The challenges arising from China's global engagement should not, however, be confused with the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that characterized the Cold War, in which each side actively promoted different, competing concepts for a global order. China does not seek to impose a new ideology on the world, yet the mercantilist way in which it promotes its economic development, combined with its lack of commitment to international norms that it didn't create, makes it more difficult for the United States to conduct business and pursue policy goals in Latin America and other parts of the world.
Consider China's ties with the eight countries that make up the leftist Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). Since 2007, China has loaned $50 billion to Ecuador and Venezuela, the alliance's two largest countries, giving them the financial wherewithal to continue sustaining anti-U.S. policies at home and to advance their cause in the region -- from funding oil alliance Petrocaribe, to setting up teleSUR and Banco del Sur, to sending suitcases of cash to politicians in Argentina. And the willingness of Chinese companies to invest in Venezuela and Ecuador has made it easier for those countries' regimes to nationalize industries and displace undesired Western corporations. China's indifference to those countries' political systems has cleared the way for their devolution to less democratic practices, from the legal actions taken against the leadership of El Universo and other Ecuadorean media, to forcing RCTV off the air in Venezuela and persecuting Venezuelan opponents from Manuel Rosales (now in exile) to former armed forces head Raúl Baduel (now incarcerated). China's no-strings-attached investments enable the regimes to thumb their noses at Western institutions and prevailing international norms regarding respect for contracts, freedom of expression, democracy, and human rights.
The challenge to Washington from China's presence in the region also extends beyond economics and policy objectives. The U.S. Defense Department's critical posture regarding Chinese cyberattacks is a reminder that hostilities between the United States and China, though highly improbable and undesirable, are not unthinkable. In such a conflict, China-operated ports, airports, telecommunications infrastructure, and other parts of the Chinese commercial presence in Latin America would represent potential assets in a global asymmetric warfare campaign against the United States.
It is ironic that, after his meetings in Mexico, Xi will meet with Obama in California. But for the difficulty in getting Xi's entourage of Chinese luxury cars across the border, he could almost have driven the last leg of the journey. But perhaps that is the point: It has taken a leader coming from the other side of the world to remind the U.S. leadership that Latin America is connected to the United States, in physical, economic, and human terms. Thus, what happens in the region is of profound importance for the United States and, hopefully, will be at least one of the topics of conversation between President Xi and President Obama after they shake hands at Sunnylands.
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For the past decade, Washington has looked with discomfort at China's growing interest in Latin America. But while Beijing's diplomats bulked up on their Spanish and Portuguese, most U.S. policymakers slept soundly, confident that the United States still held a dominant position in the minds of its southern neighbors. In April 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing on China's influence in the hemisphere and concluded that the U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere was much stronger than China's and, moreover, that Beijing's economic engagement in the region did not present a security threat. But that was 2005.
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In late May of this year, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden went to Latin America for a three-day, three-country tour, Beijing was hot on his heels. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Trinidad and Tobago just days after Biden left: Whereas Trinidad and Tobago's prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, characterized her discussions with Biden as "at times brutal," Xi's stop in Trinidad and Tobago included the unveiling of a children's hospital funded with $150 million from the Chinese government, discussion of energy projects, and meetings with seven Caribbean heads of state. Xi's itinerary took him to Costa Rica and Mexico on June 4 to 6, but his shadow followed Biden all the way to Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, Biden referred to a new "strategic partnership" between the United States and Brazil, yet his words' impact was undercut by the strategic partnership that Brazil has had with China since 1993 and the much-publicized fact that China overtook the United States as Brazil's largest trading partner in 2009 (trade between China and Brazil exceeded $75 billion in 2012). It's not an accident that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff made a state visit to China in April 2011, prior to paying one to the United States.
Make no mistake: China is now a presence in the region. Xi's trip to Trinidad and Tobago is only the second visit by a Chinese president to the Caribbean -- his predecessor, Hu Jintao, visited communist Cuba in November 2008 -- but China and the Caribbean's economic and political ties have been growing rapidly. On this trip, Xi promised more than $3 billion in loans to 10 Caribbean countries and Costa Rica. Xi's choice of three destinations near the United States, followed by a "shirt-sleeves" summit with U.S. President Barack Obama on June 7 and 8 at the Sunnylands resort in California, sends a subtle message that the new Chinese leadership seeks to engage the United States globally as an equal -- without the deference shown in the past to the United States in countries close to its borders.
