Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Beijing cannot accept any country acting as the “world’s judge” after the United States captured Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.
The world’s second-largest economy has provided Venezuela with an economic lifeline since the U.S. and its allies ramped up sanctions in 2017, purchasing roughly $1.6 billion worth of goods in 2024, the most recent full-year data available.
Almost half of China’s purchases were crude oil, customs data shows, while its state-owned oil giants had invested around $4.6 billion in Venezuela by 2018, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which tracks Chinese overseas corporate investment.
No, you started talking about PPP in response to a news story that described the United States and China competing over influence over the Venezuelan economy: Chinese aid and investment in response to United States sanctions. Those are essentially going to be dollar denominated, and PPP doesn’t matter. I’ve been saying from the beginning that you were wrong to bring PPP into the discussion, because this discussion, in this thread, isn’t about domestic consumption in either China or the U.S.
Again, when talking about the effects of sanctions and foreign aid and investment, we should be talking about transactions that occur in the currency at issue. If China wants to provide aid to Venezuela in RMB, Venezuela will either need to spend that on Chinese producers or exchange for another currency to spend elsewhere (including Venezuelan Bolivars being spent domestically). If there’s going to be a currency exchange, then PPP of the aid providing nation doesn’t matter. A million USD from China is worth the exact same amount as a million USD from the U.S.
I think if we’re talking about on the world stage, as an economic power, the interconnected West is best understood as a power bloc. U.S. inconsistency and unpredictability on things like Russian sanctions actually show the limits of U.S. unilateral power while still showing the power of the broader Western order. Yes, China and Russia want to provide the world with an alternative multipolar order, and fragmentation of the Western powers may open up opportunities for that vision, but that competition is playing out along alliances, not isolated nations. In any event, PPP doesn’t have anything to do with that particular competition.
We’re just going to have to agree to disagree. I’m not going to bang my head against the wall trying to explain it to you. But I’ll give it one more shot.
The fact that you see PPP as only relevant in a bubble inside the country is just idiotic. China PRODUCES things. Literally most of its aid and initiatives are in the form of resources and infrastructure projects. There is no USD involved. That’s literally the entire Belt and Road project.
I’m sorry. But it seems like you’re trying to project what you know about US trade and neoliberal economic policies onto China. You clearly know enough about US trade and how it uses the dollar for dominance on world markets. But China doesn’t have to play that game anymore. That’s literally the shift in global economic trade that has happened. The world is not being held hostage by US dollar dominance anymore. They have an alternative in China.
And PPP is a much better means of showing why this is. It’s BECAUSE China actually makes shit. It’s not just a finance and consumption economy. It makes stuff more affordable for its population AND it’s able to use this same massive industrial power to work on industrial projects with other countries.
You are explaining a world that existed 20-30 years ago.