China's involvement in Latin American countries is expanding in a visible and dramatic way. In a time frame of less than a decade, China has gone from having virtually no presence in Latin America to being a very significant trade partner to a large number of Latin American states, among them Brazil and Chile (first), Peru and Uruguay (second), and Argentina (fourth). In other states, headline splashing deals have been announced. For example, in 2010 alone, China and Ecuador signed a deal that commits an extensive loan to build a hydropower plant in exchange for the sale of large amounts of crude oil to Petrochina.Footnote ¹ In the same year Venezuela and China agreed a range of packages that have included financing for Venezuela's energy infrastructure, aerospace training, guaranteed minimums of oil supply to China and a joint Venezuela–China company for oil exploration.Footnote ² From a hemispheric perspective, the presence of China in Latin America is surprising in its suddenness and scale, and this in turn has led to a proliferation of commentary, debate and policy analysis, particularly in the realms of strategic thinking, political economy and bilateral relations.Footnote ³ But it is all too often forgotten that China's involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean is part of a more general policy of “going out” (zou chuqu 走出去), and needs to be understood – both analytically and empirically – within a larger context of globalization for China and for the rest of the world. In both qualitative and quantitative terms, China's current push to “go out” varies by region, by country, by sector and by prior patterns of engagement. There is a broad continuum of scale and intensity in China's involvement with other parts of the developing world, from intensive engagement with South-East Asia (because of geographical proximity and the existence of very large numbers of overseas Chinese), to high profile involvement with Africa (which revives and alters a much earlier public set of commitments to developing countries and leadership in the developing world), to minimal and very careful involvement in the Middle East. China's growing profile in Latin American countries needs to be considered in this global context, in which for China, Latin America occupies a position somewhere between Africa and the Middle East.

Quoting impressive figures has become a commonplace when describing this relationship. The growth in trade has been so rapid in so many places that predictions are made at peril, and this is emblematic of a larger issue: the fluidity and rate at which key aspects of the China–Latin America relationship change renders the subject a rapidly moving target. This is especially true for trade issues: the rate at which ever larger, more comprehensive deals are being concluded means that much of what we thought was known only a few years ago about China's economic impact on Latin America has become obsolete. Conversely, no one really knows, or has even begun to imagine, a future in which China might not be posting astounding growth rates, and what the impact of even a relative retrenchment in China might be for its relations with Latin America. Therefore, one of the challenges of both this overview introduction and our volume is to identify specific areas that can serve to orient inquiry towards the kinds of questions that can help to structure this new, empirically rich and rapidly changing field of study.

We open our inquiry with the notion of movement. The linguistic mixing of the Chinese term for “going out” (zou chuqu) with the Spanish for “arriving in” (desembarco) captures the range of China–Latin America interactions that require further articulation and analysis. Zou chuqu is the Chinese government's own slogan for its official encouragement for Chinese enterprises, particularly large state-owned or state-supported enterprises, to “go out” into the world in search of investment opportunities, but more colloquially it also refers to the widening of China's now global horizons at all levels of analysis from the state as a whole to the entrepreneurial individual and family. For Latin America, the history of the region can be structured as a series of “landings” (desembarcos) that shaped different encounters between those arriving (foreigners and foreign powers) and those already living in the region (indigenous peoples and the vast array of those who arrived, stayed and became local). These encounters evoke a constellation of experiences that encompass genocide, resistance, transculturation and hybridization. A common thread across these encounters has been the varied ways in which they shaped not only the identity of Latin America but also that of those who arrived in this region.

This volume represents an early attempt to develop a preliminary agenda for studying the new engagement of China in Latin America. This task involves understanding the kinds of paths that connect the flow and exchange of goods, commodities, peoples, ideas, discourses and institutions, and how these flows shape not only the interaction between the two regions but also the multitude of specific actors involved in these relations. When we refer to the dynamics of “going out and arriving in” and the resulting gamut of encounters, we are aware that for both Latin America and China arrivals and encounters must simultaneously acknowledge “the deployment and contestations of power” brought about by empires. This historical experience not only informs our emphasis on today's interactions between China and Latin America but also suggests that such interactions are typically characterized by complex practices that entail “mutual constructions and misunderstanding,” which can either separate the “us” from the “other,” or create contacts, meshing and closeness, as well as new identities, understandings and behaviours.Footnote ⁴

Disaggregating Hegemon(ies)

