While most of the world’s attention at this week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin was on Xi Jinping’s meetings with leaders from the big powers, namely India and Russia, the Chinese President also spent considerable time with heads of state from many of the world’s smallest countries, like the Maldives and Nepal, among others.
This is part of China’s longstanding small-state diplomacy strategy, where Beijing cultivates relationships with these countries in the Global South through high-level gatherings and the same diplomatic pomp that leaders from more powerful countries receive when they visit the Chinese capital.
Alonso Illueca, CGSP’s non-resident fellow for Latin America, joins Eric to discuss his latest article on how China’s small-state outreach is playing out on the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica (population 75,000) and why it’s so effective.
Show Notes:
- The China-Global South Project: Small State, Big Gains: Why Dominica Matters in China’s Global Strategy by Alonso Illueca
- The China-Global South Project: In Bolivia, China’s Lithium Extraction Plans Went to the Polls and Lost Badly by Alonso Illueca
- The China-Global South Project: Betting on Beijing: How a Diplomatic Switch Sank Honduras’s Shrimp Exports by Alonso Illueca
About Alonso Illueca:
Alonso Illueca is an associate professor at Universidad Santa María La Antigua, where he teaches International Law and Human Rights. He has also served as adjunct faculty at Universidad del Istmo and Universidad de Panamá. He holds a Bachelor of Laws and Political Science (Hons) (Universidad Santa María La Antigua), an Education Specialist Degree (Hons) (Universidad del Istmo), and a Master of Laws (Parker School Certificate for Achievement in International and Comparative Law) (Columbia University). He is a partner at Bufete Illueca, Attorneys at Law. Previously, he was an Op-Ed columnist for La Prensa newspaper and a member of the Board of Directors of Transparency International – Panama Chapter and of the Museum of Freedom and Human Rights.
Transcript:
ERIC OLANDER: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica podcast network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to be talking about Chinese diplomacy.
We’ve been talking a lot about that all week in the context of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit that took place in Tianjin and wrapped up this week. But a lot of the attention on what happened in Tianjin was focused on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the big power diplomacy. What was the message that these three leaders were sending to the US and European-led international order?
What were the optics of their gatherings? But on the sidelines of this summit, out of sight of most of the international press coverage, there was a separate track of diplomacy that was happening. Xi Jinping was holding bilateral meetings with more than a dozen leaders.
Let me just list a few of them for you. You’ll hear a theme to all of this. The Maldives, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Armenia, all of these are small countries.
He also met with middle power states, Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam. One of the things that the is they do this speed dating type of diplomacy where they’ll have a 30 to 45 minute bilateral gathering. And what’s interesting is that in the optics of it, there is no difference between what the Maldivian prime minister looks like in terms of the meeting and what Putin gets and what Modi gets.
They get the handshake with the president and they get their bilateral kind of session photograph. Putin, of course, is a little bit different. He gets a special treatment, but for the most part, most of all of these leaders get the same.
And we’re going to talk about that small state diplomacy today and why it’s so important if you want to understand the nature of Chinese diplomacy today. And to do this, we’re thrilled to have back on the show, our Latin America nonresident fellow, Alonso Iuca, who just wrote a fantastic column for us, Big Gains, Why Dominica Matters in China’s Global Strategy. Dominica, of course, is a tiny little island in the Caribbean, and he’s going to talk to us about that.
Alonso, thank you so much for staying up late to join us today on the show.
ALONSO ILLUECA: Glad to be here, Eric, and glad to talk about all these fascinating issues.
ERIC OLANDER: It is fascinating. It’s a very poorly understood aspect of Chinese diplomacy. You delved into it in the context of Dominica.
But before we get into small state diplomacy, I’m just kind of curious, what did the SCO Summit look like from your vantage point in Panama City? This is a group that has nothing to do with Central America, South America, or the Caribbean, unlike the BRICS, for example, which does have a strong Latin component to it with presence there. But talk to us a little bit about what you saw looking at the SCO Summit.
What was the messaging, and how do you think it resonated in countries across the region that you’re in?
