In China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics, Chris Alden and Álvaro Méndez examine Latin America and the Caribbean region’s interactions with China, revealing how a complex, evolving set of bilateral economic and political relations with Beijing – from Buenos Aires to Mexico City – have shaped recent development. Mark S. Langevin contends that the book is a noteworthy contribution to an understanding of China’s footprint in the region but does not offer a robust framework for comparative analysis.  

China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics. Chris Alden and Álvaro Méndez. Bloomsbury. 2022.

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China and Latin America offers a thoroughly researched account of China’s economic and political impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Alden and Méndez pivot on China’s centuries-long presence in LAC to weave an analysis of trade, investment and migration patterns, detailing a thick description of economic and political relations with the region’s governments and stakeholders. Their historical examination and assessments of national government responses to China are appropriately framed by the unfolding geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and Washington. The book details China’s underlying logic and overwhelming importance to LAC, providing a valuable contribution to the growing literature assessing Beijing’s role in the region’s economic development and international relations.

China is not new to LAC; its longstanding ties with the region provide an economic and social foundation for the massive trade and investment flows in recent decades.

In the introduction, Alden and Méndez remind readers that China is not new to LAC; its longstanding ties with the region provide an economic and social foundation for the massive trade and investment flows in recent decades. In chapter one, the authors tell an intriguing story of China’s dependence on “New World silver,” European and LAC elite thirst for Chinese-produced silks and ceramics during the fall of the Ming Dynasty in the seventeenth century, and the enduring impacts of the flow of indentured Chinese workers to the region in the eighteenth century. Accordingly, Chinese working-class immigrants settled in “cities like Lima, Tijuana, Panama City and Havana…” providing a human bridge to China while suffering through waves of xenophobia and anti-Chinese repression. China and Latin America documents the economic and social linkages tempered through centuries-long trade, investment and migration – a neglected foundation for understanding LAC’s economic development in recent decades.

The book raises several leading questions. In the introduction, Alden and Méndez explore the “interests, strategies and practices of China,” questioning whether Beijing’s approach to LAC is similar to its role in Africa (14). They ask what motivates Beijing’s interests in the region and how LAC governments, firms and social actors have responded to China’s “deepening economic and political involvement in the region” (15).

Although the book is thick on economic and historical detail, its thematic analytical framework does not guide comparative explanation within LAC and across developing regions, including Africa.

Although the book is thick on economic and historical detail, its thematic analytical framework does not guide comparative explanation within LAC and across developing regions, including Africa. Alden and Méndez offer three “broad themes” for narrating their analysis: development, agency and geopolitics. These dimensions can guide examination of Beijing’s underlying logic and regional economic and political relations but are insufficient to explain the variable regional results that could stem from Chinese policies, trade and investment or even geopolitical endeavours. Consequently, Alden and Méndez emphasise “diplomacy and statecraft” and “sub-state and societal actors” as conceptual references but without the formal specification for selecting cases, testing explanations and comparing outcomes at the national and regional levels.

For example, the book explores several groups of Latin American nations and case studies of Brazil and Mexico. Chapter three’s treatment of Chile, Peru and Argentina, chapter four’s analysis of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, and chapter seven’s assessment of Central America and the Caribbean reflect similar patterns of development and diplomacy. However, these chapters do not present a systematic comparative analysis between these cases. Moreover, the authors’ slim selection method excludes Paraguay and Uruguay without assessing these nations’ participation in the Common Market of South America (Mercosur) along with Argentina and Brazil. Indeed, Uruguay’s recent proposal to ditch Mercosur and negotiate a bilateral trade treaty with Beijing makes it an interesting case for comparison with Mexico, given its longstanding ties to Canada and the US through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its successor pact (USMCA).

In chapter four, Alden and Méndez explain how the “sustained rise in commodity prices” – much of it fuelled by Chinese demand – “enabled these governments to seek rents from export tax revenues and direct them toward development and social programmes,” an approach the authors associate with “neo-extractivism.” Accordingly, the so-called Bolivarian republics of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia sought to replace their dependency on the U.S. with China. Beijing embraced the opportunity, but the growing Chinese footprint “obscured the commercial intent and practices pursued by Chinese firms” (103). In response, these nations’ governments grappled with increasing Chinese debt, among other externalities brought by Chinese firms, including the “willful neglect of the concerns of local communities, environmentalists and labour activists.” Indeed, as the authors point out, even Beijing grew weary of the region’s “high expectations” and the growing “costs of entanglements” (104).