China had almost no presence in Latin America only two decades ago. By this time Latin America had already experienced a long succession of outsiders coming to the region in search of natural resources, land, and both direct and indirect forms of influence, often manifested through terms of trade. Many of the essays included in this volume touch on this; Gonzalo Paz in particular reminds us that much of the history of the region can be analysed in terms of outsider “hegemonic challenges,” some of lengthy duration and others as aspirants that never quite got the purchase that their promoters hoped for. From the perspective of Latin America, China's “coming to” the region is felt as the latest in a long series of desembarcos – and a sudden, new encounter at that, which many are struggling to comprehend. If we take an Olympian view, public opinion perceptions about China's influence in Latin America are not as positive as those held by Africans (the other developing global region that is dealing with a seemingly sudden and massive Chinese “landing”), but significant percentages of Latin Americans, like significant percentages of Africans, think that China's influence on their countries is a good thing. These figures suggest a tendency to accept China as a newcomer in the hemisphere and probably a willingness to welcome deeper relations with the East Asian country.Footnote ⁵

However, the closer we look, the more problematic the all encompassing terms “China” and “Latin America” in fact are. China's official rhetoric certainly presents itself as a unitary, rational actor, and most of the analysis outside China is only too happy implicitly to subscribe to this view, but careful work in the realm of natural resource acquisition that is elaborated by Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente for the mining sector suggests that beneath the polite construct of formal relations, China is rife with principal-agent problems, bureaucratic infighting, and “national” state-owned enterprises in untrammelled pursuit of profit and influence often to the detriment of China's wider reputation. Nor is it entirely clear what is and is not the Chinese state, and at whose behest the “going out” policy is implemented. While it is obvious that states in Latin America are many while the state in China (minus the contested offshoot in Taiwan) is unitary, different countries in the region pursue varying strategies of regional integration, industrialization and diplomacy. There is also equally significant variation between different sectors across a range of countries. Whether sectoral or bilateral, this rapidly “thickening” set of relations between China and Latin America typically involves complex blends of symmetries and asymmetries, complementarities based on division of labour, as well as competition and tensions based on the occupation of identical economic niches.

Thus Ecuador and China can have strong complementarities in trade structure but be characterized by profound asymmetries in scale and influence. Enrique Dussel Peters suggests that China and Mexico can be in bitter competition over much of much of the automotive production and spare parts chain, but are also beginning to find tentative ways to co-operate through joint ventures. Both Strauss, and Barbosa and Jenkins find that Brazil and China can simultaneously exhibit an unusual degree of international co-operation, have strong complementarities in some sectors such as agriculture and mineral export, and have high degrees of tension in manufacturing. More broadly in the region, commodity exporters have gained a great deal from the higher world commodity prices that Chinese demand for raw materials and are enthusiastic about the deepening of trade. At the same time, many of the essays, including Strauss, Armony, Hearn, Dussel Peters, and Barbosa and Jenkins all have evidence that points to profound challenges for light manufacturing such as textiles and shoes throughout the region in countries as different as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Peru. The complexity of “going out” and “landing” is thus manifested in multifaceted interactions encompassing ideas, rhetoric, power relationships, business networks, and multiple domestic, international and transnational actors.

Currently, our thinking is that as analysts of a new, rapidly moving relationship, we ought to take a step back and think broadly and conceptually about how to conceive of the set of complex, cross cutting patterns that we are now beginning to see emerging in China and Latin America. This agenda is still of necessity preliminary. But we wish to advance, drawing from systematic empirical work, a set of preliminary notions that can help guide future inquiry in the field of China–Latin America interactions.

China and Latin America as Subject and Object of Globalization

China's officially articulated understanding of its actions in the developing world is a uniform one: “going out” (zou chuqu), “mutual benefit,” and “giving and getting,” all of which is predicated on the principles of mutual respect, absolute state sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs. Each one of these principles can be empirically questioned, but the broad brush strokes of China's overall understanding of its globalization in the developing world is a relatively coherent one that is then applied to quite different world areas. There are two questions that emerge from these assumptions. First, if China's engagement with Latin America is part of a larger global process, how much of the particular relationship with Latin America is analytically, qualitatively or quantitatively different from its involvement in the rest of the developing world? If there is a newly emerging field of China–Latin America, how is it analytically different from China–Africa, or China–South-East Asia, and how might it be developed to contribute to these other empirical arenas of study, as well as to understanding processes of contemporary globalization more generally? Do the patterns we see in China–Latin America simply mirror the kinds of processes and tensions now under way in South-East Asia, Africa or even the Middle East?

