I firmly believe that our natural resources have been used as collateral in borrowing money from China. The future will not be pretty.
We borrow in dollars. I have zero doubt about the ability of the government to repay the Chinese in dollars. We used to have to print this stuff. Now it's just a SWIFT payment, whereby some data entry operator at Treasury punches in a string of numbers. Our problem isn't repaying the Chinese - it's fighting the wars that China might start just because (1) they're bored and (2) it's what they've always done for entertainment when they're economically strong and feeling good about themselves. We spent over $1T in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which are economic and military non-entities. That's most of the $1.19T the Federal government owes to China. The mind boggles at what we'd spend fighting the Chinese.