VENEZUELAN President Nicolas Maduro flew to China today to discuss financial assistance in the wake of a halving of the price of oil in the past six months.

Before leaving Caracas, Mr Maduro said that he would talk about Venezuela’s oil-for-loans agreements with President Xi Jinping, as well as economic, education and technology projects.

China has loaned Venezuela more than $40 billion (£26.3bn) over the past five years, some of which has already been paid off with oil deliveries.

Mr Maduro announced at the end of December that he would make the economy his chief focus in 2015.

His itinerary will also include visits later this week to members of the oil cartel Opec, which decided last month to maintain production levels rather than, as Venezuela and Russia had wanted, to reduce output as a means of driving up prices.

The Venezuelan president called his trip “a very important tour to take on new projects, given the circumstance we have in our country, including falling revenue and the plummeting price of oil.”

Oil makes up 95 per cent of Venezuela’s export earnings. 

It has also underpinned the country’s Petrocaribe solidarity programme to help regional economic development, especially for Latin American countries united in the Alba bloc.

In visiting other Opec countries, Mr Maduro hopes to “continue high-level efforts to create a strategy for a recovery of oil prices, a strengthening of Opec.”

Venezuela’s economy contracted during the first three quarters of 2014 for various reasons.

Apart from inadequate economic diversification by the government, the far-right opposition’s violent disruption at the beginning of 2014, when city centres were occupied and blockaded, played a role.

Systematic smuggling by the commercial sector of state-subsidised goods out of the country to be resold profitably in Colombia and Guyana also hit the economy.

The Bolivarian revolution’s most bitter enemies in the US, where the government has imposed economic sanctions against individual Venezuelans, are forecasting loudly that Caracas will default on its foreign bonds.

Mr Maduro insisted firmly that this would not happen, but he recognised that borrowing on international markets was prohibitively expensive, causing him to return to his close allies in Beijing.