A first step is to pay attention to the ways in which China itself makes sense of the wide variety of relations that it has established with the rest of the developing world. China formally engages with other areas of the world on the basis of a very consistent set of principles that were first formed nearly 60 years ago. However, as Julia Strauss argues in her article,Footnote ⁶ these bedrock principles have been intertwined with a set of notions about development that frame China's international outreach to regions such as Africa and Latin America: a common experience of underdevelopment, poverty and suffering at the hands of exploitative powers, and a newer “globalized” emphasis on “win-win” results as a shorthand for complementarity, comparative advantage and division of labour. These rhetorics are widely applied in both Latin America and Africa. But newer notions of “common development” for Latin America are beginning not only to acknowledge a recognition of the region as more than simply a source of natural resources, but also to act on a common set of developmental challenges with China and, more importantly, accept that both sides are equally capable of engaging in mutually beneficial, complementary and genuinely horizontal co-operation. While this notion of “mutual benefit” is frequently trumpeted for China's relations with (for example) Africa, it fits better the reality of Latin America where diversification and other options represent viable possibilities for actual rather than merely notional complementarity as part of horizontal co-operation. Insofar as China's actions in horizontal co-operation match its rhetoric of formal equality, it marks a welcome distinction to Latin America's relations with the United States, which in practice have been anything but equal for many generations.

Careful analysis of China's ways of framing and legitimizing its involvement with specific Latin American countries also reveals important differences with respect to its involvement in the rest of the developing world. A fundamental case is its relations with Brazil, which suggest a notion of “mutual co-operation” that goes beyond the ideas of common experience with underdevelopment and a mode of interaction based on division of labour. Official rhetoric on relations with Brazil, as well as recent bilateral projects on agricultural research, nanotechnology and climate change, indicate a different approach to economic complementarity: a notion of mutual co-operation based on joint research and technological development, convergence in international efforts, and two-way strategic investment. As China deepens its relationship with Brazil, we observe that rhetorical devices are at present gradually becoming less important in the face of “real content” and substantive equality. Strauss's research then gives us a useful analytical insight to understand how specific bilateral relationships, such as that of China–Brazil, can contribute to articulate new notions of South-South co-operation that will shape this emerging field of study.

Consideration of China–Latin America equally needs to ask a set of important questions from a Latin American perspective: what are the analytical and empirical features that distinguish this new field from the established one of US–Latin American relations, or, for that matter, even earlier patterns of external influence and domination. It may be useful to explore the process of interaction between China and Latin America taking into account the presence of variables that have structured the relationship between Latin America and the United States, from geography to US reaction to the presence of external actors in the Western Hemisphere. In addition, the contrast between the constitutive narratives of the United States and China (how they self-explain their history and, accordingly, their place in the world) casts light on how an extra-regional power such as China is received in Latin America, a region that has been powerfully influenced by the United States. The contrast between a US narrative built around the idea of a continuous search for new frontiers and a Chinese narrative revolving around the experience of a century of humiliation are starkly different and they are likely to influence engagement with Latin America in distinct ways.

As the history of Latin America cannot be grasped without reference to the United States, the presence of extra-hemispheric states in Latin America cannot be understood without attention to the ways in which these states defy (or not) the status quo sustained by the United States, the region's hegemonic power. A significant portion of the debate on China's involvement in Latin America revolves around the extent to which China represents a threat to the established order in the hemisphere and/or to the United States. In his contribution to this volume, Gonzalo PazFootnote ⁷ places China–Latin America relations in the context of previous instances of “hegemonic challenge” to the United States in Latin America – by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan – in order to assess whether China's emergence in the area represents a potential threat to US interests. He concludes that, as earlier cases show, trade growth is an essential component of the challenge, but that other factors (such as arms trade and open contestation to the dominance of democracy in the region) have the potential to push the United States into a more aggressive reaction.

Paz shows how there are important similarities between the (real or perceived) challenge posed by Japan and China: a perception that the challenger's economic capabilities could threaten US hegemony and fear that economic power could be connected to military might. A key difference is that, unlike Japan, China is not a democracy and possesses a substantial military. It is difficult to say whether China presents some sort of ideological challenge (for instance, its own brand of authoritarian capitalism) that might be appealing to Latin American countries. As Ariel ArmonyFootnote ⁸ shows in his study of Colombian media, there are significant differences between coverage of the rise of Japan in the 1980s and that of China in the 2000s. Newspapers in Colombia did not react to the arrival of an emerging power in Latin America as they did in the case of Japan: issues specific to both China and the current international context define China's image in Colombia's media.

