The Foothold and the Field

 THE GRAMMAR OF NON-ALIGNMENT, CONTINUED

The Foothold and the Field

Why $13 Billion in Chinese Investment Is Still the Smaller Number

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Thursday evening, at a reception marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Prime Minister Mark Phillips delivered the kind of speech Georgetown has grown practiced at giving: warm, forward-looking, thick with the vocabulary of partnership. Guyana’s exports to China, he said, reached US$501 million in 2025 — the country’s strongest performance to date, enough to make China the 8th-largest destination for Guyanese goods. Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang went further, placing cumulative Chinese investment in Guyana at roughly US$13 billion, and cataloguing the tangible evidence: the US$260 million Demerara River Bridge, the US$100 million Aurora Solar Farm, Bosai’s recent donation of generators to a power-starved Linden.

Those are real numbers, and this publication has tracked the positioning they represent — the slow drift of Guyana’s infrastructure and security relationships between two competing patrons, documented across this series. But read against the government’s own budget figures, released the same season, the China numbers reveal less about Beijing’s foothold in Guyana than about how small a foothold looks next to the country’s actual patrimony.

Guyana’s crude oil exports alone generated an estimated US$17.8 billion in 2025 — more than the Chinese Ambassador’s entire multi-year investment tally, in a single year, from a single commodity.

— 2026 national budget figures, as reported by OilNOW

A RANKING THAT UNDERCOUNTS THE REAL RELATIONSHIP

The 8th-place ranking Prime Minister Phillips cited is accurate as far as it goes — but it measures Guyana’s non-oil export relationship with China, not the totality of the country’s trade. Crude oil, which does not figure in that ranking at all, accounted for more than 85 percent of Guyana’s total export receipts in 2025, on total export earnings of roughly US$20.1 billion. Oil is not a footnote to Guyana’s trade profile; it is nearly the whole of it.

And on oil, the picture tilts decisively toward Washington, not Beijing. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data cited by OilNOW, U.S. net crude imports from Guyana averaged nearly 200,000 barrels per day through the first ten months of 2025 — up from 176,000 bpd in 2024, 98,000 bpd in 2023, and just 27,000 bpd in 2020, Guyana’s first year as an oil exporter. In October alone, the U.S. took in 216,000 barrels a day from Guyana, trailing only Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia — placing this country of under a million people fourth among all suppliers to the world’s largest economy, for that month, ahead of the entire Gulf and West African oil-producing world.

Because Guyana imports no crude oil from the United States, that net figure is also, in effect, the gross figure — a rare instance of clean data in a trade relationship usually obscured by two-way flows. There is no comparable Chinese figure of that scale. China did take a direct crude shipment from Guyana in 2025, its first in three years; but crude sales to China remain occasional cargoes, not a structural relationship. The Ambassador’s $13 billion is a cumulative investment total, built up since 2015; the crude relationship with U.S. refiners is a current, compounding annual flow now worth many multiples of that figure every year. The comparison Thursday’s reception invited — trade destination rankings — was, whether by design or convenience, the wrong one to make.

THE REVELATION UNDERNEATH THE COMPARISON

But sitting with the $17.8 billion figure raises a harder question than which foreign power holds the stronger position in Guyana — it raises the question of how much of that patrimony ever reaches Guyana at all.

Of the US$17.8 billion in crude export earnings recorded in 2025, Guyana’s own revenue; from the sale of its profit-oil share, plus royalty runs to roughly 14.5 percent of the total, a rate the Ministry of Natural Resources has itself repeatedly confirmed as the structural outcome of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement: 75 percent of all revenue reserved for contractor cost recovery, the remaining 25 percent split evenly between government and consortium, plus a 2 percent royalty paid to the state out of the consortium’s share. Measured against the top-line $17.8 billion figure, that leaves the country that owns the resource collecting a share smaller than what the Chinese Ambassador cited as this country’s total accumulated benefit from a decade of Belt-and-Road-adjacent investment — every single year.

The question this publication has asked before, in other contexts, applies here with unusual force: where else in the world does a nation’s ownership of its own resource yield so comparatively meagre a return?

— The Board

WHERE ELSE — A COMPARATIVE RECORD

The government has, at various points, defended the Stabroek terms as internationally competitive. The public record does not fully support that defense, and in one important respect; Guyana’s own subsequent conduct — appears to contradict it outright.

Figures compiled from OilNOW reporting on Ministry of Natural Resources statements, IDB Technical Note (Aug. 2020), Global Witness/Rystad Energy exchange (2020), and VP Jagdeo’s 2022 model PSA announcement.

The 51-60 percent range cited by the IDB and by Rystad Energy uses a broader methodology than the government’s own 14.5 percent headline figure; an average effective tax rate accounting for the full life of a project, not a single year’s fiscal split — and the two are not strictly comparable on their face. But the gap between them is itself instructive: even the more generous of two independent outside assessments, produced by a firm that pushed back on Global Witness’s harsher number, still placed Guyana below what it judged appropriate for “a mature producer” like Brazil. Global Witness, for its part, put a dollar figure on the shortfall — estimating in 2020 that Guyana stood to lose in the order of US$55 billion over the life of the agreement.

The most damning comparator, however, is not an outside estimate at all. It is Georgetown’s own. When Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo announced the terms of the government’s revised model production-sharing agreement in 2022 — the template now applied to new blocks, though pointedly not to Stabroek itself; the royalty rate more than quintupled, from 2 percent to 10 percent. The cost-recovery ceiling, which determines how much revenue contractors can claim before any profit-sharing begins, was cut from 75 percent to 65 percent. And a 10 percent corporate tax was introduced where none had existed before.

A government does not rewrite its own template this drastically unless it has concluded, in practice if not in public rhetoric, that the original template gave away more than it should have.

THE FOOTHOLD REFRAMED

None of this diminishes the substance of what Ambassador Yang described Thursday evening. Thirteen billion dollars in cumulative investment, a doubled trade relationship, a bridge, a solar farm, a donation of generators to a region the state itself has struggled to keep lit — these are not trivial facts, and this publication has covered the strategic logic behind each of them elsewhere in this series. China’s position in Guyana is real, and it is growing.

But Thursday’s framing — an export ranking, a multi-year investment total, offered as the measure of a foreign power’s stake in Guyana’s future — obscures more than it reveals when set beside the country’s actual patrimony. The crude flowing to Houston and the Gulf Coast refineries dwarfs, in a single year, what a decade of Chinese investment has accumulated. And the government’s own revenue from that crude — the thing Guyana is actually left holding, after the contractor’s cost recovery and profit share are taken — is smaller, as a share of the resource’s value, than almost any independent assessment of comparable agreements elsewhere in the world, and smaller than Georgetown’s own revised terms suggest it should be.  Assistant Secretary Segura’s remarks, expected shortly, will presumably make the American case for the country’s economic significance in the manner these occasions typically call for.

The more consequential figure will remain the one that hasn’t yet been the subject of a reception: not who ranks 8th, but what happens to the other 85.5 percent.

Sourcing: PM Phillips and Ambassador Yang remarks per event coverage (Sept. 18, 2026); crude export and revenue figures per Guyana 2026 national budget as reported by OilNOW; U.S. import data per EIA, via OilNOW; PSA fiscal terms per Ministry of Natural Resources public statements; comparative government-take estimates per IDB Technical Note (Aug. 2020) and the Global Witness/Rystad Energy public exchange (2020).