ALONSO ILLUECA: We’re actually, with this, Eric, the dawn of a new era, the dawn of a new world order. And any analysis of the SCO Summit has to be done in conjunction with the Summit in Alaska. I have been hearing for the past couple of weeks a lot of analogies regarding Czechoslovakia and the Munich Conference, the Munich Summit of 1936-1939.
But in that context, we also have to take into consideration another area or another historical example that is often forgotten by most of the analysts on geopolitical affairs, which is the secret agreement that Metternich, Thalerand, and Kastler-Rick signed during the France to re-establish itself, diplomatically speaking, after the Napoleonic Wars. Basically, the Alaska Summit was kind of a Vienna moment for Vladimir Putin. And now what we’re witnessing with the SCO is his re-entrance into global politics.
He has ceased to be a pariah. He’s meeting not only with great powers such as India, such as China, but also he’s engaging directly with middle powers and also with small states. And that was a very privileged opportunity.
We also have to do any analysis. It has to be taken into account that this Summit was carried out during the commemoration of the 80-year war victory, the anniversary of the victory or the liberation of China from Japanese aggression. And that’s another complex issue for Chinese analysts, because there has been an ongoing debate internally in China on what is the exact date in which World War II started for China.
There is a new school of thought that is trying to push forward the idea that it was during the Japanese takeover of Manchuria. The previous school of thought was 1938, when the large-scale invasion of the Japanese forces started. But we also have another school of thought that is 1895, the takeover of Taiwan by the Japanese forces.
So there are so many complexities into this. And the underlying message for the Global South, and particularly for Latin American states, is the famous quote by the Finnish Prime Minister, the one that President Trump failed to recognize in a recent summit, that our vacation with history has come to a complete end. We can have to cease ignoring the realities of contemporary geopolitics and usually competitions.
For the first time in many years, I see the people in Panama, people in all over Latin America are paying attention to what’s happening in the global stage, and particularly what is happening in Asia with the SCO summit. So yeah, it’s complex analysis, a complex scenario, but also it’s very interesting to see how interested different capitals of the region are in this summit.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, you’re in a region that’s very much in flux right now, and it’s in many ways what we can call a swing region, where parts of it can go in either direction. And so when you hear the messages come out of the SCO about the emphasis on multilateralism, the UN system, anti-hegemonic behavior, this again is all directed towards the United States. But at the same time, in Latin America right now, there is a pushback against some of the leftist leaders in Colombia, in Chile, in Bolivia, certainly it’s happened in Argentina already, and in Brazil as well, about whether they should become more on a Trump-aligned foreign policy.
So in terms of the messages that come out of the SCO, how does that resonate with elites and the political class across the region?
ALONSO ILLUECA: Call it active non-alignment, call it multi-alignment, I think that the SCO summit and the underlying debate around tariffs and the rhetoric surrounding the Trump administration highlights a very important fact, the impossibility of conducting an active non-alignment or a multi-alignment policy. Because what Washington is currently doing with the trend on tariffs is that they are pushing away potential allies in a geostrategic competition with China. I think that the best example of all of that is the presence of Narendra Modi in the summit.
I believe that Modi had not been in China for the last seven years, but the fact that President Trump decided to pick up a fight with Prime Minister Modi basically drove him towards China’s arms. The same thing could be said about the famous reverse Kissinger that Trump was trying to to partake in by engaging directly with Putin and forgetting about the serious violations of international law conducted by the Russian Federation in the War of Aggression against Ukraine. But all of this basically is pushing most of the countries in Latin America to an alignment policy, either that be towards the United States or towards China.
And as you clearly mentioned, what we currently have in Latin America and the Caribbean is the pendulum, the ideological pendulum going directly to the right. Because if you watch the polls, if you watch how the electoral results are playing out, what you will see is that you will get in the next year, most of the new elections will have new presidents from the right and new presidents more aligned with President Trump and his policy than to multilateralism or any other form of or idea of the international liberal order. So yeah, it’s complex because on the other side, you don’t have a country or you don’t have a power such as China that is trying to maintain the liberal order as it is.
Yes, they are trying to preserve multilateral system, but with Chinese characteristics. And that’s also an interesting take on it, because if you go to La Paz, if you go to Bogota or if you engage with people in Santiago de Chile, you will get very different ideas from the ones you get from Beijing. So it’s a complex balancing act.
