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China’s Shaky Latin American Liabilities

07/13/14

Matt Ferchen

Economics, Trade, Politics, China, South America

Xi Jinping is likely to announce new multibillion deals at the upcoming BRICS summit—deals that amount to a doubling down on an already risky Chinese bet.

China may have been a no-show for the 2014 World Cup, but at next weeks’ 6th BRICS Summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, all eyes will be on President Xi Jinping. While the summit is likely to result in important announcements such a Shanghai-based BRICS Bank, the rest of Xi’s Latin America visit, which will include stops in Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina, is bound to attract even more headlines.

Pundits inside and outside of China will either trumpet or decry the trip as a grand tour of China’s Latin American socialist and statist friends and a slap in the face to the United States. However, no matter how much socialist solidarity and “South-South” diplomatic back-slapping is offered up for public consumption, President Xi’s trip will actually be less about deepening already healthy ties with strong regional allies than seeking to mitigate deep anxieties about its commercial and diplomatic relations with dysfunctional friends.

In contrast to U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip this past spring to shore up ties with American allies in East and Southeast Asia, Xi Jinping’s tour of Latin America’s crisis-prone leftist stalwarts (Cuba and Venezuela) and populist debtors (Argentina) will simply underscore how problematic some of China’s “strategic partnerships” in the Americas actually are. Rather than highlighting the strengths of China’s presence in Latin America, Xi’s trip, especially the stop in Venezuela, will instead expose the limitations of China’s influence in the region China explicitly refers to as America’s “backyard.”

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/china%E2%80%99s-shaky-latin-american-liabilities-10863