Notwithstanding ideological differences and realpolitik tensions, Beijing's involvement in the region continues to be defined by a central strategic principle. It continues to reiterate publicly the specifically US (and to Latin Americans insulting) metaphor of Latin America as the “US backyard” (houyuan 后园) in which China will not, or at least cannot be seen to, challenge the US influence. But at the same time, China's emergence has offered governments and economic elites the possibility of diversifying their economic and political relations outside Latin America, thus lessening US hegemonic power in the region. There are several games being played at the same time: diversification of markets, an institutionalized dialogue on Latin America between the United States and China, and increasing trade friction with China. These games are played under a “new normality” marked by dramatic shifts in the global economic order and are shaped by different factors, size being an important one: there is significance variation between Brazil and Mexico's share of Latin America's GDP as compared to that of Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile and Peru – and there are vast differences in economic power across sub-regions in each of these countries. Accordingly, an effective research agenda requires studies that explore how varied forms of China–Latin America engagement manifest across national and subnational settings.

A second and even larger question about the emerging field of China–Latin America interaction considers contemporary processes of globalization and the role that China is currently playing in either repeating known patterns of transnational investment, migration and diplomacy, or posing a genuine and meaningful alternative. China makes much of its insistence on “giving and getting,” as well as strict non-interference and non-conditionality, in counterpoint to the Western aid regime. We also know that Chinese companies have received a great deal of criticism for their actions in the mining and oil industries in both Africa and Latin America.Footnote ⁹ But in fact, how much of this criticism is because China's ways of doing things are so different, and how much is down to the timing of China's entry into globalized capitalism? To what extent are the kinds of unsavoury extractive and labour practices that attract so much criticism a product of China's relatively late entry into globalized sectors in which the best oil and mining concessions have long been locked up by Western companies, in which it is mostly the most marginal, risky and fragile political/natural environments that allow for the room for newcomers to set up operations? Similarly, given the profound global push towards outsourcing, downsizing and cost-cutting in both public and private sectors, how unusual is the stress of Chinese managers on efficiency, hard work, lowering levels of entitlements for workers, and incurring other costs, like severe environmental damage, in pursuit of profit margins? In short, how much of the kinds of patterns we see in China's involvement in Latin America is either the universalization of patterns of post-capitalist modernity or a challenge to practices that we think of as “Western” in terms of investment, business, trade, aid regimes and migration?

A case in point is the internationalization of China's mining and energy industries. In the mining sector, there is a standard view that Chinese companies prefer to operate in non-democratic contexts because they offer fewer constraints on social and environmental standards. This perspective highlights China as an outlier, which deviates from the behaviour of Western transnational firms. However, a closer look at the evidence shows that Chinese mining companies' investment abroad is marked by a preference for mature and developed mining economies, geographic proximity and direct dealings with other transnational mining companies in lieu of national governments. These conditions help assuage China's relative lack of international experience in the mining industry and therefore reduce market risk.

As Ruben Gonzalez-VicenteFootnote ¹⁰ argues in his article, Chinese mining investment in Latin America (which is concentrated in Peru and Ecuador) gives priority to liberal mining investment regimes, political stability, pre-existing business relations and the presence of a significant Chinese community in the host country. Preference for specific countries in the region are best explained by the strategies and experience of particular firms rather than by a national strategy dictated by the central government or an inclination to work with regimes that shy away from transparency, accountability and the rule of law. The example of Chinese mining operations abroad suggests that Chinese firms are not substantially different from Western companies with regards to their preferences for certain national environments. However, as Gonzalez-Vicente shows, there are some particular characteristics that set Chinese mining investment apart. Chinese companies have the capacity to complement their mining projects with significant projects in infrastructure, which places them in a strong position when competing with other investors. In addition, they rely only partially on stock markets and shareholders, which gives them more freedom to concentrate on medium to long-term profit-making and, more importantly, makes them less vulnerable to monitoring and demands from civil society organizations.

Overall, China offers a complex picture that makes us rethink how processes of capital accumulation interact with political economies of resource extraction. Chinese economic expansion and the demand for natural resources are contributing to reshape the political economy of the Latin American region. We cannot make sense of China's process of capital accumulation without understanding the role that Latin America (and also, for example, Africa) are playing in this process. In turn, China's demand for natural resources should be seen as part of a “unitary historical process” that is changing configurations of wealth and power in Latin American societies, but with its own particular mixture of competitive aspects of industrial policy (longer time horizons and ability to plan) and the kinds of inflexible and insensitive management practices that make it deeply unpopular and possibly even uncompetitive.Footnote ¹¹ In this light, the study of China–Latin America interactions in business, aid and investment is a necessary component of any serious attempt to understand contemporary processes of globalization.

