The spectacular growth of the Chinese economy – averaging over ten per cent per year since 1978 – has reshaped global economic relations. At the same time, it has pushed China to deepen its relationships with areas of the world of little previous interest. China's search for raw materials and foodstuffs and for new markets for its manufacturing exports propels these new relationships, creating new economic, political, and cultural forms of engagement that only recently have been the subject of sustained analysis and inquiry.
In China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores, R. Evan Ellis argues that the nature of the relationship between China and the individual nations of Latin America countries is best understood through attention to several specific factors: the historical evolution of its relationship with China; the size and characteristics of the ethnic Chinese community; the country's available export products; the size, wealth and structure of its internal market; the legal, financial, and logistical infrastructure to support a commercial relationship with China; and the nature of political and military relationships and their impact on co-operation overall. He then proceeds to map, country by country, sub-region by sub-region, the nature of the Chinese relationship across all of these dimensions.
The book's principal contribution is the sheer scope of this mapping. Through interviews with key players, reviews of the Chinese and Latin American press, and consultation with a wide range of official sources, Ellis presents in extraordinary detail the range of economic and political relationships between China and nations of the Southern Cone, Andean region, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. No other English-language source provides such encyclopaedic detail and information across so many aspects of the relationship, including what Ellis calls the “intellectual infrastructure” of universities and research institutions that promote Chinese studies or offer training in Mandarin.
Ellis draws on a wide range of secondary sources to contextualize the expanding engagement between China and Latin America. He concurs with other scholars that China's interests in Latin America fall in four broad areas: acquiring raw materials and agricultural commodities; expanding Chinese export markets; isolating Taiwan; and positioning itself globally through new strategic alliances with key countries. Latin American nations, meanwhile, see China as an export destination and potential source of foreign investment as well as an opportunity to counter-balance the traditional US dominance in the region.
Although Ellis appears less concerned with interpreting what China's trade and investment patterns with Latin America means for the hemisphere's future economic development, he presents detail that would gladden the heart of the purest mercantilist. China voracious appetite for Latin America's primary commodities – oil, iron ore, copper, soy, fishmeal and wood, among others – defines the principal contours of the relationship, as does China's search for new markets for low-end goods such as footwear and textiles to higher-end products such as consumer electronics, computers, motorcycles, cars, trucks and even locomotives. China has resisted imports of goods with a higher value-added, preferring, for example, to import Brazilian soybeans rather than soybean oil. China has directed investments to infrastructure and other sectors of the economy that enhance the trade relationship.
Despite the apparent throw-back to trade and development models of previous centuries, the book provides ample reason for understanding why Latin American countries look so eagerly to China. China's demand for Latin American commodities has fuelled a boom that, until the market crash of late 2008, contributed to unprecedented levels of export and GDP growth in countries throughout the region. Chinese investment in the Andean region in particular has counter-balanced the withdrawal of US and European companies facing an increasingly hostile investment and political environment. At the same time, countries such as Mexico, which have seen their own manufacturing exports wither in the face of Chinese competition, have sought to partner with the Chinese in joint ventures that take advantage of Mexico's duty-free access to the US market. The smaller countries of Central America and the Caribbean, meanwhile, have leveraged their diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to gain economic benefits.
Overall, China in Latin America succeeds less in drawing the broader analytic conclusions about Chinese-Latin American engagement than it does in painting the relationship in all its detail. Not each aspect of the relationship is equally important: the significance attributed to Chinese communities in Latin America, for example, appears overdrawn, and not all readers will be interested in the questions for US policymakers that inform the overall inquiry. Nonetheless, we are treated to an outstanding survey of the aspects of China's growing presence in the region, presented in the context of Chinese as well as Latin American interests. From this rich spread we can achieve a more nuanced understanding of the opportunities, threats and trade-offs inherent in the relationship, considerations ultimately of great utility to decision makers throughout the hemisphere.