Ironically, it's the Latin American country closest to the United States where Xi might be able to make up the most ground. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto's engagement with the Chinese president, both at the April summit in Boao, China, and this week in Mexico City, allow him to differentiate himself from his pro-U.S. predecessor, Felipe Calderón. Similarly, Mexico's role in forming the Pacific Alliance, a new subregional organization built around a group of four pro-market, pro-trade countries (Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) allows Mexico to reassert a leadership role in the Americas, relatively independent of the United States.
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The View from Europe
China, the US and the Caribbean strategic encounters
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President Xi Jinping of China. Photo <a href="http://csmonitor.com" rel="nofollow">csmonitor.com</a>
By David Jessop
This weekend President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China will hold their first summit. The meeting, in the 200 acre private Annenberg estate in California, is the first since the Chinese President took office. It is expressly designed to be informal and to enable the two men to get to know each other, as well as allowing them, their Ministers and senior officials to consider the trade, economic and security issues that divide and unite the world’s two most powerful nations.
In most respects, the two day meeting is evocative of the great strategic encounters of the past that shaped the modern world. From the latter part of the Second World War on, and throughout the cold war, such summits evidenced the way the world was divided, establishing the fault lines and the policies, until the US emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union as the world’s only super power.
Since then much has changed, new economic powers have emerged and China’s peaceful rise has returned it to the confident global role it lost many centuries ago.
What happens this weekend, therefore, will mark a turning point in world history, ending the uni-polarity that Jamaica’s former Prime Minister, Michael Manley, so astutely recognised in 1990, as casting adrift and marginalising regions like the Caribbean.
The Annenberg summit will, at the very least, demonstrate the new bipolarity in the world and cause China as well as the United States to have to confront and hopefully accommodate their differing philosophical and strategic views.
It is unlikely that Mr. Xi’s recent visit to Latin America and the Caribbean just before his arrival in the United States was coincidental. It sent a strong signal that while the US may be undertaking a pivot to the East - regarding its western view out across the Pacific as the one most critical to its future strategic interests - China now has a strong, positive and rapidly deepening relationship with almost all of the nations of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the new political body that brings together all nations in the Americas other than the US and Canada.
Put another way, Mr. Xi’s Latin American and Caribbean visit was almost certainly intended to demonstrate that China was seeking to rebalance relationships with proximate nations to the US that Washington has previously regarded as being within its ability to influence.
In this context the Chinese President’s encounter with the Caribbean days after a visit by the US Vice President, Joe Biden, at his own admission at short notice, marked a significant change in the way in which both the Caribbean is seen and sees itself . It placed the region in a position that it may be able to gently leverage to its advantage.
Both meetings in Trinidad were as important for their tone as well as their content.
The discussions with the US Vice President on May 28 were, both sides agreed, cordial but very frank, with Mr. Biden stating afterwards that the US wanted to ‘deepen’ its relationship with the Caribbean, to ‘play a part in the overall development of the region’ and ‘show respect’. This was a humbler US with a new script: “We need you. We need you. And I hope you’ll find a place in your hearts, in your economies, in your quest for energy, in your quest for societalization of your economies that we can play a part with you”, Mr. Biden said.
At the meeting the Caribbean found its voice: US interest in the Caribbean had become marginal; relations had been soured by a number of trade disputes; and the US was not providing enough assistance in relation to security, tax and other issues on which it is seeking Caribbean compliance. In response, the US was critical of the Caribbean’s inability to integrate, implement and comply on issues that it regards as being in the region’s own interest.
In a startlingly frank subsequent comment, Haiti’s President Michel Martelly, the present chair of Caricom, noted: “It would no doubt help the United States to articulate clearly its policy toward the Caribbean which would provide an overarching framework for the relationship and cooperation.” This he noted could act as an “important precursor” to a summit with US President Barack Obama.
Then, just two days later on June 2, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, met with those Caribbean nations that have diplomatic relations with China. The tone could not have been more different.
While President Xi called for ‘more vigour and cooperation to boost ties between China and Caribbean nations’ he made clear in bilateral discussions that China was seeking to further deepen its relationship.