Imagination and Mutual Perceptions: Frames for or Creators of Reality

From longue durée trajectories of hegemony (Paz) to the everyday discrimination faced by Chinese communities in Cuba and Mexico (Hearn), the question of perception and the degree to which (mis)perceptions of the Other have impacts in the real world looms large in the China–Latin America relationship. Part of this is the process of mutual learning across such vast distances and such different cultures so often referred to in the official state level rhetoric. As Paz suggests, the perception of (and concern about) hegemonic challenges may be as important as anything “real” that actually is hegemonic. Dispossessed and exploited communities in areas of mining activity may perceive of China as a rapacious extractor of natural resources, while Chinese managers may equally see the same reality as one of obstreperous, unreasonable and/or lazy people devoid of either work ethic or an understanding of what is best for their own “development.” Jenkins and Barbosa show quite clearly that while there is surprisingly little objective evidence that Brazilian industry is being “hollowed out” by competition with China, one of the dominant images and concerns in Brazil (and by implication elsewhere in Latin America) is that China's commercial and trading engagement with Latin America will push it straight back into the kinds of primary commodity export, dependent development from which the region has struggled to escape.

China's behaviour thus awakens a range of local sensitivities in different sectors of Latin America's public sphere. As ArmonyFootnote ¹² examines in the case of Colombia, the media can provide constructive channels for open discussion about environmental impact, human rights and corporate responsibility concerning China's global expansion. In the last decade, China has attained a relevant presence in the news media, which presents the Asian power as a model that draws admiration from both conservatives and left-wing observers, but at the same time raises concerns regarding China's commitment to global sustainability and respect for human rights. Latin Americans are increasingly gauging themselves in relation to China: there is significant admiration for China's capacity to generate economic growth but serious doubts about the quality of China's leadership role on a global scale.

A close look at the news media in Colombia reveals that criticism of China's human rights record has more shades of grey than the dominant black-and-white images that are so often produced in Western news outlets, which on the whole react quite negatively to the profound gaps in China's domestic record on human rights as well as its continued support for regimes with recorded and dramatic human rights abuses, such as for example Sudan and Zimbabwe. In Colombia at least, influential media outlets articulate concerns about “universal values” but, at the same time, appear to be more in line with the behaviour of many governments in Latin America, which have adopted China's often-articulated principles of non-intervention and sovereignty, and have at least formally refrained from denouncing human rights violations in China. This position carries important implications for Latin America, given its own long-standing history of human rights violations, and merits further analysis.

It is not only Latin America and Latin Americans who perceive the Chinese desembarco in the light of their own local, sectoral and national experiences. China and Chinese also, albeit more rarely, imagine Latin America through their own perceptual filters. China's “imagined Latin America” is different from the ways in which other regions, such as India and Africa, are collectively perceived. Simon Shen'sFootnote ¹³ examination of how ordinary Chinese citizens participating in online communities view Latin America provides some preliminary evidence on this dimension. In China, perceptions of Latin America are dominated by stereotypes rooted in an outdated framework dating back to the revolutionary era, and reveal a great deal of misinformation and little knowledge about current trade or economic aspects of the relationship between the two areas. Because of this outdated and stereotypical set of notions, insofar as we can gauge popular views through the internet, we find a highly critical view of Latin America as a collective region unable to find a sustained, coherent path to development.

Online discussions on Latin America in popular Chinese internet forums are dominated by the “new leftists”: nationalists who believe in a strong central government, uphold realist views that emphasize a geopolitical role for China in Latin America, and view tensions between the United States and Latin American countries as an opportunity for China to make deeper inroads in the region. These realist perspectives are not exclusive to Latin America: they are also present in views towards India, Africa and Japan. However, in contrast with India and Africa, Latin America's negative aspects are not attributed to cultural or racial factors but to structural reasons largely influenced by US policies. Accordingly, there is more enthusiasm for a partnership with Latin America than with India or Africa, particularly because China's netizens assume that Latin Americans would welcome China's growing presence in the region as a counterbalance to US power. These views differ from the official rhetoric of the Chinese government, which highlights co-operation, peaceful relations, mutual benefit and avoidance of tensions with the United States.