The book’s treatment of Venezuela is pivotal because it details the most extreme case of commodity export dependence and debt-trap diplomacy in the region.

The book’s treatment of Venezuela is pivotal because it details the most extreme case of commodity export dependence and debt-trap diplomacy in the region. This sets an analytical benchmark that sharply contrasts with Brazil’s diversified commodity exports to China and the parallel influx of Chinese goods, foreign direct investment and migrants, along with the incipient pattern of technology transfer through the localisation of Chinese manufacturing firms in Brazil.

On the energy front, Venezuela shifted to government control over petroleum production after Hugo Chavez’s rise to power in the late 1990s, while Brazil partially liberalised the sector during the same period. The authors assess China’s rise and growing demand for petroleum products but do not explain the divergent policy approaches taken by Caracas and Brasilia. Did Venezuela’s deepening authoritarianism and Brazil’s vibrant democracy shape Beijing’s approach to these countries and help determine the different outcomes in the petroleum sector, or are the differences limited to these countries’ respective opportunities for crude oil production for export? Moreover, do these contrasting policy-response patterns explain diplomatic outcomes, including Caracas’ growing distance from Washington? Alden and Méndez contribute to our understanding but fall short of a comparable explanation of Venezuela and Brazil’s two very different paths.

Chapter eight offers a vital perspective of China’s presence in LAC within the emerging geopolitical landscape that pits Washington against Beijing.

In conclusion, chapter eight offers a vital perspective of China’s presence in LAC within the emerging geopolitical landscape that pits Washington against Beijing. The authors explain China’s deepening engagements, becoming an observer to the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2004 and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2008, and President Xi Jinping’s trip to Brasilia in 2014 to attend the first Summit of Leaders of China and LAC. Xi’s confident embrace of the region did not initially spark concern in Washington, according to Alden and Méndez. However, as the authors recount, by 2018, the US National Defense Strategy Summary confirmed Washington’s acknowledgment of the strategic competition with Beijing throughout LAC.

Alden and Méndez raise a central question that should frame research and policymaking in the coming years: at what point do the citizens and leaders of LAC search for alternatives to ‘China’s dominant position in their country’s economic and political life?’

China and Latin America concludes, “No longer passive, Chinese diplomacy now looms large in the capitals and boardrooms across the region, leaving the once-unassailable US dominance scrambling to regain its standing” (175). Hence, Alden and Méndez raise a central question that should frame research and policymaking in the coming years: at what point do the citizens and leaders of LAC search for alternatives to “China’s dominant position in their country’s economic and political life?”

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Nadezda Murmakova on Shutterstock.

Rodrigo Acuña (Macquarie University), 'Venezuelan Foreign Policy and Latin American Unification'

This is the third seminar in the Semester 1 series of 2016 organised by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.

Date and Location:

7 April 2016, Darlington Centre Boardroom, 4:00pm – 5.30pm

All welcome!

Venezuelans balloted last month – again. Nothing exceptional in a country where citizens have cast their votes in twenty different nationwide elections over the past 17 years – more than once annually, if one draws an average. Yet elections in the Bolivarian republic generate an extraordinary level of international attention and a flurry of commentary ever since the late Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998. That is what happens when people in an oil-rich country suddenly reveal themselves as rich in political resources too, and furthermore decide that neither their oil nor their politics should be managed in the interest of national and international elites: the latter rapidly deploy the best of their political repertoire (and their media) to make sure that everyone around the world realises how wrong those people in the oil-rich country are.

On this occasion, the spotlight on Venezuelan elections was even more intense than usual. A variety of international analysts and the hostile majority of commercial media had been anticipating a defeat of chavismo. After repeated embarrassments in past pre-electoral prognoses, this time their oracles got it right: the opposition bloc, a permanent occupier of the losing side in previous electoral contests, obtained a strong qualified majority in the new National Assembly.