ERIC OLANDER: I’d like to come back to this because you’re also writing on the Bolivian presidential election and how it relates to China. And I want to get to that, but I want to focus on this small state diplomacy part. And this is something that’s very important.
And again, we saw it on full display this past week in Tianjin, where China was engaging with Prime Minister Juan Manet of Cambodia, also Fan Minxin from the Prime Minister of Vietnam. Vietnam’s not quite a small state. It’s a middle power.
But nonetheless, these smaller states get that same level of attention as the larger states. You selected Dominica in particular as a country to focus on. Why Dominica?
Before we get into that, because I think a lot of people are going to confuse it with the Dominican Republic, which it’s not the same country. Tell us a little bit about Dominica before we get into the details of why China’s engagement with Dominica is so important.
ALONSO ILLUECA: One of the reasons why you have to engage with a country such as Dominica is because it’s a relatively small country. It’s a small island located in the Caribbean, which for most of the global powers or for the academia or for most of the analysts regarding geopolitical affairs, it will be rather inconsequential.
ERIC OLANDER: But a thousand people is the population, correct? I mean, very small population.
ALONSO ILLUECA: Yeah. And a very small GDP, like the GDP doesn’t even go that far into $1 billion. I think it’s around, it’s a very close figure towards $800 million.
So it’s a relatively small economy, a relatively small country. It’s located in the Caribbean, which is not accustomed to see any type of geopolitical dynamics. You have actually only one hegemon, and you have relatively stability there.
So it’s something that you wouldn’t see in the headlines of the news in every single day. But if something showed us the re-emergence of GST competition between China and the United States was how important were the small states. I don’t know if you recall the pictures of that, but a few years back, I don’t know if you remind this or our listeners remind this, but there were some people putting the parliament of Solomon Islands into flames because of the decisions regarding the establishment of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China.
It was a very, very complex moment in recent history for them. I even recall some people in the United States saying that they felt when they arrived to the Solomon Islands, that there was like arriving to the middle of a Cold War movie. So small states do matter in the context of geostrategic competition.
And that’s why Dominica came into my mind when writing this piece, because there’s also this tendency from us inhabitants of nominally what we call the Global South to see China as a monolithic entity, as an entity that conducts the same type of activities in all of the states that it engages with. What the Dominica example shows is that they have many strategies and many ways of engagement depending on the country that they engage with.
ERIC OLANDER: But let me just ask you a quick question, because a lot of people, when they think of Chinese diplomacy, they’ll think of, well, they go to Peru because Peru has a lot of resources. It has great port access. They’ll go to Brazil because there’s a large domestic market.
There’s lots of natural resources, critical minerals. It’s a big trading partner. They buy soybeans.
There’s always these strategic reasons. Now, we look at this tiny little island, Dominica, of 75,000 people, GDP of $800 million or so, no apparent natural resources that would benefit China strategically. Why does a big power like China take an interest in a tiny little country like Dominica?
ALONSO ILLUECA: It’s because China, again, is not a monolithic entity. China engages in what we call in the academia soft power, hard power, sharp power, and most importantly, smart power. I think that the case of Dominica is a very good example of what smart power is.
When I was writing this piece, in parallel to this, I was doing another piece for a Spanish newspaper, one that is based on Nicaragua, is from the exile community of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica. This news article, this op-ed article was on the establishment of the IOMED, of the International Organization of Mediation. One of the things that I did in conducting this analysis was to conduct another analysis on who were the members of the International Organization of Mediation.
What is International Organization of Mediation? It’s an organization established by the People’s Republic of China, and led by the People’s Republic of China, that seeks, in practice, to displace the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
ERIC OLANDER: The headquarters of this is a new facility that’s in Hong Kong, correct?
ALONSO ILLUECA: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly that one.
In that context, I was like, this is very interesting because this is a very good example of what some academics will call revisionism, because China is trying to basically refurbish the international liberal order to its own ways and means, or to its own likings. In that regard, it’s important to analyze the IOMED, again, not as a collection of authoritarian states. Yes, there are plenty of authoritarian states.
