By Jessica Ludwig
China’s growing engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in recent years has captured the attention of policymakers, business leaders and foreign policy observers across the region. It seems nearly everyone these days wants to talk about China’s evolving presence and role in the region.
Much of this discussion has focused on the economic dimensions of the relationship, occasionally spilling over into concerns about the local social and environmental impact where Chinese companies or state-backed financing banks are involved. More recently, observers have also taken an interest in China’s global export of technology and what it could mean for the region’s development prospects.
But largely absent from the conversation has been a serious, dedicated look at the normative impact of relations with Beijing on governance—and, in particular, on whether closer relationships with China’s party-state authorities will affect prospects for democracy in a region that has—at least theoretically—adopted a consensus around democratic values. At the same time, China has invested in a growing number of initiatives designed to shape public opinion and perceptions around the region, ranging from people-to-people exchanges, cultural activities, educational partnerships and programs, as well as media enterprises and information initiatives—a phenomenon that is even more apparent at the global level.
These activities targeting the ideas-realm are often interpreted as nothing more than China’s efforts at public diplomacy and are typically understood through the familiar lens of “soft power.” But consider for a moment whether LAC countries a might be miscalculating the scope of Beijing’s interests and aims—particularly those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its chairman, Xi Jinping.
Underpinning the predominant paradigm about China in LAC are three persistent myths that merit revisiting before dismissing China’s impact on governance institutions in the region as limited.
Myth #1: China’s interests in LAC are principally—and therefore, solely—economic
A persistent assumption that Beijing’s top-priority interest in LAC is to acquire natural resources and seek out foreign investment opportunities to generate win-win benefits has yielded an entire field of research focused on evaluating China’s engagement on the basis of whether Chinese financing, investments, and trade relationships are yielding economic benefits for the hemisphere.
This perspective is not without basis—but it is perhaps time to reconsider whether this lens has been too narrow to draw conclusions about the wider impact. While the prospective benefits of increased trade and financing from China has been at the forefront of bilateral conversations between Beijing and LAC governments, the overall effect on the region’s development prospects has been mixed. Economic analyses that attempt to assess the impact on governance tend to focus on China’s behavior and whether it maintains closer economic ties with democratic or illiberal governments in the region as a primary measurement indicator.
Meanwhile, the lack of transparency around agreements that countries have signed makes it difficult to monitor whether China’s state-backed financing banks have followed through on commitments, or whether Latin American governments are upholding their own procurement, environmental, and social standards when determining to take on debt to finance infrastructure projects or enter deals with Chinese firms.
However, in practice, the anticipation of potential economic benefits has yielded a deeply troubling degree of opacity in and around the signing of many agreements by LAC governments with China, producing an institutional effect better categorized as “corrosive capital.” In Argentina, a 2012 agreement signed by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s administration allowed China’s People’s Liberation Army to operate a satellite station with dual scientific research and intelligence capabilities, without any formal mechanism for government oversight. In El Salvador, former president Salvador Sanchez Cerén’s administration signed more than a dozen bilateral agreements in 2018, when it suddenly agreed to diplomatically recognize the People’s Republic of China, including a proposal to set aside 14 percent of the country’s territory for a special economic zone that would effectively provide Chinese companies preferential tax exemption benefits. Both agreements were signed under conditions of complete secrecy in which few individuals were involved outside of Argentina and El Salvador’s top executive leadership; they are now under congressional inquiry in their respective legislatures over concerns about whether the agreements violate national sovereignty.
Myth #2: China does not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs
Assumptions that the aims of China’s leadership are principally economic has led to a degree of complacency about the non-economic costs of engaging with a one-party authoritarian state such as China. The CCP leadership in Beijing are first and foremost concerned with protecting the party’s core interests—which include economic development as a source of legitimacy, but more fundamentally rely on preemptively neutralizing any potential movement or criticism that would undermine the CCP’s governing authority within China.