The economic crisis in Venezuela had already reached enormous dimensions, the government had been under a renewed wave of international pressure and the political vigour of the chavista electorate was at a historical low. The limitations in the government programs seeking to strengthen national production over the past decade could not be ignored anymore, and took their toll. And many chavistas directly criticised the lack of skill of Maduro’s government in successfully addressing the crisis – but they did not mean that the opposition was the solution.

Even in those critical circumstances, more than 5.6 million Venezuelans voted for Bolivarian candidates. This is a strong indication of how deep runs the distrust towards an opposition bloc which cannot fully disguise its neoliberal core and whose leadership has for over a decade oscillated between electorally competing with chavismo and pursuing extra-institutional adventures to oust the government. Let us recall that, unlike Maduro in December, most prominent opposition leaders did not recognise electoral results when they were not favouring them, systematically casting doubts on the electoral system and on the very same National Electoral Council that now certified their victory.

In the current conjuncture, the future of the Bolivarian project is clearly at risk. As I argue more at length in my book Venezuela Reframed, the transformative potential of this project, still undefined between its post-neoliberal and post-capitalist possibilities, is only plausible if chavismo were to maintain electoral majorities. Despite the radical character of the Bolivarian revolution in some respects, it is once again necessary to underscore that what effectively made the pursuit of a transformative political process possible in the country were elections. Continuing successes in electoral competition guaranteed access to shares of state power that enabled the condensation of fragmented anti-neoliberal forces in the country, and that in turn enhanced the possibilities of further transformation. From a governing position, those shares of power were simultaneously used to facilitate socioeconomic inclusion and to foster popular mobilization.

After the December elections, the composition of the new National Assembly fundamentally recasts the institutional power balance in the country – and the options for the Bolivarian bloc to prevent the gradual dispersion and fragmentation of anti-neoliberal forces in the country. The qualified majority that the opposition has obtained in the Assembly provides it with a variety of institutional means to harness and debilitate the Executive Power in the hands of Maduro, and consequently the Bolivarian forces will lose spaces and mechanisms for their regrouping and reactivation. What is ahead in the next few months is a frontal contest between the Legislative and the Executive that will encapsulate the national-level struggle between chavismo and its historically constituted opposite – and will also decide the medium term prospects of the socialism of the twenty-first century project in the country.

In this conjuncture, a minimal modification in the distribution of allegiances in the National Assembly could make a world of a difference. Because the opposition has just narrowly reached the two thirds qualified majority that endows it with non-negotiable powers to obstruct the initiative of the Executive and to influence the orientation of other Public Powers (including, in the medium term, the appointment of directing figures in those Powers). Without that special majority, the opposition would still dominate the legislative Assembly, but negotiation would become indispensable for certain key decisions. In practical terms that would provide Maduro with a political breather that could prove crucial to regroup chavista forces: the Executive could maintain its creative, generative forces in addition to trying to address the most acute symptoms of the economic crisis. Given the expected recall referendum that the opposition will launch half way throughout the year, that breather could be the life-saving one for Bolivarianism in the short run.

In this scenario, do you know who the opposition depends on in order to maintain its super-qualified majority of two thirds in the Assembly? If you do not, here is a probably unexpected answer: the three indigenous MPs.

The 1999 constitution guarantees minimum representation to the indigenous population in legislative organs at local, regional and national level. In the National Assembly, they are granted three seats, whose occupants are elected in special constituencies (the amalgamation of several federal states). In the past December elections, the three elected indigenous representatives were politically allied with the so-called Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD: Democratic Unity Roundtable) – the political platform of the opposition bloc. Without their support in the Assembly, the opposition would lose its two thirds qualified majority.

In my book Venezuela Reframed I explain the populist political logics that led the opposition bloc to build its own space of indigenous politics. In the 1990s, scholar and long term activist Esteban E. Mosonyi wrote in the preface to a seminal book on indigenous mobilisation written by the Wayúu Nemesio Montiel that in Venezuela the Right ‘does not want to have anything to do with the Indians’. Yet the Bolivarian process has altered so much the political dynamics of the country that at present the Right in Venezuela has occupied itself by having something to do with the Indians.

