Transcript | Eric Olander: After the Maduro Capture — Assessing China's Real Exposure in Venezuela

Transcript courtesy of CadreScripts follows that! Image by Keya Zhou.

This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project.

In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The operation unfolded quickly, with minimal kinetic escalation, but has raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the Trump administration’s willingness to use force in the Western Hemisphere. Just before the raid, China’s Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas. Commentary linking Trump’s action to China has ranged widely—claims about spheres of influence, arguments this was all about oil or rare earths, and pronouncements about what this means for Taiwan. Eric helps us think through China’s actual stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China’s role in the region and the global South more broadly, China’s immediate reaction and concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, and what Chinese military planners may be studying as they assess how this operation unfolded.

5:18 – How Beijing is reading this episode: official messaging versus elite thinking

7:40 – The Taiwan comparisons on Chinese social media and why they don’t work

11:09 – How deep is China’s actual expertise on Latin America?

14:56 – Comparing U.S. and Chinese benches of Latin America expertise

18:02 – Are we back to spheres of influence? Why that framing doesn’t work

20:09 – Where is China most exposed in Venezuela: oil, loans, personnel?

23:41 – The resource-for-infrastructure model and why it failed

28:27 – The political assets: China as defender of sovereignty and multilateralism

36:25 – Will this push left-leaning governments closer to Beijing?

40:07 – The “China impotence” narrative and what doing something would actually mean

46:26 – What Chinese military planners are actually studying

51:46 – The Qiu Xiaoqi meeting: strategic failure or intelligence delivery?

58:40 – What actually changes and what doesn’t: looking ahead

Paying it forward: Alonso Illueca, nonresident fellow for Latin America and the Caribbean at the China Global South Project

Recommendations:

Eric: “China’s Long Economic War“ by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Foreign Affairs)

Kaiser: The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. You can reach me at sinicapod@gmail.com. And listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. You will enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators, one of whom joins me today.

And of course, you will enjoy the knowledge that you are helping me do what I honestly believe is very important work. So, check out the page, see all that is on offer, and do consider helping out.

In the early morning hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a tightly coordinated operation in Venezuela that culminated in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and their subsequent rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges — Narco-terrorism. The operation appears to have unfolded quickly, and with minimal kinetic escalation, but it has already raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the willingness of the Trump administration to use force in the Western Hemisphere. One detail that stands out is timing. Just before the raid, China’s Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas, a reminder of how abruptly Beijing’s plans or Beijing’s assumptions were overtaken by events.

In the days since, commentary somehow linking Trump’s action, which I think qualifies as a special military operation, linking it to China has ranged really widely. There have been claims that, you know, we’re back in a world of spheres of influence, and then China gets one, arguments that this was really all about China all along, or all about oil, or cutting off oil to China, or rare earths or the strategic minerals or any combination of the above, with many gratuitous takes on what this means for Taiwan or for China’s energy security or its, you know, what, $510 billion two-way trade in the region.

Just hours after the strike, there were various pundits pronouncing this as a big blow to China or a major setback to China. This struck me, as you can probably guess, as rather premature. Indeed, any take that basically was, you know, this was all about China, or this was all about oil or this was all about, you know, any one thing, was bound to irk me.

What’s been harder for me to pin down, though, is how this episode is actually being read outside of Washington, and particularly in Beijing.

So that is where today’s guest comes in. Eric Olander is the host of the China Global South Podcast, the founder of the Global South Project. And there is no one better positioned to help us think through China’s stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China’s role in the region and in the global South more broadly. We will talk about China’s immediate reaction, its concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, the constraints imposed by sanctions and chokepoints, and what Chinese military planners may be quietly studying here as they assess how this operation unfolded.

As always, the goal here isn’t to score points or to force analogies, but to think carefully, to think soberly and with context. So, Eric joins us from his home in Southeast Asia. Eric, it is great to have you back on Sinica, man. Good to see you.

