foreign policy”–has been parsing China’s mask diplomacy to decipher where Beijing is attempting to gain influence, sources involved tell TIME. State Department’s J-Bureau–charged with “elevating and integrating civilian security in U.S. This has not gone unnoticed by Washington the U.S. Gedan, a former South America director on the White House’s National Security Council, now with the Wilson Center. “The pandemic has opened up a diplomatic opportunity that China did not have before,” says Benjamin N. By late October, China had provided over 179 billion masks, 1.73 billion protective suits and 543 million testing kits to 150 countries and seven international organizations around the globe. Shanghai-based China Cosco Shipping is building a new $3 billion port at Chancay in Peru, while there are ambitious proposals for a transcontinental railway linking South America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts from Brazil to Chile.ĬOVID-19 presented another opportunity. “It’s just more profitable to sell here than anywhere else.”Īlready, 19 governments across Latin America and the Caribbean have joined Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $1 trillion transcontinental trade and infrastructure network. “We’d rather not be so dependent on exports to China, but what is the alternative?” Paulo Estivallet, Brazil’s ambassador to China, tells TIME. These are the commodities that will help Latin America weather the storm–and China will inevitably be the primary customer. Chinese purchases of minerals and agricultural commodities helped South America stave off the worst privations of the 2008 financial crisis.Īnd during COVID-19, Latin America is once again reliant on China, whose middle class drives demand for beef from Uruguay, copper from Chile, oil from Colombia and soya from Brazil. In 2019, Chinese companies invested $12.8 billion in Latin America, up 16.5% from 2018, concentrating on regional infrastructure such as ports, roads, dams and railways. Today, China is South America’s top trading partner. As countries in the region grapple with a cascade of challenges to their developing economies, they increasingly look not to the North but to the East. The political debate in Paraguay reflects a broader battle raging across Latin America about China’s swelling influence. Still, opposition lawmakers have forged ahead in deepening their institutional ties with China, eliciting what they described as the first-ever Chinese humanitarian aid to Paraguay in June, and vowing to recognize the country if the balance of power in Congress shifts. In the end, the proposal was voted down, 25 to 16, in a Senate still controlled by the right-wing party Stroessner founded. The Senators argued that the pandemic would make Chinese support–in the form of masks and ventilators, but also investment, trade and possibly a vaccine–crucial in the coming years. In April 2020, as COVID-19 began to tear through Latin America, the leftist bloc in the Paraguayan Senate introduced a bill to open relations with Beijing–which would inevitably mean ending recognition of Taiwan. “Taiwan helps us a lot, sending donations and financing, but it doesn’t serve us at a great scale.” “It’s a political thing, and for many of us it’s absurd, really,” Almeida says. In 1957, Paraguay’s recently installed right-wing dictator Alfredo Stroessner recognized Taiwan–an island that politically split from the mainland following China’s 1945–49 civil war, but which Beijing considers a breakaway province–as the “one true China.” In response, China limits trade and diplomacy with Paraguay, just as it does with any country that recognizes Taiwan. The answer is that Paraguay is one of only 15 countries in the world–including nine in Latin America and the Caribbean–that still don’t recognize the government in Beijing.
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