According to my data, 52% of the countries that are party to the IOMED are authoritarian states. Those from 33 countries, basically, you have around 18 that could be considered authoritarian or not free states. But you have 27% that are partially free and 21% which are considered to be free.
This is according to the Freedom House, according to the Liberty in the World Report. Which are these states that this is important. It’s fascinating to have that data.
Jamaica, Dominica, Kiribati, Nauru, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu. All of this have in common that there are small islands that are either under Caribbean or in Oceania. This is very, very interesting because you will tend to think why it is important for China to have in the IOMED such small states as these ones.
So you have two ways of reasoning it. Number one, because they will adhere to the new international world order led by China. The second one is because it’s smart diplomacy.
Because in forums like the UN, every vote matters. And having allies such as Vanuatu, Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, among others, and of course Dominica, it adds to your position a significant amount of votes. If you combine that with China’s leadership in the non-aligned movement in the group of 77, you have the bulk of the votes in any forum in which any state gets one vote.
ERIC OLANDER: And that vote, Dominica’s vote of representing 75,000 people, is worth exactly the same as Australia’s vote with tens of millions of people in the UN and elsewhere in the other international fora. So for the Chinese to invest in securing votes in the small states is actually much easier for them, given the fact that a lot of these states don’t get as much attention from major powers. Yeah.
ALONSO ILLUECA: And now if you combine that with the recently unveiled global governance initiative, then you get an enormous amount of soft power, and I will even call that moral power, from China, in the sense that they now can portray themselves and present themselves as the defenders of international law, of multilateralism, and of diplomacy, and of the international liberal order, actually. Because when you have a war that it’s trying to make some sense out of the most recent developments that we have been witnessing in the past few months, the return of interstate warfare, you get Cambodia and Thailand engaging in wars. You get India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, Russia and Ukraine.
If you see this continuum of interstate conflict, you will think that from the global south, our tendency is to advocate for peace, to advocate for the rule of law, for the international order to prevail. And in that regard, you need to find some type of support. That’s why I say that I don’t see any significant meaning right now to the concept of active non-alignment or multi-alignment, because what one of the parties is actually doing is saying, welcome to my camp, while the other one is saying, if you don’t align with me, I don’t want you in my camp.
So there’s the radical impossibility of active non-alignment or multi-alignment right now. What we currently have is either you align or you submit to my wishes, and that’s complex.
ERIC OLANDER: So we see this coalition that you’re talking about with these small countries in Oceania and the Caribbean that the Chinese invest in. And then when the Chinese go to the UN Human Rights Council, for example, and want to put forth a letter on Hong Kong or Xinjiang or Tibet, or they want to challenge a letter, for example, at the UN Human Rights Council from France, Canada, Australia, the United States, they then mobilize this coalition. Is that how the dividends of this investment are reflected in the diplomacy?
ALONSO ILLUECA: Yes. And let me add something. When you get cases such as the ones of countries currently aligned with the U.S., such as Argentina, that today decided to withdraw from the Human Rights Council, then you are basically throwing a hanging curveball right to the middle of the plate, because basically you are leaving all the space to Beijing. You are leaving all the space that you were supposed to defend to the country that you are trying to compete with. Because if Argentina follows through and withdraws from the Human Rights Council, as they did following the U.S. example, then you could get in the future other countries withdrawing from the Human Rights Council. The idea of the Human Rights Council was not to exclude the countries that violate human rights or that have problems with human rights.
It was to include them in order to work together with them in the improvement of the human rights situations in their own jurisdictions. But what we are witnessing now is that there is a group of countries that basically want to break with the current order, while there are other ones that say, I don’t like the order as it is, but I’m willing to work with it in order to shape it into my own liking. And that’s where the danger lies in, because we currently have no country defending the stability of the current order as it is.
ERIC OLANDER: And just for those of our listeners who are not from Panama or Cuba or El Salvador or any other baseball-loving country, a hanging curveball is a very easy ball to kind of knock out of the park. So let’s see. Let’s quickly turn back to Dominica, and then I want to get on to Bolivia very quickly.
You talked about the presence of Chinese labor, for example, in Dominica, and that’s a very contentious issue. That’s something that comes up quite a bit around the world. For these small countries, isn’t the presence of Chinese labor going to be more prominent, simply because in a country of 75,000 people, the labor pool isn’t very large.
