China’s Twenty-First Century Foreign Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Imaginaries and Geopolitical Representations

Abstract

Over the last two decades, relations between China and the Latin American and the Caribbean countries have seen an exponential growth, especially as concerns economic exchange, but also from a political perspective. Drawing on Critical Geopolitics, the article discusses China’s foreign policy towards the Latin American and Caribbean region. It first explores the imaginaries and spatial representations that shape China’s particular way of “seeing the world”. It pays special attention to the principles of peaceful development and mutual benefit cooperation, and the way in which these inform China’s relations with other actors in the international scenario. The article then analyses the geopolitical codes orienting China’s current foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is argued that China’s implicit strategy is to construct hegemony by locating the region’s countries within her particular vision of the global scenario, thus consonant with China’s pursuance of an enhanced position to intervene in the design of the international system.