Eric Olander: Kaiser, it’s wonderful to be here. Thank you so much. Looking forward to our discussion.

Kaiser: Yeah. And let me add this is a joint show between Sinica and the China Global South Podcast, and it will appear on both networks. So, Eric, before we get into the interpretations, I want to establish maybe some ground truth about what this looks like from Beijing. So, there’s China’s official reaction that has emphasized, of course, sovereignty and international law, opposition to the U.S. and its unilateral actions.

But it hasn’t framed the operation as explicitly targeting China or its interests — not surprisingly. From your vantage point, and without maybe too much by way of just pure speculation, how is this episode actually being read in Beijing, both at the level of official messaging and in terms of whether Chinese policymakers see this as a coherent, long-planned U.S. strategy or a more kind of operational stick contingent move? What do Chinese policymakers think just happened, and what matters most to them right now?

Eric: Well, I think it’s very hard to tell what’s going on inside the corridors of power in Beijing. And most people on the outside, either they’re lying about it, or they’re speculating. So, let’s start with that disclaimer right there. I spent the morning talking with some folks both in Shanghai and Beijing to try and get the read on it. There is a lot more sobriety in this part of the world than I think there is coming out of Washington, particularly out of the media. They don’t see this as something directed at them. Let’s be very clear here that Donald Trump on Air Force One said very clearly that the oil will continue to flow to China.

And they took that as an indication that this isn’t about China. That was one thing I heard today. And they don’t see this as a China-specific action. China, of course, is a player. But let’s remember that the Chinese have been bobbing and weaving since Trump came back into power on all sorts of issues. And so, this is part of a continuum of trying to adapt to whatever is happening on the day with Donald Trump, whether it’s trade war, rare earths, whether it’s sanctions, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s South China Sea. And so, when we put that all together, this is just one factor among many. And I don’t get the sense that there’s the same kind of hysteria.

I am a little surprised, though, that Chinese social media has been allowed to run quite rampant on the narratives of, well, let’s take Taiwan now. This would be something that you would think that the Chinese would actually want to calm some of that rhetoric down, and they haven’t. It’s been a huge topic of conversation on Weibo, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu.

Kaiser: Yeah, let’s talk about that. I mean, because the reactions have included these comparisons to Taiwan, of course. Maybe we talk about other texts later, but I mean, you’ve seen some of this popular commentary on, as you say, Weibo and WeChat and Xiaohongshu, suggesting that, hey, maybe, you know, we, China, we could go and do this in Taiwan, go in and grab Lai Ching-te, put him on trial. And, after all, we’re back in the law of the jungle now. So, hell with international law. Trump’s already made that a dead letter. I guess I want to ask you, how much do you think this social discourse feeds into internal elite thinking? Or how much does it influence policy deliberations? How should we read into the fact that this discourse is even being allowed?

You know, usually they’ve got the fan in the firehose, right? They can fan it up or allow it to burn, or they can hose it down pretty easily. And they have not hosed it down.

Eric: They have not hosed it down. And nothing is by coincidence in China on these issues. So, there’s clearly an intent to let this percolate the way it’s been percolating. In terms of this whole Taiwan narrative that has been a mainstream of the U.S. discourse on this, and you’ve heard this from both U.S. politicians, you’ve heard it from commentators, you’ve heard it from any number of stakeholders, usually non-Chinese specialists, and who will then draw this equivalency that says, well, because Donald Trump led this military intervention in Venezuela, that now somehow sets a precedent for China to move on Taiwan.

And I’m going to channel my inner Evan Feigenbaum and Ryan Hass and Bonnie Glaser, all the people that I know you respect a lot, and the people I’ve been following quite a bit on this issue, and one thing that they’ve all been consistent about is that China does not feel that it needs the United States to set a precedent in order for it to take decisions on Taiwan. It looks at Taiwan as a domestic internal issue. It does not see it as an international affair. That’s a big discrepancy between what happened in