A TRACK RECORD OF PUTTING MONEY INTO RISKY COUNTRIES.

given an opening to seize the moral high ground on climate change and sustainable energy development; with the potential withdrawal of the U.S. from NAFTA, China may be given an opening to strengthen trade with Mexico and perhaps even Canada, which has lots of stuff that China still needs.

We might also expect to see more foreign investment and lending from China throughout the world. In 2013, Xi announced a multiyear, multi-trillion-dollar plan — the One Belt, One Road initiative — to build infrastructure throughout Eurasia to build connections peril of defaulting on US$3.7 billion in debt repayments due over the next couple of months. Chinese-funded infrastructure projects, like the Tinaco-Anaco high-speed railway announced in 2009, remain unfinished; locals call the Tinaco-Anaco a “red elephant.” And it’s increasingly unlikely that Venezuela will ever pay back China, which officially cut off more lending to the country late last year.

Yet Venezuela is only the most glaring example of a wider problem with Chinese largesse: it has a track record of putting money into risky countries with poor economic governance — you know, things like courts and securities regulators and laws and all that. Obviously, some of that risk tolerance can be put down to its predilection for politically sympathetic regimes, like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. But it’s been a general issue, a sign of China being “indifferent to governance environments to the extent that it is making major investments in weakgovernance environments where other investors fear to tread,” as David Dollar of the Brookings Institution put it in a recent paper.

That might change. To some analysts, China’s withdrawal from the Venezuela debt crisis suggests that it is learning from its mistakes, and will take a more riskaverse approach to foreign lending and direct investment in future. Yet as China expands its economic presence in other countries, it could very well run into another problem: the locals might not like it very much. In Sri Lanka, for instance, protests erupted earlier this year over a Chinese-backed industrial zone; farmers fear they will lose their homes, and opposition politicians claim Sri Lanka is ceding sovereignty to China through the development.

Can Xi expect more of the same? Maybe not, if he can successfully back up his rhetoric about trade liberalism and better governance — he has repeatedly touted the virtues of “the rule of law” in international relations — with action. One step would be more reciprocity when it comes to foreign direct investment; China remains one of the world’s most closed economies to outside capital.

Even then, however, China can expect its planned path to global pre-eminence to be a rocky one. As the United States can attest, from Vietnam to Iraq, heavy is the head that wears the superpower crown.