The opportunities that China is missing.
Xi didn't attend the BRICS summit in Brazil. Not showing up is a mistake by China.
I would criticize a US president missing the Summit of the Americas, APEC, or another large multilateral meeting of leaders in this hemisphere. Showing up and meeting in person is important for hemispheric diplomacy. It’s how things get done.
So what does it mean that Xi failed to show up for the BRICS meeting in Brazil? He failed to show up for a meeting of an organization where China is one of the key leaders. Maybe Xi has a health issue. Maybe China’s attention is elsewhere. Maybe China’s leaders were concerned about Brazil-India dominating this meeting and wanted to downplay the BRICS split. Whatever the reason, China’s leader failed to show up to what was probably the most important meeting for him to attend in the hemisphere this year.
And it’s particularly notable that Xi failed to show up at a moment of US weakness. US budget cuts in foreign aid and diplomacy have weakened the US government’s connections in Latin America. Trump’s image is awful among Latin American public opinion. The trade war and various inter-personal disputes have weakened US standing with some of the region’s largest countries including Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.
Nearly every analyst out there has written some article discussing how China has the opportunity step into the void that the US is leaving behind. For the past two decades, numerous media and think tank reports have highlighted moments when China increases its presence and investments in the hemisphere.
What’s often missed are the many ways China’s leadership is dropping the ball. In some ways, the failures parallel US mistakes from the past and present.
Latin America and the Caribbean face enormous security challenges. China provides almost no security assistance or training that would help reform police or improve security strategies. The military cooperation it provides and the military sales it attempts are more for China’s benefit than for Latin America’s. China could do more to help Latin American security and it doesn’t.
Some of those security challenges are caused by drug trafficking. China’s fentanyl chemical flows and money laundering networks are every bit as much to blame as drug demand in the US and Europe for the drug cartel problem, and China’s government doesn’t do much to help Latin America stop it and may even be complicit in it, at times telling the US it will halt counter-drug cooperation as part of negotiation threats. The region sees China’s role in that fentanyl chain.
Chinese fleets overfish across Latin America’s waters and China defends its fishing operations, which sometimes border on paramilitary cooperation, rather than defend Latin America’s environment.
When China does provide economic assistance, it’s in the form of debt that countries struggle to repay. The “economic hitmen” argument can apply to many of these deals in the same way it does to US and European deals. Further, Latin America wants to move up the value chain on economic production, not just be a supplier of commodities. China is every bit as exploitative of Latin America’s open veins as Spain and the US were in the past. They take raw commodities from the region and then dump cheap products on consumer markets in ways that prevent Latin America’s domestic industries from thriving.
Latin America sees all of the above, and it means China is not winning.
I don’t cheer on China in any way. I’m quite happy that China is failing to capture all the opportunities that it could. I want Latin America’s anti-imperialist tendencies to turn an eye to Beijing and realize the threat it poses.
Meanwhile, US analysts should recognize that China isn’t some sort of genius supervillain capable of exploiting all the ways the US fails in Latin America, whether that’s the current Trump administration or every administration that came before it. China is just as capable as the US of neglecting the Western Hemisphere, failing to show up when it counts, and insisting that its own interests are more important than the sovereign decisions of the region. China doesn’t magically win just because the US makes mistakes.
US missteps present an opportunity for China, but we too often underestimate the likelihood that China will fail to capitalize on it.