China won’t miss Chavez’s mismanagement of oil industry

As the news of Hugo Chavez’s death filtered through the Great Hall of the People yesterday, China’s leaders must have had mixed emotions.

During the past few years they have supported Venezuela’s socialist president with billions of dollars in loans and investments, all aimed at securing access to the country’s abundant oil reserves.

Sinopec and China National Petroleum Corp CNPC are both invested in projects within a vast deposit of oil sands in the Orinoco River basin that contains 1.6 trillion barrels of oil, according to PDVSA, the national oil company.

Venezuela says it will be able to recover 260 billion barrels of...