Space does not enable me to detail the extensive range of commitments made, but in meetings on both a multilateral and bilateral basis with Trinidad, Grenada, Antigua, Dominica, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Barbados, it became clear that China will significantly scale up its development assistance, investment, and exchanges at a political, business and cultural level in a way not seen before in the region; with the overall objective of a significant deepening of bilateral relations.
Also taking place, but almost unnoticed, was a separate but just as significant a meeting in Havana. In parallel to the Chinese President’s visit, Raul Castro met Guo Jinlong, a senior member of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. Although the meeting resulted in the signing of a number of economic agreements, the Chinese state media made clear that for Cuba the approach was different. It noted that there was a special political relationship based on a long standing friendship that is ‘deeply cherished’ by the new Chinese leadership, which to quote Mr. Guo, ‘supports the Cuban party and government in exploring a socialist development path suitable to the country's own national conditions’.
Although what occurred in Trinidad may be seen as a sideshow to the discussion that will take place in Annenberg, it cast in sharp relief the changing nature of the ways in which the region sees its future. It also demonstrated in a sometimes dramatic way how historically based relationships, now largely driven by security, are colliding with those that are new, offer future value and provide a philosophical framework and world view with which the region feels more comfortable.
As such, the two high level encounters were auguries for the future, about which more in another column.
David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at <a href="mailto:david.jessop@caribbean-council.org">david.jessop@caribbean-council.org</a>
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
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David Jessop THIS WEEK IN EUROPE
This weekend US President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping of China hold their first summit.
The meeting, in the 200-acre private Annenberg estate in California, is the first since the Chinese president took office. It is expressly designed to be informal and to enable the two men to get to know each other, as well as allowing them, their ministers and senior officials to consider the trade, economic and security issues that divide and unite the world's two most powerful nations.
In most respects, the two-day meeting is evocative of the great strategic encounters of the past that shaped the modern world. From the latter part of the Second World War on, and throughout the Cold War, such summits evidenced the way the world was divided, establishing the fault lines and the policies, until the US emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union as the world's only super power.
peaceful rise
Since then much has changed, new economic powers have emerged and China's peaceful rise has returned it to the confident global role it lost many centuries ago.
What happens this weekend, therefore, will mark a turning point in world history, ending the uni-polarity that Jamaica's former Prime Minister Michael Manley, so astutely recognised in 1990, as casting adrift and marginalising regions like the Caribbean.
The Annenberg summit will, at the very least, demonstrate the new bipolarity in the world and cause China as well as the United States to have to confront and hopefully accommodate their differing philosophical and strategic views.
It is unlikely that Mr Xi's recent visit to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) just before his arrival in the United States was coincidental.
It sent a strong signal that while the US may be undertaking a pivot to the East - regarding its western view out across the Pacific as the one most critical to its future strategic interests - China now has a strong, positive and rapidly deepening relationship with almost all of the nations of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the new political body that brings together all nations in the Americas other than the US and Canada.
Put another way, Mr Xi's LAC visit was almost certainly intended to demonstrate that China was seeking to rebalance relationships with proximate nations to the US that Washington has previously regarded as being within its ability to influence.
In this context, the Chinese President's encounter with the Caribbean days after a visit by the US Vice-President Joe Biden, at his own admission at short notice, marked a significant change in the way in which both the Caribbean is seen and sees itself. It placed the region in a position that it may be able to gently leverage to its advantage.
Both meetings in Trinidad were as important for their tone as well as their content.
The discussions with the US vice-president on May 28 were, both sides agreed, cordial but very frank, with Mr Biden stating afterwards that the US wanted to "deepen" its relationship with the Caribbean, to "play a part in the overall development of the region" and "show respect".
This was a humbler US with a new script.
"We need you. We need you. And I hope you'll find a place in your hearts, in your economies, in your quest for energy, in your quest for societalisation of your economies that we can play a part with you," Biden said.
At the meeting, the Caribbean found its voice: US interest in the Caribbean had become marginal; relations had been soured by a number of trade disputes; and the US was not providing enough assistance in relation to security, tax and other issues on which it is seeking Caribbean compliance.
In response, the US was critical of the Caribbean's inability to integrate, implement and comply on issues that it regards as being in the region's own interest.