Evidence from online forums also shows that Latin America may serve as a “parameter” for the Chinese average citizen as it represents possible scenarios for China's future. However, as Shen discovers, Latin America is not heralded as a positive model but viewed as a negative one, an impending threat for China if Beijing veers away from pre-emption, flexibility and pragmatism. One of the notions emerging in online discussions is that of “Latin Americanization” (LaMeihua 拉美化), which is employed as a negative label encompassing all those policies that China should avoid (fiscal deficit, inflation, foreign debt, income inequality, corruption, citizen insecurity, political instability and, by implication, democratic participation). Netizens' reference to the “Latin Americanization of China” seems to reflect the use of a label that has become increasingly popular among Chinese analysts, who employ Latin America as a standard to measure China's deviation from a successful path of development. The outcome is a kind of “othering” that makes it possible for Chinese netizens to project what they imagine to be the collective “costs” of underdevelopment and popular political participation on to a faraway region that falls far below authoritarian but stable China in an implicit hierarchy of advanced development.

Comparative and Constitutive Approaches

The current expansion of the China–Latin America interaction is happening at a time in which area studies are seeing a new wave of changes: if the post-9/11 academic and policy making sphere witnessed a modest revival of area studies (after heavy attack during the 1990s), there is at present a broad consensus that serious inquiry in area studies needs to engage in cross-regional comparison in transnational, global and “glocal” contexts. The study of Latin America has been heavily influenced by the presence of “benchmark” cases (predominantly the United States) against which other countries are viewed as deviations from the norm.Footnote ¹⁴ This implicit benchmarking, and the norms that are inextricably embedded in it, are now increasingly challenged. As we move away from considering countries in Latin America as “half baked” cases that deviate from a certain model (such as US-style liberal democracy), China's presence in Latin America presents alternative and concrete examples of economic success and heightened global influence that are quite separate from the United States.

Our contributions include those that focus on state–society and citizen–citizen relations. As Adrian HearnFootnote ¹⁵ suggests, economic and political actors move in a “deep sea” of informality in both China and Latin America.Footnote ¹⁶ Even though it is difficult to identify informal institutions (by discerning their features, scope and mechanisms of enforcement), they should not be ignored because they open a window for understanding how actors navigate “actually existing” institutional settings, particularly when those institutions are now in the early stages of formation.Footnote ¹⁷ This is, without doubt, a fundamental space of possible connection between China and Latin America. In order to examine this dimension empirically, we need to understand how (and what kinds of) “markers” shape China–Latin American interactions at the local level and the ways in which these markers structure the rules of the game in different contexts (subnational, national, international and transnational), such as businesses, mining enterprises, newly laid down infrastructure, diasporas and states agencies.Footnote ¹⁸ Without taking into account this essential feature of these societies, it is very hard to understand how individuals and groups interact and create new relations, to explore how China's foreign policy is expressed at the subnational level, and how local reactions do and do not become politically salient at regional and national levels of policy making in Latin America.

State–society and citizen–citizen interactions can be explored by looking at the role that overseas Chinese communities play in deepening linkages between China and their adopted countries. Adrian HearnFootnote ¹⁹ shows that overseas Chinese communities are in a privileged position to “broker trans-Pacific co-operation”: the booming engagement between China and Latin America creates new opportunities for these communities to engage in global partnerships, but at the same time produces new challenges which depend, among other factors, on the extent to which the activities of these communities are successfully institutionalized and are able to benefit from state support in the form of diplomacy, regulatory oversight, trade expertise and other contributions. As Hearn finds in Mexico and Cuba, governments are not able to work effectively with Chinese communities because they fail to integrate these communities' informal networks into an institutional framework that would take advantage of the capacities of these groups to expand economic relations and help attract investment from China.

In Mexico, authorities are mostly reluctant to endorse commercial activities promoted by Chinese organizations in a context of public hostility towards China and Chinese communities, a highly critical media and a general perception of a “Chinese commercial invasion” causing serious damage to the economy. Lack of government support in turn leads to stronger reliance on informal ties within the Chinese communities, reinforcing a vicious circle of distrust and resentment. In Cuba, the efforts of the state to “formalize the informal,” by transforming informal Chinese associations into an official institution, has for different reasons failed to nurture co-operation and compliance because state intervention has been overly rigid and reluctant to consider the priorities of local communities.