If they want to get the development projects actually built, you’re going to have to bring in the engineers and even some of the workers, potentially, to do some of the work. I guess that’s one of the questions that I had when reading it, is that these tiny countries don’t have the resources available. So sometimes the necessity to bring in the labor is there, whereas a larger country, that could be easily offset by local labored pools.
ALONSO ILLUECA: Yeah, exactly. And that’s actually reflected on the population’s feelings towards the foreign laborers. They don’t criticize it a lot.
They just think that as long as they get the projects done, things are going to be better because there’s the promise of wealth, the promise of well-being after those projects are finished. So you don’t see that type of critical approach from the population within Dominica. You see that critical approach from Dominica’s partner saying, you have to be careful with this because this is the play good that we have been witnessing.
And that’s exactly what takes me back to my initial argument. Again, we are trying to analyze China as if it was a monolithic entity. No, it actually has many ways of operating.
And the case of Dominica shows that even if you bring foreign labor, even if you bring foreign goods, because there’s also another example of a distribution center they’re trying, they’re in the process of building, what you’re going to bring is wealth and people are going to be happy with you. This is what has actually happened. Dominica’s prime minister, long-serving prime minister, I think he has been in office for 20 years.
He has always expressed favorable views towards Chinese presence, not only on the sector of infrastructure projects. He has also said marvelous things about the Belt and Road Initiative and many other different areas. He has conducted official visits to Beijing.
So his way of viewing China is win-win cooperation. And from my recollection of the facts, and this is based on hard facts, I don’t see anything wrong with his current rationale. Yes, there are concerning signs in other places, but the case of Dominica is a case of success.
ERIC OLANDER: And is Dominica getting similar engagement from the United States or from the European Union, from other major powers, including Russia, or is China alone in this space?
ALONSO ILLUECA: The U.S. has presence, but again, it depends on the type of diplomacy that each country deploys. The U.S., whenever it engages with Dominica, it engages collectively with Dominica, with all the other prime ministers of all the other islands in the Caribbean. In the case of China, China, as a matter of practice, doesn’t do this type of multilateral engagement.
They tend to do more bilateral engagements, one-on-one. They do engage with them when they go to the China Select Forum, but they also have the space in which he gets to meet personally with President Xi and also meet personally with Foreign Minister Wang, and he gets to have significant access to relevant diplomats in Beijing. That’s something that you don’t get in Washington, in Brussels, or even in Moscow.
What you get, and I’m telling you this as a Central American citizen, you will get any of these countries to meet directly with the President of the United States or a member of the European Union. Yes, you could get that if you conduct significant efforts diplomatically speaking, but if you have access to them via the multilateral level, that will be your best choice available because that’s where you will get most of the meetings with. You will get to meet with them directly in a meeting room where you will have to share a table with six other prime ministers, with eight other presidents, and not get this one-on-one contact.
And that’s important for small states.
ERIC OLANDER: That’s right. And then also in 2023, if I recall, Hua Chunying, who’s an assistant foreign minister, very high-profile official in the Chinese foreign ministry, made a visit to Dominica. So getting these high-profile visits is something that also I think is important reciprocally because you don’t get the U.S. or the Europeans or the Russians necessarily to come to a small state like that. Also, just want to make a note this week that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Mexico and part of the agenda in Mexico is to talk about what he calls China’s malign influence in Latin America. So this push and pull, Alonso, that you’ve talked about among the great powers is very much on display right now as we’re talking about this. I want to quickly shift now to your upcoming column on Bolivia.
There’s a very important election that’s coming forward by the Christian Democrat who’s the centrist, Rodrigo Paz, and then also right-wing conservative and a former president, Jorge Quiroga, who came out last week with some very interesting rhetoric saying that if he is re-elected to office, he will cancel the billion-dollar lithium mining deals with both the Russians and the Chinese. And that, of course, is a signal to Donald Trump and the White House that he is going to align behind them and he’s going to counter China’s influence in Bolivia, at least. And Bolivia is a critical country given its role in the lithium triangle.
That is, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are the three largest lithium producers in the world. So there are some very serious consequences here. Of course, Argentina, President Mele came to power saying he was never going to do business with communists.
