
Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump, articulated this doctrine in an interview with the CNN host Jake Tapper on Monday. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
It could keep the US and the brunt of its military forces away from Asia. And it could undercut Washington’s criticism of Beijing when Chinese forces elbow their way across contested waters of the South China Sea and menace Taiwan, the island democracy China claims as its own.
The assault on Caracas "does further erode the norms against great power use of force that have steadily weakened in the last two decades, which works just fine for Beijing", said Rush Doshi, a China expert at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations. “More important, if it distracts the US by tying us up in Venezuela, all the better for Beijing too.”
Beijing has long railed against what it calls America’s strategy of containing China, which includes stationing troops in Japan and South Korea, and deploying US naval ships in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. And it has criticised Washington’s moves to deepen security ties with India and help Australia develop nuclear-powered submarines.
Xi has depicted China as a reliable and powerful pillar in the region, in contrast to the US, as he sought to court neighbours to his side in a trade war with Trump.
In a speech at a high-level Communist Party conference on regional diplomacy, Xi called for the region to be governed by "Asian values", Asian supply chains and an Asian security model where countries shared "weal and woe".
On Monday, Xi once again appeared to underscore the contrast between the Trump administration’s assault and China’s “neighbourhood diplomacy” in a meeting with President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea in Beijing. Xi, casting China as a benevolent major power, said Beijing and Seoul were able to achieve “harmony without uniformity” by "resolving differences through dialogue and consultation".
In fact, China has not hesitated to use its massive economic power for coercion and its ample modern military to intimidate its neighbours.
Just last week, China fired more than two dozen long-range rockets into waters around Taiwan and surrounded the island with bombers, fighter jets and warships in a two-day show of force aimed at intimidating the island’s leadership. China has also punished Japan economically for showing support for Taiwan.
None of this means Beijing is calibrating its approach to Taiwan based on events in Venezuela. Chinese leaders have long treated the island as a domestic issue to be resolved on their own terms, independent of US actions elsewhere.
China has sometimes been explicit about how it sees its power in its own neighbourhood. At a meeting with Southeast Asian officials in 2010 over the South China Sea, China’s then-foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”
New York Times News Service