At the outset of the twenty-first century, Latin America was refocused within China’s scope of interests following its “going-out” strategy at the time when the hegemonic dominance of the United States over Latin America went into decline as US foreign policy was dominated by the counterterrorism war primarily in the Middle East, and, later on, the country entered into a persistent financial crisis. These events, coupled with US neglect toward the Western Hemisphere during the George W. Bush administration and Barack Obama’s first term, played to the advantage of China, as Latin America’s rich endowment of natural resources complemented its needs to secure and diversify its energy and resources supply.
For nearly a decade, robust economic growth in China has fueled a strong demand for commodities, which often come from Latin America. Bilateral trade increased 22-fold between 2000 and 2013, from just over $12 billion to nearly $275 billion. In just a few years, China has gone from being a minor partner to becoming a central actor in the region’s foreign trade. Until 2010, very little foreign direct investment (FDI) flowed from China to Latin America and the Caribbean. A turning point was reached in 2010, when the inflow of FDI from China approached an estimated $14 billion—equivalent to 11 percent of the region’s total inward FDI. There is no doubt that China has recognized the growing importance of its ties with Latin America and the Caribbean. China is now Latin America's second largest trading partner and the region's third largest source of investment. Undoubtedly, China’s footprint in the backyard of the United States is altering the status quo of power politics in the Western Hemisphere and weakening Washington’s traditional geopolitical privileges in the “zero-sum” game.
A remarkable turn to the left of several Latin American governments also paved the way for Chinese economic engagement with the region. Those countries view the keen interests shown by the Chinese authority in strengthening ties with LAC as a historic opportunity to address the challenges of poor infrastructure and, short of investment, increased productivity and competitiveness and diversification of exports. In return, the active responses from Latin America catalyzed the imperatives from the Chinese government to increase its presence in the Latin American ground. Thus, China’s increasing interaction with countries in Latin America urged changes in China’s foreign policy architecture to acquire an overall and systemic approach to LAC while clarifying the concerns from some skeptical voices.
In this sense, the first of China’s white papers on Latin America was released in 2008, designed as a guideline to advance the booming bilateral and multilateral cooperation. While acknowledging the positive sides of this belated official document, it was embedded with a set of abstract and generalized diplomatic terminology and concepts, which are rooted in the Chinese mind-set and mirrored experiences largely from Sino-African engagements.
The stereotyped and ambiguous narratives set in China’s white paper gave rise to the apparition of a set of misperceptions and misunderstandings that blurred its capacity to design a more accurate and concrete policy approach toward Latin America. Judged from the document, China not only assumed Latin America as a unified region, but also tended to view it in a systemic way, which actually has been an illusory picture. Deinstitutionalization and fragmentation are still characterizing Latin America, and these factors make countries in the region develop varying degrees of autonomy and diplomatic stances when voicing their opinions to extraregional actors, especially China. Moreover, fragmentation in the region became more evident as China adopted a bilateral approach to selected countries—mainly in South America—to expand its links based on its increasing demand for raw materials and energy resources. Arguably, China’s approach toward the region underestimated the complexity and diversity of Latin America.
Changes began when the new leaderships tended to take a more assertive approach in foreign policy. In 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to three Latin American countries marked a turning point in the country’s relationship with this region. China’s launch of a “new charm offensive” to selected countries and the region at large denotes that LAC is an emerging priority to the leadership in Beijing. For Latin Americans, Chinese influence in the region has been very promising, as Beijing has slowly filled the vacuum left by the United States after a stark and perdurable presence in the Western Hemisphere since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century. Arguably, China’s expanding ties with LAC came at a time when the United States was shifting its foreign policy focus toward the Asia-Pacific region; inevitably, a more cohesive integration of common interests shall prevail on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, despite other actors’ influence. China in LAC and the United States in Asia Pacific are not isolated cases; thus, they shall not be disassociated. China’s twirl to LAC is viewed as a reaction to Washington’s pivot to Asia and vice versa. It goes without saying that LAC’s diversity and complexity poses new challenges to China derived from the lack of a deep, concrete, and asserted knowledge about the region, based on the fact that Chinese universities and think tanks have traditionally prioritized their resources to the studies of the United States and the European Union, at which studies on LAC are left far behind.
In the second decade of this century, China’s diplomacy reached a new historical height. The new leadership in Beijing has been embracing a reformed top-level policy design, to which the region of LAC has taken a more dominant role. China, with its new Twelfth-year’s Plan launched in 2013 and the drivers of the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, has adopted new strategic adjustments in China’s economic and political architecture. In this context, new patterns of globalization and the imperative necessity for regional integration in Latin America are shifting commercial, economic, and financial relations between both actors from economic complementarity to overall cooperation. China’s Latin America policy has been redefined through a multilateral approach aimed at advancing political relations.
