Chinese cannot demand repayment

This is one of those myth's that drives me bonkers. This is a non-partisan post, it only explains how debt works, I am not pointing fingers about how we got here.

1. All U.S. treasury bonds are issued for fixed durations. So if the Chinese hold a 30yr bond, they CANNOT get their money before that time. They have to wait for the bond to mature. The only thing they get before the 30yrs is interest on the bond which is only a small fraction of the amount.

The only thing that the Chinese can do to raise money from the U.S. treasuries would be to sell the bonds on the open market but if they dump the bonds by selling them all at once they are also reducing the value of the bonds that they own. Yes, it would hurt the U.S. by increasing interest rates but it would hurt the Chinese because they would end up selling $1T of bonds for $500B. It is kind of like mutual assured destruction.

2. If the Chinese hold the U.S.treasury bonds to maturity, collect their money, and choose not to buy any more bonds, we pay them in U.S. dollars. Guess who controls the printing press? We do. It's a good thing our debt isn't payable in gold or something that we don't have control over. So even if we are totally irresponsible and don't have the money to pay back our debt, we can always print dollars because that is the currency our debt is represented in. This would devalue the dollar but our debt holders would have to accept it.

Now repeat after me, the Chinese cannot call in their bonds, the Chinese cannot call in their bonds, ....

I am not arguing that it is okay to have a huge national debt, I am only pointing out the fallacy of anyone who claims that the Chinese can re-posses our country by 'calling in their debt'. It is literally impossible.