A Two-Way Street

The vast majority of the work that we have at present on China–Latin America centres the study of this relationship on the impact that China has on host states and societies in Latin America. However, it is equally critical to examine what impact involvement in Latin America has on China and how this engagement shapes the Chinese state and Chinese society. We think it important to consider the following kinds of questions. Does Latin America's experience with democratic and non-democratic systems have a discernable impact, even an indirect one, on China's state and society? Is Latin America a mirror in which different sectors of China's intellectual community can observe and debate the challenges and opportunities that shape their country's development path?

Given the relatively strong democracies and components of civil society in Latin America, we wonder whether a mutually constitutive form of learning might emerge to shape China–Latin America interactions. At present, there are no answers to this set of questions, but it is worth noting that the Chinese government's formally issued Latin America Policy Paper does commit itself to stepping up government-to-government and business-to-business exchanges.Footnote ²⁰ Chinese political elites may shrink in horror from the contested noisiness and popular representation that is typical of civil society and democratic claims on the state in Latin America, but the government's own policy paper on Latin America also promises much augmented people-to-people and legislature-to-legislature exchanges.

What kinds of outcomes these exchanges will have is at present unknown. But we do know that Latin America's last Cold War communist holdout in Cuba has had a set of influences upon China's intellectual elites that has rippled far beyond what one would expect, given the small size of Cuba's economy and China's profound lack of interest in riling the United States by overtly supporting a Marxist Leninist regime that has long been the US's nemesis. Yinghong Cheng's work shows us how Cuba has become a kind of distorting mirror through which debates on China's ethos and path of development are currently conducted. “New Left” intellectual elites critical of China's marketization, growing inequality and rampant unfairness in outcome hold up Cuba in general and the figure of Che Guevara in particular as a set of ideals and models from which China has badly strayed; supporters of the regime's current path of marketization and globalization equally strongly hold up Cuba as a negative image that represents all the failings from which China has escaped. For them, Cuba stands as a case of LaMeihua that is very close to home.

China and Latin America: Scholarship into the Future

At present the emerging area of China–Latin America has a good deal of solid research on trade issues and the impact of China on Latin American exports and domestic markets. We have useful studies of bilateral relations (China and specific countries), diplomatic and military relations, and China's soft power. However, in almost every area of the China–Latin America relationship there is a crying need for more field research and good case studies, particularly those carried out by researchers with a working knowledge of both Spanish/Portuguese and Chinese. There is also a need for studies that employ the tools of comparative politics and bring together insights from other disciplines as well. We venture to suggest that this sort of future work ought to be designed so as to accommodate the multi-dimensional nature of the China–Latin America interaction and capture the empirical realities of a rapidly changing and complex set of relationships while developing concepts that lend themselves to a mixture of comparison and generalization. We need to continue to explore China–Latin America from a transnational perspective, understanding how global phenomena are expressed in different ways at the local level, how various actors (governments, corporations, diasporas, non-state organizations and so on) interact with each other, and how international and domestic agendas shape interactions between China and Latin America. Capturing the complexity of China–Latin America interactions requires a good understanding of the ways in which ideology and rhetoric (what is said and the ways that ideas matter in shaping and framing) interact with interests (who benefits) and perceptions of power as well as the exercise of power.

On the Chinese side, it is necessary to examine the ways in which policy makers in China perceive the reasons for their country's own developmental success, which in turn provide much of the framing for its trade policy and development initiatives elsewhere. Critical to this analysis is the disaggregation of the Chinese state. The profound embrocation of political power and economic advantage in China is a case in point. In the Chinese context much of the behaviour often thought of as corrupt and undue influence is not quite legal corruption because the norms are so vague and the enforcement of separation of party, state, enterprise is nonexistent. The government's stress on “harmonious society” (leading to informal negotiation and repression as ways of managing both social stress and conflict) shapes the government's actions as well as the perceptions and preferences of preferred business networks of the sort that are “going out” to Latin America. Similarly, what might well be understood in Latin America as the normal workings of democracy and representation may equally be reacted to in China as “disorder,” “chaos” and “instability.” Increased contact with organized sectors of society and democratic processes in Latin America (and Africa) appears to lead gradually to short-term tactical adjustments and perhaps longer-term policy rethinking. At the same time, Chinese investors are showing concern over Latin American countries that offer weak legal conditions for foreign investment, which forces them to seek international arbitration in order to obtain fair resolution of commercial disputes.Footnote ²¹