In a startlingly frank subsequent comment, Haiti's President Michel Martelly, the present chair of Caricom, noted: "It would no doubt help the United States to articulate clearly its policy towards the Caribbean which would provide an overarching framework for the relationship and cooperation." This, he noted, was this could act as an "important precursor" to a summit with President Obama.
Then, just two days later on June 2, President Xi met with those Caribbean nations that have diplomatic relations with China. The tone could not have been more different.
While President Xi called for "more vigour and cooperation to boost ties between China and Caribbean nations", he made it clear in bilateral discussions that China was seeking to deepen its relationship.
Space does not allow me to detail the extensive range of commitments made, but in meetings on both a multilateral and bilateral basis with Trinidad, Grenada, Antigua, Dominica, The Bahamas, Jamaica, and Barbados, it became clear that China will significantly scale up its development assistance, investment, and exchanges at a political, business and cultural level, in a way not seen before in the region; with the overall objective of a significant deepening of bilateral relations.
Also taking place, but almost unnoticed, was a separate but just as significant, a meeting in Havana.
economic agreements
In parallel to the Chinese President's visit, Raul Castro met Guo Jinlong, a senior member of the political bureau of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee.
Although the meeting resulted in the signing of a number of economic agreements, the Chinese state media made it clear that for Cuba the approach was different. It noted that there was a special political relationship based on a long- standing friendship that is "deeply cherished" by the new Chinese leadership, which to quote Mr Guo, "supports the Cuban party and government in exploring a socialist development path suitable to the country's own national conditions".
Although what occurred in Trinidad may be seen as a sideshow to the later discussion at Annenberg, it cast in sharp relief the changing nature of the ways in which the region sees its future.
It also demonstrated in a sometimes dramatic way how historically based relationships, now largely driven by security, are colliding with those that are new, offer future value and provide a philosophical framework and world view with which the region feels more comfortable.
As such, the two high-level encounters were auguries for the future, about which more in another column.
David Jessop is director of the Caribbean Council. Send feedback to <a href="mailto:david.jessop@caribbean-council.org">david.jessop@caribbean-council.org</a>
The discussions with the US vice-president on May 28 were, both sides agreed, cordial but very frank, with Mr Biden stating afterwards that the US wanted to "deepen" its relationship with the Caribbean, to "play a part in the overall development of the region" and "show respect".
This was a humbler US with a new script.
"We need you. We need you. And I hope you'll find a place in your hearts, in your economies, in your quest for energy, in your quest for societalisation of your economies that we can play a part with you," Biden said.
At the meeting, the Caribbean found its voice: US interest in the Caribbean had become marginal; relations had been soured by a number of trade disputes; and the US was not providing enough assistance in relation to security, tax and other issues on which it is seeking Caribbean compliance.
In response, the US was critical of the Caribbean's inability to integrate, implement and comply on issues that it regards as being in the region's own interest.
In a startlingly frank subsequent comment, Haiti's President Michel Martelly, the present chair of Caricom, noted: "It would no doubt help the United States to articulate clearly its policy towards the Caribbean which would provide an overarching framework for the relationship and cooperation." This, he noted, was this could act as an "important precursor" to a summit with President Obama.
Then, just two days later on June 2, President Xi met with those Caribbean nations that have diplomatic relations with China. The tone could not have been more different.
While President Xi called for "more vigour and cooperation to boost ties between China and Caribbean nations", he made it clear in bilateral discussions that China was seeking to deepen its relationship.
Space does not allow me to detail the extensive range of commitments made, but in meetings on both a multilateral and bilateral basis with Trinidad, Grenada, Antigua, Dominica, The Bahamas, Jamaica, and Barbados, it became clear that China will significantly scale up its development assistance, investment, and exchanges at a political, business and cultural level, in a way not seen before in the region; with the overall objective of a significant deepening of bilateral relations.
Also taking place, but almost unnoticed, was a separate but just as significant, a meeting in Havana.
economic agreements
In parallel to the Chinese President's visit, Raul Castro met Guo Jinlong, a senior member of the political bureau of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee.
