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    China and Latin America in Transition: Policy Dynamics, Economic Commitments, and Social Impacts
    China and Latin America in Transition: Policy Dynamics, Economic Commitments, and Social Impacts
    China and Latin America in Transition: Policy Dynamics, Economic Commitments, and Social Impacts
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    China and Latin America in Transition: Policy Dynamics, Economic Commitments, and Social Impacts

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    This volume explores the policy dynamics, economic commitments and social impacts of the fast evolving Sino-LAC relations. China’s engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean has entered into an era of strategic transition. While China is committed to strengthening its economic and political ties with Latin America and the Caribbean, Latin America as a bloc is enthusiastically echoing China’s endeavor by diverting their focus toward the other side of the ocean. The transitional aspect of China-LAC ties is phenomenal, and is manifested not only in the accelerating momentum of trade, investment, and loan but also in the China-CELAC Forum mechanism that maps out an institutional framework for decades beyond. While Latin America is redefined as an emerging priority to the leadership in Beijing, what are the responses from Latin America and the United States? In this sense, experts from four continents provide local answers to this global question. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
    Release dateAug 27, 2016
    ISBN9781137540805
    China and Latin America in Transition: Policy Dynamics, Economic Commitments, and Social Impacts

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      China and Latin America in Transition - Shoujun Cui

      Part I

      China’s New Commitments and Responses from Latin America

      © The Author(s) 2016

      Shoujun Cui and Manuel Pérez García (eds.)China and Latin America in Transition10.1057/978-1-137-54080-5_2

      2. China’s New Commitments to LAC and Its Geopolitical Implications

      Cui Shoujun¹ 

      (1)

      Center for Latin America Studies/School of International Studies, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

      The trade and economic relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have been expanding exponentially since the dawn of the new millennium. China’s economic engagement is a key driver of the commodity boom in the first decade of the twenty-first century, because China imported massive amounts of raw materials from Latin America, which in turn boosted the fast economic growth in the region. Latin American officials, pundits, and journalists developed a keen interest to rediscover China and its growing impact on the transformation of the global economy and on the Western Hemisphere.

      A new wave of China’s presence in LAC has been ushered in since Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated his position in 2013. The two high-profile diplomatic visits made by President Xi Jinping to seven Latin American countries came to a consensus with the leaderships in LAC to convene the China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum. In January 2015, Beijing successfully hosted the First Ministerial Meeting of the China-CELAC Cooperation Forum, in which 40 leaders from 30 Latin American and Caribbean countries participated and three important documents were signed, including the China-CELAC Beijing Declaration, the Regulations on the China-CELAC Forum, and a five-year plan for cooperation in economics, security, and other key areas. The first China-CELAC summit was a historical event of global influence, which set up a comprehensive framework for future cooperation.

      China fever gripped Latin American media again when China’s Premier Li Keqiang made his first trip to four Latin America countries, namely, Brazil, Columbia, Peru, and Chile, which again manifested China’s commitments to scale up the magnitude of economic and political engagement with Latin America in the context of China’s going global strategy (Cui 2015). Premier Li Keqiang’s visit was intended to reassure the region of China’s new commitments, in an effort to explore key areas of cooperation and key projects of financing in order to display the road map set up by President Xi and his counterparts formulated in Beijing.

      China’s New Commitments: From Bilateralism to Multilateralism

      China is in the process of redefining its policy toward Latin American and the Caribbean in an approach that puts more emphasis on multilateralism, particularly that embodied by the China-CELAC framework while still maintaining the bilateral cooperation with individual countries in the region. Arguably, the guiding principle for China’s new commitments to Latin America and the Caribbean can be interpreted as to engage multilaterally where China can and bilaterally where China must. China’s top leaders’ event-packed tour of major Latin American countries and the successful creation of the China-CELAC dialogue mechanism marked the intensification of Beijing’s relationship with a region that has become increasingly important in overall Chinese foreign policy and development strategy.

      Tracing the trajectory of the PRC’s historic relation with Latin America, Latin America carried less weight than other countries in China’s closer periphery. In the Cold War narrative, Communist China articulated an image of itself as a member of the Third World, which was depicted as YaFeiLa (亚非拉, Asia-Africa-Latin America), in a hope of solidifying the newly independent developing countries under the leadership of the PRC to defend national sovereignty and struggle for economic development, in the context of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism (Taylor 2006). In the YaFeiLa narrative, Asia and Africa were put before Latin America, implying Asia and Africa were a priority and Latin America was relegated as a second priority, because geographically the region is far from China and there was no close coordination between them.

      In the post–Cold War era, with the deepening of the reform of the opening-up policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping, China started to strengthen its relations with Latin America and the Caribbean (Fernández et al. 2010). In the early 2000s, China’s diplomatic strategy came to emphasize three elements: the peaceful rise of China as a regional and world power, the concept of a multipolar world, and the vision of international organizations as a primary instrument of foreign policy (ECLAC 2015a, b, c). Against this backdrop, China is poised to perceive its relations with LAC through the lens of South-South cooperation in the contemporary global political system, in order to stress the peace, development, and cooperation agendas and reform the existing world order. Hence, South-South economic initiatives geared toward supporting less developed countries have remained an area of common interest to both China and the South American states (Hirst 2008).

      The bilateral approach is a pragmatic way to strengthen China’s economic ties with such key resource-rich countries in the region as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba. The takeoff in Sino-Latin American relations can be traced back to 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). Prior to that, China’s presence in Latin America was primarily political and cultural, concentrating on advancing China’s diplomatic recognition and building goodwill (Ellis 2015a). After 2001, China adopted the going-out strategy in order to secure natural resources to sustain its fast economic growth. Since 2001, Chinese presidents have visited Latin America six times. Excluding Xi’s two trips, these include: Jiang Zemin’s 2001 visit to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Uruguay, and Venezuela and his 2002 visit to Mexico; and Hu Jintao’s state visit in 2004 to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba, to Mexico in 2005, to Costa Rica, Cuba, and Peru in 2008, and to Brazil in 2010.

      It can be argued that China’s expansion in Latin America is driven by the imperatives to gain minerals, oil, and raw materials to feed its thirst for natural resources, while the expansion of Chinese economy size provided China with the capacity to capitalize on such opportunities. As the rise of China’s economic might substantially reshaped its relations with the outside world, Beijing began to amend its foreign policy to suit its new identity. During the Hu Jintao administration (2003–2012), China began to adopt the principle of an all-round/dimensional foreign policy that theoretically does not differentiate among geographical regions or countries. According to senior Chinese analysts: Chinese foreign policy is not about relationship with a particular region/country. China emphasizes balanced diplomacy and seeks to develop ties with all important powers in the world. (The Global Magazine 2009). Under this principle, China has designed a specific strategic mapping for all regions/countries in the world: Big powers are the key; China’s periphery is the priority; developing countries are the foundation; multilateral platforms are the stage. (大国是关键, 周边是首要, 发展中国家是基础,多边是重要舞台.) (Zhou 2007). In this context, Latin America as a group of developing countries gradually became a priority in China’s foreign policy, which in turn brought about a fundamental transformation in China’s global

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