As indicated by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in September 2014, “China has never been so close to the center of the world stage, and has never before so fully participated in various kinds of international affairs like today.” 1 It is worth noting that China has successfully created the 1+N multilateral dialogue platforms with “South countries,” such as the China-Africa Cooperation Forum, China-Arab Cooperation Mechanism, Shanghai Cooperation Forum, and China-ASEAN Summit. The only missing piece is Latin America as a whole block, which is an emerging block. From the perspective of South-South cooperation, a trans-Pacific coordination mechanism needs to be born at the right moment.
In July 2014, in Brasilia, President Xi’s keynote speech, “Striving to Build a Hand-in-Hand Community of Common Destiny,” at the China-Latin America and the Caribbean Summit, announced China’s major proposals and measures for the promotion of China-Latin American cooperation. Among others, one was to jointly build a new “1+3+6” cooperation framework, meaning, “1” plan to establish the China-LAC Cooperation Plan (2015–2019) with the aim of achieving inclusive growth and sustainable development through “3” main engines—trade, investment, and financial cooperation— focused at “6” fields—boosting the China-LAC industry connection with energy and resources, infrastructure construction, agriculture, manufacturing, scientific and technological innovation, and information technologies as cooperation priorities.
In turn, Latin American governments and citizens—once again—have found the raw material export-oriented pattern of development to be an unsustainable economic growth model for the region, demonstrated with the impacts that the current prices plunge in oil and minerals have on the traditional trade framework enclosing LAC’s ties with China. Therefore, it has been extensive debate about the urgent needs that Latin America has to upgrade its value chain and improve the proportion of value-added product. However, this would only be achieved as soon and as long as a unified and integrated development policy agenda is reached upon consensus among all the actors involved in the region. The intertwined China’s domestic transformations and LAC’s steps toward concrete regional development could be fused to benefit both sides. As China’s calls were positively answered by Latin American counterparts, both sides agreed to establish the China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum in July 2014 in Brazil.
Undoubtedly, China’s engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean has entered an era of strategic transition. This has been demonstrated by the first ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC Cooperation Forum held in Beijing in early January 2015, bearing a particular significance. This event not only illustrated that Latin America is adjusting to Chinese initiatives, but also that a common response to China is emanating from the region. Latin America’s most pressing challenge in the decade to come is to attract foreign direct investment and to receive financial support in order to advance social and public infrastructure projects, targeted at upgrading the region’s industrial and services platforms, as President Rafael Correa of Ecuador stated in Beijing the day before the inauguration of this meeting. He also pointed out that despite China’s willingness to cooperate, LAC needs to elaborate a specific development agenda. Thereby, China and Latin America’s transition emphasizes “seven pillars at which China can cooperate with the region: agriculture, finance, infrastructure, security, services, special economic zones and energy,” as stated by Professor Luis Guillermo Solis Rivera, president of the Republic of Costa Rica, when delivering a keynote speech at the award ceremony of a honorary doctorate degree and the official inauguration of the Center for LAC Studies at Renmin University of China. President Solis went further, to determine that our generation is experiencing a reformulation of a “world order” in which LAC—with a population of almost 600 million, is playing a key role in shaping the new balance of power.
It is self-evident that the complexity and diversity of LAC not only pose challenges to the region’s path toward integration but also to China’s quest for political and economic commitments. At the political sphere, although it has been noticeable that China has taken an inclusive attitude, the absence of diplomatic relationships between China and 12 LAC countries may constrain the mechanism because they may develop a perception of marginalization vis-à-vis the rest of the countries. The United States may continue exerting some degree of geopolitical influence on the community (CELAC) and the forum. The economic fragmentation of Latin America and the characteristics of individual states make national economic interests more prevalent over the regional development consensus.
Current challenges demand that Beijing measure and assess the effectiveness of its political and economic commitments, while assuring the transparency and accountability that in turn may upgrade China’s role and image in the region. Moreover, China should take a more flexible approach toward the 12 LAC countries without diplomatic ties. Debates and discussion in this aspect will be pertinent and beneficial in deepening the bilateral and multilateral cooperation.
The transitional relationship between China and Latin America seems to be following a perfect timing between commitments and responses and policy dynamics. In this sense, this book has been divided into three sections. Part I analyzes China’s new economic and political commitments to Latin America and the subsequent responses from the governments and citizens of the countries in the region. Part II elaborates the traditional realms of interaction between China and Latin America, namely, trade and FDI, while introducing two increasingly pertinent topics in the field of Sino-Latin American studies—agriculture and intellectual property. This project would have been incomplete without Part III, which presents specific studies that have taken predominance in Sino-LAC relations in the twenty-first century: cultural dimensions, the relevance of civil society in this engagement, and the social impacts derived from different forms of interaction.