On the Latin American side, China's emergence in the region elicits competing reactions. While China offers a suggestive model of state-led development and external diplomacy, its involvement in Latin America has been criticized for its allegedly negative impact (environmental, human, economic and social). There are also concerns that Chinese economic expansion in the region could have an even deeper negative impact on the most vulnerable sectors of society, the millions of people living in poverty, because of its emphasis on non-labour intensive products.Footnote ²² An empirical agenda would need to examine public and elite representations of China in Latin America further, exploring the diversity and contradictions of Latin American perceptions of China. We need to continue to examine how Latin Americans and the media interpret official Chinese pronouncements about its “peaceful rise” and pursuit of “harmonious global development,” how they construe an image of China in the context of major global transformations, and how these perceptions and understandings may or may not change over time in the light of what actually happens on the ground. Additionally, we need to investigate actual social conflicts associated with resource-extractive sectors that involve Chinese firms and investment. This research could take a close look at the participation of local and external actors and trace the diversity of transnational linkages associated with these industries.

The articles in this volume show that China–Latin America interactions need to be studied by considering the diversity of actors that create them – not only governments and businesses but also diasporas, news media, netizens, cultural expressions of various kinds and others – and that these actors generate a rich texture of attitudes and perceptions that interact with each other in various ways and often shape concrete behaviours. As we read detailed case studies, we observe that the debate on China's expansionism (and the “China threat”) tends to be characterized by a high degree of bias (it assumes China as an outlier in global capitalism and views its “going out” policy as inflexible and one-dimensional) and it is usually devoid of a proper contextual framework that is both historically and globally situated. Looking at the dynamic interactions between China and the Latin American countries from both a Chinese and a Latin American point of view, it becomes clear that their relationship is not simply about China's unidirectional expansion into Latin America but also about the ways in which Latin America makes China view itself and rethink itself as an underdeveloped nation on a fast track to superpower status.

China's presence in Latin America has also served to start a conversation that connects Latin America with Africa. This has been primarily driven by Latin American fears of becoming “China's next Africa” (conceived as Beijing's strategy to secure access to natural resources while flooding the region's markets with cheap goods) but it is likely that the Chinese presence in both continents gives impetus to studies that connect these regions in innovative ways.Footnote ²³ Concerns about a Chinese “African safari” are sometimes based on real facts but they overlook a more diverse reality. China's engagement in Africa, as in Latin America, varies according to country, sector and corporate features, and is also a function of pre-existing contacts as well as demands and legal standards from the host-nation. As research in Africa has shown, China's behaviour in the resource-extraction industry is not the result of a cohesive Chinese interest seeking to impose itself on a weak partner, but a collection of actions often shaped by uncertainty and limited experience in the region.Footnote ²⁴ As in the case of Africa, Latin American states and societies are not passive victims of a Chinese strategy aimed at imposing a particular model of development on a continent. Nevertheless, the negative aspects of China's aggressive capitalism are augmented by certain features of the Latin American context such as corruption, weak transparency and accountability, among others. Latin America is a region populated by democracies but still with substantial institutional weaknesses, and it is thus important to understand how China's emergence in Latin America is processed in the region's governmental, economic and public spheres – and how these processes are different from those in Africa.

Is it possible to conceive of China–Latin America interactions as a new field of study with the potential to generate different ways of thinking about globalization that go beyond pure descriptive production? We believe that this volume presents a compelling argument that such a field of inquiry is beginning to take on a distinctive form. Current processes of globalization cannot be grasped without attention to China's relationship with Latin America, but this relationship is different from those that China has established with other areas of the world. New terms such as LaMeihua (Latin Americanization), gongtong fazhan 共同发展 (common development), and the adaptation of old ones like houyuan 后院 (backyard) have arisen to describe how key groups in China understand and process new empirical phenomena in China–Latin America relations, but they equally have the potential to drive a new research agenda that is both empirically grounded and conceptually different from North American concepts and norms. In turn, Latin America increasingly views China not only as a trade partner but as a counterpart to exchange knowledge and experiences on issues such as sustainable development, urbanization, water management, disaster risk reduction and mass transportation, among others. A substantial degree of commonality on these issues will be likely to bridge the “cultural gap” even more and perhaps even make these exchanges more productive than those with the United States and other advanced industrial nations. Nevertheless, as the relationship deepens and Latin American opinion-makers, businesspeople and other elites begin to look more carefully at a “global China,” will they immediately begin to miss the United States? The continued rapid “thickening” of ties between China and Latin America will without question continue to provide a great deal of raw material with which to recast the ways in which we think about contemporary processes of globalization.