Beijing’s natural international allies are other autocracies, given that they are less likely to raise concerns about the lack of democratic elections in China, its domestic crackdown on civil society, and grave human rights abuses against ethnic and religious minorities. Thus, it’s not surprising that China has developed closer relationships and offered significant financial lifelines to illiberal regimes such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador (under former president Rafael Correa).
However, more unexpected are the efforts that China has invested—and where it is succeeding—in cultivating relationships across the political spectrum within and among a variety of democracies in the Western Hemisphere. Under the auspices of party-to-party and parliament-to-parliament exchange, the Chinese government has organized cost-covered trips for political party members and government officials from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Panama, among others. During these visits, participants report red-carpet treatment and are often impressed by seemingly high-level access to Chinese leadership, but the range of experiences and perspectives to which they are exposed are also carefully tailored to limit any meaningful interaction with Chinese society outside of the CCP’s purview.
At the same time, China’s authorities have applied various forms of pressure on those who take positions that challenge the CCP’s leadership or priorities. In Chile, China’s ambassador recently reacted to a Chilean legislator who met with Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong by publicly lambasting him and mischaracterizing the demands of the Hong Kong demonstrators in an op-ed published in one of Chile’s leading media outlets. This incident did not happen in isolation, but was repeated by China’s diplomatic core in more than 70 countries around the world, signaling a deliberate, coordinated effort to manipulate, induce self-censorship, and preempt future demonstrations of support in international discussions about the protests in Hong Kong.
Myth #3: What we think we know about China in Latin America
For a variety of reasons, there are few independent sources of information about China in Latin America. Local media generally lack resources or political will to provide the sustained and dedicated support necessary for journalists and editors to develop their own expertise about China, or to monitor how Chinese state-linked entities are behaving locally. There is a similar shortage of academic and analytical expertise in the region’s university and think-tank sectors.
China’s people-to-people diplomacy targeting Latin American political elites, such as the parliamentary exchanges mentioned above, represent just one type of initiative through which Beijing is actively seeking to manage and manipulate which perspectives about China circulate among the region’s policymakers, experts, and opinion leaders. Access to opportunities for Chinese language learning or travel to the country are largely limited to either business sector experience or through initiatives funded, organized, and shaped by the Chinese Communist party-state.
In this environment, scholars and analysts who publish material that is critical of China’s authorities or who raise concerns about human rights abuses inside the country face various forms of censorship. These include a risk of losing access to future opportunities to conduct or publish research in China, participate in forums hosted by Chinese institutions, or collaborate with Chinese counterparts, affecting their career prospects and visibility within the region’s small community of China scholars and experts.
Considering such dynamics, Beijing’s influence activities in the ideas-realm are poised to have an outsized effect in shaping the predominant frameworks that Latin American policymakers, analysts, and the public apply to how they understand and interpret China’s engagement and interests in the region.
Reframing the conversation about China’s engagement in the region
Looking beyond China’s economic relationship with the region to assess the form, tone and effects of its engagement with Latin American and Caribbean societies, it is evident that Beijing relies on opacity, controlled access, and manipulative discourse to limit the space for discussion about China in the region. These efforts are more appropriately characterized as “sharp power” and require a closer degree of scrutiny to inventory, monitor, and contextualize than those who follow the region have previously paid attention to. Sharp power influence poses a serious risk to the integrity of the information environment in which decisions are made about how to manage relations with China.
At the heart of this issue is whether leaders, policymakers, and societies across the Western Hemisphere are adequately equipped and prepared to anticipate how to secure, protect, and promote their own national and institutional interests as they engage with the CCP leadership in Beijing.
Without a firm, well-rounded foundation of knowledge about China and the priorities of its political leadership, LAC countries are starting from a significantly disadvantaged position when negotiating the terms of the relationship. If Latin American societies do not know their own strategic advantages or identify spaces to maneuver and secure their own interests, how can they ensure that the relationship is truly win-win with no strings attached? And more importantly, how can they ensure agreements with China do not violate the rule of law or undermine the integrity of their own values and governance institutions?
An approach that considers the three myths described above is a starting point to rethink the conversation, develop transparent relationships with China’s party-state authorities and secure democracy in the region.
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