Amid the sharp escalation in tensions between the United States and Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro mentioned China, the United States’ biggest economic rival, during a speech about education in the country.
While speaking about tutorials to learn how to do new things during the closing of the “First Pedagogical Congress of Bolivarian Teachers,” Maduro paused to present his new cell phone, which, he said, was a gift from China’s leader Xi Jinping.
Maduro said he communicated with Xi through that new phone by satellite.
“You want to learn something, you look for a tutorial. I want to learn how to use that camera that the cameraman has there, you put ‘camera tutorial such-and-such.’ I want to learn how to handle this new Huawei phone (China’s flagship brand in mobile devices), which is the most advanced in the world… This was given to me by President Xi Jinping, of China, I have it here. I communicate by satellite with him,” Maduro commented at the closing event.
“Ni hao, ni hao (hello). Xiexie, xiexie (thank you),” the Venezuelan president immediately added while pretending to have a phone call in Mandarin.
While it might seem minor, it was yet another sign of Venezuela’s need to publicize its rapprochement with China in the midst of tension with the US.
In addition to Xi Jinping’s “gift,” there have been other nods to China in the past week, including, a diplomatic visit and a message from the Asian country, both of which took place on Thursday.
The diplomatic meeting
Maduro met with Lan Hu, China’s ambassador to Venezuela, and celebrated the progress between the two countries, especially in the economy, he said.
“I am happy with the progress of this year 2025 in our mutual cooperation with sister China, especially in economy, science, technology and artificial intelligence projects,” Maduro wrote on social media.
Since his appointment as ambassador to Venezuela in May 2023, Hu has celebrated relations with the Latin American country and economic progress, as well as joining in on criticizing pressure from Washington.
Last year, on the sidelines of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Venezuela, Hu criticized “unilateral coercive measures” of the US.
“China and Venezuela are united in defending the rights and interests of developing countries in the face of US unilateral coercive measures, so as to build a more just and equitable multipolar world, based on mutual respect,” Hu said.
These words from the Chinese ambassador came around the same time the US expressed concern about the arrests of opposition activists ahead of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential elections.
Maduro was later proclaimed the winner by electoral authorities, who are under the tight control of Maduro’s ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
The opposition questioned the electoral process, claiming that its candidate had won the vote, receiving the support of much of the international community. Maduro’s government assures that the elections were legitimate, although the detailed results have never been published.
China rejects the ‘threat of the use of force’
Beijing shared its concerns following the recent US military deployment in Caribbean waters near Venezuela.
“China opposes any move that violates the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and a country’s sovereignty and security. We oppose the use or threat of force in international relations and the interference of external forces in Venezuela’s internal affairs under any pretext. We hope that the United States will do more things conducive to peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region,” Mao Ning, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said Thursday after being asked about the issue at a press conference.
This week, the Trump administration carried out a major military deployment in the waters surrounding Latin America and the Caribbean as part of an intensified effort to combat drug cartels, two US defense officials told CNN.
The deployment — which comes as the US hardens the drug trafficking narrative about Maduro and his government — also includes a nuclear-powered attack submarine, additional P8 Poseidon reconnaissance jets, several destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser as part of the mission, the officials added.
For his part, Maduro announced the deployment of 4.5 million militiamen throughout the national territory, and said that “no empire is going to touch the sacred ground of Venezuela,” and minimized the “threats to peace” of the country.
The president assured that his country has the defensive capacity to avoid a confrontation.
“Let the world know, let the empires know: Venezuela today more than ever has what it takes. That is why we are living in peace and we are going to continue at peace,” Maduro said during a televised ceremony. “We carry the strength of David versus Goliath,” he added before recounting more details of the biblical story.
Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the US is prepared to “use all the resources of its power” with the goal of curbing the “flow of drugs into the country and bringing those responsible to justice,” after being consulted about the deployment of three ships with 4,000 military personnel in Caribbean waters.
A US Department of Defense official told CNN that the deployed ships had not received orders to head to the edge of Venezuela’s territorial sea, which has about 4,000 kilometers of coastline.
A ‘politically correct’ message
The relationship with Beijing has been commercially useful for Caracas for some time, while it is mired in a deep political and economic crisis.
“The support that Venezuela has had (from China), especially at the economic level, has helped prevent the deepening of this deep economic crisis,” José Antonio Hernández Macías, a researcher in Latin American Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), told CNN.
China has a trade surplus with Venezuela: it exports around US$3.45 billion in products to the South American country, while it barely imports $739 million, which means a surplus of $2.71 billion for the Asian economy, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) updated until 2023.
In this sense, China has economically benefited from its relationship with Venezuela, whose main export product to the world is oil, the OEC adds.
Meanwhile, the United States has a trade deficit with Venezuela, as it exports fewer products to Venezuela than it buys from it. The trade balance is in favor of Venezuela by more than US$ 1.3 billion, according to OEC data.
So, because Venezuela is a strategic ally for China in the economic sphere, it seeks to take care of its interests in the region by showing its stance against the deployment of the United States, said the UNAM expert.
“The oil that exists in the Essequibo, this territory that Venezuela and Guyana are disputing, plays a crucial role in this issue (…) Oil is not only being exploited by the United States, but there are also Chinese companies in this region,” explained Hernández Macías.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a statement on Friday by the Guyanese government, which expressed its “grave concern” about “the threat to peace and security in the region posed by transnational organized crime and narco-terrorism, which often involve criminal networks” like Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns.
Recently, the Trump administration reiterated its claim that Maduro is the leader of the criminal group of the Cartel of the Suns and doubled the reward to $50 million for information leading to the arrest of the Venezuelan president. In addition, the US designated the Cartel of the Suns as an international terrorist organization. The accusations against Maduro for alleged drug trafficking, repeatedly rejected by the Government of Venezuela, are not new. They date back to 2020, when the US pointed to Maduro as the leader of the Cartel of the Suns and initially offered $15 million for information leading to his arrest.
Amid this renewed confrontation between the United States and Venezuela, “what interests (China), beyond defending the Venezuelan government, is that the conditions exist to have access to the energy resources of this entire area,” added Hernández Macías.
On Friday, Reuters reported that a private Chinese company has begun exploiting two oil fields in Venezuela and plans to invest more than $1 billion in a project to produce 60,000 barrels per day of crude by the end of 2026, under a 20-year production-sharing contract signed in 2024.
While there is a mutual economic benefit, Maduro remains isolated from the world at large and China’s position on the US military deployment speaks volumes globally, according to Gabriel Pastor, an analyst at the Uruguay-based think tank Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Económica y Social (CERES).
“(China’s position) is saying something that more or less everyone can expect, but it does not mean that China is going to intervene in the conflict by supporting Venezuela,” Pastor told CNN. It is a “politically correct statement” that does not change anything for Venezuela, since “no specific action” is announced to support the Latin American country.
CNN’s Gonzalo Zegarra, Natasha Bertrand and Germán Padinger contributed to this report.
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