The opposition bloc harbours the diehard neoliberal forces that during the Constituent Assembly of 1999 sonorously opposed the recognition of indigenous rights. In fact, during that period one of the most adamant spokesmen against indigenous rights was Henrique Capriles, who subsequently became the opposition presidential candidate on two occasions – defeated in each of them by Chávez and Maduro, respectively. In a quasi-miraculous political conversion, 13 years later, during the campaign of the 2012 presidential elections of 2012, Capriles shouted ‘I will demarcate all indigenous lands’ before a congregation of supporters in the capital of Amazonas state – the only federal state in the country with a majority indigenous population. That day he was wearing an indigenous feather crown.

In my book I unveil that electoral pragmatism contributes to explain Capriles’ conversion, and more generally why Venezuelan right-wingers have been seeking to building organised alliances with an indigenous political front. But this question has another side to it, which is the fact that indigenous struggles in Venezuela, as for that matter in the rest of Latin America, cannot be assumed to have anti-capitalist directionalities or inclinations – which is what some people automatically assume.

Despite generalising assumptions and simplifications, the indigenous population in the continent is characterised by economic, cultural and other structural cleavages – rather than merely separated from other sectors of the population by one or all of those divisions. And this fragmentation is expressed in identifiable forms of indigenous collective action that reveal diverse political goals and priorities. Against hyperreal and teleological conceptions of indigeneity and indigenous struggles, this fact has been long ago revealed with clarity in Venezuela and other countries in the continent.

Some of those currents of collective action are anti-capitalist, needless to say, or at least anti-neoliberal. And among those currents some have been nourishing the ranks of the historical collective subject that in Latin America is behind the emergence of the so-called socialisms of the twenty-first century, whereas others have taken a belligerent position before the governments that represent them. But there are other identifiable streams of indigenous collective action that are best characterised as channelling new forms of ‘indigenous capitalisms’, a concept that encapsulates the political goals of activists who seek a successful incorporation into capitalism as an index of self-determination and as expression of cultural strength.

In Venezuela, representatives of those indigenous capitalisms have now a decisive role in the definition of the national struggle between chavismo and anti-chavismo – between post-neoliberal/post-capitalist potentials and a rapid return to neoliberalism. And this is only a visible, institutional example of the way in which the so-called socialisms of the twenty-first century have repoliticised all spheres of national life – including the indigenous ones. The (indigenous) advocates of indigenous capitalisms are an important part in the shaping of contemporary Latin American politics – just as the (indigenous) advocates of the Indoamerican socialisms have been.

Venezuela's struggle is widely misrepresented in western media. This is a classic conflict between right and left, rich and poor

The current protests in Venezuela are reminiscent of another historical moment when street protests were used by right-wing politicians as part of an attempt to overthrow the elected government. From December of 2002 through February 2003, there was strike of mostly white-collar workers at the national oil industry, along with some business owners. The US media made it look like most of the country was on strike against the government, when, in fact, it was less than one percent of the labor force.

The spread of cell phone videos and social media in the past decade has made it more difficult to misrepresent things that can be easily captured on camera. But Venezuela is still grossly distorted in the major media. The New York Times had to run a correction last week for an article that began with a statement about "The only television station that regularly broadcast voices critical of the government …" As it turns out, all of the private TV stations "regularly broadcast voices critical of the government". And private media has more than 90% of the TV-viewing audience in Venezuela. A study by the Carter Center of the presidential election campaign period last April showed a 57 to 34% advantage in TV coverage for President Maduro over challenger Henrique Capriles in the April election, but that advantage is greatly reduced or eliminated when audience shares are taken into account.
Although there are abuses of power and problems with the rule of law in Venezuela – as there are throughout the hemisphere – it is far from the authoritarian state that most consumers of western media are led to believe. Opposition leaders currently aim to topple the democratically elected government – their stated goal – by portraying it as a repressive dictatorship that is cracking down on peaceful protest. This is a standard "regime change" strategy, which often includes violent demonstrations in order to provoke state violence.

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