Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro pledged to work with China towards the construction of an “alternative to capitalism” on Wednesday at an online meeting organized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping personally presided over the online event titled “High-Level Dialogue with the Communist Party of China and Political Parties of the World.” Maduro joined Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Le Hoai Trung, head of the Foreign Relations Commission of the Communist Party of Vietnam, among others, in the virtual meeting.
During his intervention, Maduro, as both head of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and Venezuela’s dictator, offered Xi Jinping “all the support” of his chavista government and the Venezuelan people for the construction of a “developed and egalitarian world, far from capitalist ideas.”
“I send you all our commitment in the work and in the daily struggle to build, as we are building, an alternative to savage capitalism, to neoliberal capitalism, to imperialist hegemonism. An independent, sovereign alternative,” Maduro asserted.
The socialist dictator continued by claiming that Venezuela will support the Chinese Communist Party calls for a “community of a shared future,” insisting on the need for dialogue and coordination among the countries of the world to “make diversity shine.”
“You can count on the full support of Venezuela, of our people and of the United Socialist Party in the endeavor to build a civilization where we all fit, where we take the path of development,” Maduro said, “a new civilization of peace, harmony, union, of shared destinies.”
Maduro also made calls “to create alternative models to hegemony, to economic blackmail, to the attempt to impose through coercion, the blackmail of aggression, to impose their domination on our people,” in reference to sanctions imposed by the United States, Canada, the European Union, and other countries on Maduro, his socialist regime, and its high-ranking members.
Maduro assured Xi that the “times of empires are over” — apparently not in reference to China’s own imperialist activities in Tibet, East Turkistan, Africa, and the South China Sea — and that the time has come for a new world based on the integration of peoples opposed to the United States.
“The times of the empires are over, the times of the peoples have arrived for now and forever, let no one doubt that,” Maduro said. “The time has come for the articulation of a new world that we call multipolar.”
“The multipolar and multicentric world deserves a lot of effort, perseverance on the right path to build a civilization, as comrade Xi Jinping has raised, which allows the beautiful diversity of the culture and strength of the peoples to shine,” he continued.
The socialist dictator availed himself of the opportunity to boast about PSUV’s anti-U.S. work, describing it as “a party that was born under the banners of the construction of socialism.”
“A party that was born as a social and political force, in the heat of the struggle against North American imperialism and its obsession to hegemonize and dominate our America,” Maduro said. “It was born in the heat of the struggle to build in our homeland our own economic, social and political model of socialism in the 21st century.”
The Venezuelan socialist regime, a key ideological ally of China in Latin America, was the first country in the region to sign a “strategic development partnership” with China in 2001. The Maduro regime has seen its dependence on China grow over the past years, largely due to the collapse of “Bolivarian socialism” that began over a decade ago. The nation’s economy and political structures failing prompted Maduro to seek further Chinese aid to maintain control of the country — in addition to support from Russia, Iran, Turkey, and other ideologically-aligned allies.
China’s assistance to the Venezuelan socialist regime has ranged from the technical, in the form of helping it build its own Social Credit System-inspired “Fatherland platform,” to financial lifelines.
The Maduro regime has not publicly disclosed the amount of money received from China, but reports indicate that Venezuela received more than $50 billion from China during Hugo Chávez’s rule (1999-2013). By 2020, Venezuela, which at that time owed over $19 billion to Chinese banking institutions in oil-for-loan deals, had to negotiate a new grace period with the Chinese banks.
Reports published in August accused China of aiding the Maduro regime in shipping millions of barrels of its sanctioned oil since 2020 through a state-owned defense firm to help offset Venezuela’s large debt to China.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.