In Chap. 2, Cui Shoujun examines the new Chinese commitments toward LAC, mapped out by the first China-CELAC Forum in January 2015 at Beijing. The five-year action plan (2015–2019) has formulated specific measures for overall cooperation between China and Latin America, covering politics, security, trade, investment, finance, infrastructure, energy, resources, industry, agriculture, science, and people-to-people exchange, with far-reaching implications. The bilateral approach adopted by China since the late 1990s with selected countries in the Western Hemisphere has been traditionally focused on economic issues, while China’s new commitments have prioritized multilateralism with political ambitions. In the second decade of this century, globalization and regional integration lay the ground for a closer South-South political coordination with an emphasis on reshaping the unfair old world order. Cui argues that this redefinition comes at a time when governments in LAC are advocating integration and catalyzing China’s engagements in order to tackle the pressuring issues affecting their societies. Thus, the transitional feature of China-Latin American ties is phenomenal. Coincidentally, the US “pivot” toward Asia Pacific was followed by China’s “twirl” to LAC, which has geopolitical implications in the narratives of Sino-United States “great power politics,” considering the rise of China and decline of the United States. What’s more, the inclusion of 12 LAC counties without diplomatic ties with China in the China-CELAC summit mechanism future complicates the China–Taiwan cross-straits relations. Ariel C. Armony and Yu Xiao in Chap. 3 go beyond the economic perspective of China’s presence in Latin America, by indicating that China should come up with a more effective global narrative in communicating its political aspirations to this relationship. The authors argue that China is creating a project with an extraordinary reach, justifying itself as a global power. But China’s quest for power is not determined solely by economic or military means. In addition, China should craft a persuasive narrative of legitimacy that could help generate global influence as well as respect. From a Latin American perspective, the authors attempt to establish the fundamental characteristics existing between China and Latin America and propose the creation of a more just, reasonable, and equitable international order, and the important role Latin America plays in this strategy. The Chinese narrative of “common development” based on the notion of complementarity is necessary but not sufficient. China’s notion about the developing world returning to its true values is constructed out of one central concept that is articulated in Beijing’s overall message. By privileging the notion of civilization, Beijing is emphasizing three values: diversity, equality, and inclusion. China advances the notion of a world thought of as a positive sum of civilizations. Clearly, China tells Latin Americans that we all share something very important: besides being victims of foreign powers, we all have brilliant civilizations. The diversity of civilizations guarantees our equality and our right to a just inclusion in the international order. According to Armony and Xiao, we still have yet to see if the Chinese project in Latin America will be able to cement values that would differentiate it from the United States. But, is there a Latin American vision about the relationship that is being constructed with China? China does business in Latin America, but behind this business there comes policy and narrative, from a perspective other than that of the United States, which manifests an overall grand strategy. Jiang Shixue in Chap. 4 focuses on the new development of China-Latin America relations since 2013, when Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang became China’s president and premier, respectively. China has adopted a more active, more assertive and more vocal policy on the world stage. Consistent with the general principle of China’s foreign policy that had been implemented by Xi Jinping’s two predecessors, Jiang argues that the China-CELAC summit held in early 2015 signified that Latin America has been uplifted to a more important position in China’s foreign diplomacy. However, China’s increasing engagement with Latin America is also faced with old and new challenges. The old problems include trade disputes and the US factor. The unbalanced trade structure invokes trade protectionism from Latin American countries, such as anti-dumping, and the hawkish policymakers in the United States thought China’s rise in Latin America would dampen the US hegemonic influence in the Western Hemisphere. The new challenges encompass an image problem, political risk, and social risk. The wider spread of a “China threat” and “fear of China,” political instability, economic insecurity, and rising crime rates in some Latin American countries will be greater hindrances to the booming relationship across the Pacific. Therefore, for Jiang, to further promote the bilateral relations between the two sides, China should pay more attention to the new risks as well as the old problems. Juan Gonzalez contributes Chap. 5 to this volume, incorporating an analysis of the recent evolution between Latin America and China relations, after China’s economic slowdown recorded since 2011, emphasizing the importance of Sino-Latin American relations, which despite their being geographically distant regions, has been presenting a surprising dynamism. He studies the concept of an Asian model of development to understand China’s position in the world and to comprehend the Chinese economy’s impact in the world in order to access China’s strategies toward Latin America. Gonza...