Although the meeting resulted in the signing of a number of economic agreements, the Chinese state media made it clear that for Cuba the approach was different. It noted that there was a special political relationship based on a long- standing friendship that is "deeply cherished" by the new Chinese leadership, which to quote Mr Guo, "supports the Cuban party and government in exploring a socialist development path suitable to the country's own national conditions".
Although what occurred in Trinidad may be seen as a sideshow to the later discussion at Annenberg, it cast in sharp relief the changing nature of the ways in which the region sees its future.
It also demonstrated in a sometimes dramatic way how historically based relationships, now largely driven by security, are colliding with those that are new, offer future value and provide a philosophical framework and world view with which the region feels more comfortable.
As such, the two high-level encounters were auguries for the future, about which more in another column.
David Jessop is director of the Caribbean Council. Send feedback to <a href="mailto:david.jessop@caribbean-council.org">david.jessop@caribbean-council.org</a>
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NEW YORK — It seems a match made in tourism heaven. China was flirting with the Caribbean, and the Caribbean was winking right back.
The much-anticipated third annual Avalon Invest Caribbean Now 2013 forum, held here on June 5, included a panel titled “China and the Caribbean” with representatives from the Chinese government and the Chinese-American business community as well as investment companies. All had come courting a very receptive audience composed of dozens of Caribbean tourism ministers, private-sector partners and government policy makers.
The event had been organized by the Caribbean Tourism Organization and digital media solutions company Hard Beat Communications during Caribbean Week here.
China is no stranger to the Caribbean region.
In 2012, China invested $9 billion in various projects in the Caribbean, a 9.4% increase over 2011, added to the hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, grants and other forms of economic assistance it had already channeled in the past decade, according to Li Li, managing director of the Chinese American Business Development Center.
“Our president Xi Jinping pledged more than $3 billion in loans in 2013 to 10 Caribbean nations and Costa Rica during his recent visit to Trinidad,” she said. “In the next two years in the Caribbean, China will invest in agricultural centers and the hospitality industry, set up 1,000 scholarships to medical students, develop sports facilities and computer centers and invest in secondary schools on several islands.”
Trade with the Caribbean and Latin America totaled $261 billion in 2012, a 9% increase over 2011, according to Li.
“We are eager to continue to do business with the Caribbean,” she said.
The Caribbean region is just as eager for Chinese tourists as it is for Chinese investments.
As CTO Chairwoman Beverly Nicholson-Doty pointed out, “We in the Caribbean have the vacation formula down pat. We know how to do that. How can we prepare for the Chinese visitor?”
Direct airlift from China to the Caribbean is the biggest challenge, said Xiaoguang Liu, consul in charge of economic and commercial affairs of the Consulate General of China in New York.
“If the lift materializes, prepare your airports and get ready for the invasion,” he said.
It could be quite an invasion.
“Chinese travelers made 70 million overseas trips in 2011,” Liu said. “That figure could top 100 million by 2015. To attract and cater to even a small portion of these travelers, Caribbean resorts must adapt to the Chinese visitor.”
Meanwhile, Anthony Eterno of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Caribbean Affairs /Western Hemisphere Division said the Obama administration remains committed to an economic partnership that stimulates growth with the region.
Eterno, who warmed the audience with mention that his wife is a “Vinci” (native of St. Vincent), cited the U.S.-Caribbean Community Trade & Investment Framework Agreement signed by Vice President Joe Biden on his recent trip to Trinidad.
“This agreement is essential to spurring economic development and diversification of the region and contributing to the well-being of citizens,” Eterno said.
Other speakers included Rufus Ewing, premier of the Turks and Caicos, who outlined the investment opportunities in his destination, and Miguel Reyna, director of port business development and asset management for Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., who summarized the line’s port investment activity in the Caribbean.
Recipient of the 2013 Corporate Leadership award for commitment to serving the Caribbean region’s tourism sector was Royal Caribbean International. Royal CEO and President Adam Goldstein and Mike Ronan, vice president of government relations for the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia, accepted the award on behalf of the cruise line.
In video remarks, Goldstein said, “The Caribbean has been the heart and soul of who we are and where we go for 40 years. Our goal is to continue to work closely with the Caribbean so that the region’s ability to retain and attract cruise ships remains as strong and as robust as ever.”
Follow Gay Nagle Myers on Twitter @gnmtravelweekly.
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