He was never going to support them. And then once in power, he very much moderated his language. Tell us a little bit about what you’re hearing in Bolivia with regards to the Chinese.
ALONSO ILLUECA: So it’s complex again. I think that the same mistake we do with China, we do it with Latin American states. We tend to think that all Latin American states are alike.
And it’s actually the complete opposite. Yeah, 200 years ago, there was this dream by Simon Bolivar to try to unite all the states of Latin America in a single confederation. But in practice, this has never come to fruition.
So Bolivia has a very, very complex history. It had a complex history of military dictatorships, corrupt presidents, corrupt establishment, and upper classes governing over the indigenous population. And then you get this phenomenon that is called Evo Morales getting into office.
He was in office, I believe for 15 years. And then he hands over power to his successors.
ERIC OLANDER: And Evo Morales, just for our audience, was distinctive because he was indigenous, correct? He wasn’t of Spanish descent, correct?
ALONSO ILLUECA: Yeah, it was not the same as, for example, Goni or even Tuto Quiroga, Jorge Quiroga, the current presidential candidate and former president of Bolivia. He was a member of the indigenous population. And that goes right to the heart of the discussion because during Evo Morales’ presidency, basically the status of the indigenous population was significantly improved.
Also, it was significantly improved because in Latin America, in the Americas as a whole, we have a very comprehensive human rights system that recognizes the collective rights of the indigenous populations. So the issue surrounding the lithium projects touches upon the rights of indigenous populations. Why?
Why is that? Because part of their identity, of their way of living and of their cosmovision is tied to their lands. So if you affect the lands with projects that are going to cause environmental degradation, you are affecting the collective mantra, you’re affecting the collective entity of the indigenous people.
So that carries some important ramifications.
ERIC OLANDER: You also get the part… Quiroga isn’t going to ban the Chinese because of the protect indigenous populations, correct? He’s going to do it for more ideological reasons.
ALONSO ILLUECA: There is a component of sovereign slash ideological things surrounding that. Also, you have to take into consideration that, yes, but also you have to take into consideration, for example, the frontrunner’s position, Rodrigo Paz. He has a mild position on that when you compare it with Jorge Quiroga, but his position is actually the same.
We have to review these contracts because they were celebrated without any type of transparency. He’s even quoted saying nobody knows what those contracts say. So yeah, it’s complex.
Yes, there’s an ideological component, but again, how far that ideological component will go? I don’t think it will go that far as you mentioned with the case of President Millet. The case of President Millet was, I think, even more incendiary rhetorically speaking than the one given by Quiroga.
At the end, what has proven consistently in Bolivian society during the last 20 years is the power of mobilization of the indigenous population there. Remember, Juan Morales right now is basically abandoned. He’s basically hidden in one region of Bolivia and he’s being protected by different groups that inhabit that region.
So yeah, there is an element of internal or domestic politics that raises the complexity of the issue. So yeah, I could see that there is an ideological component, but I also would like to add that all things considered, you cannot erase the fact that the most dominant party in recent history of Bolivia just lost a significant amount of votes. But those votes are basically disenfranchised votes that could easily go to the centrist candidate.
That’s some people are saying that Rodrigo Paz is surely going to be the next president of Bolivia. So in that particular context, even though the statements of Quiroga are very incendiary, you will get a Christian Democrat, a centrist as Rodrigo Paz revisiting the contracts. In that event, you could see large mobilization of peoples against the contracts.
There’s even an injunction from a judge in Bolivia ordering to stop the projects. So it’s complex.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah, very complex. A couple of other things to take into account is that the price of lithium right now is quite low and the Chinese have backed out of lithium projects in Chile. Also, they’ve shut down a major lithium producer in China itself in part because of these low prices.
So I’m not sure how much leverage Bolivia may have because given the surplus of lithium that’s out there and the expansion of Chinese mining in Africa for lithium and other parts of the world, they may find that their leverage to actually negotiate better deals may not be as strong as they thought. Also, the Chinese have over the years dealt with these issues of polarized politics, particularly campaign politics, quite a bit. Remember in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the previous president, very anti-Chinese, but it didn’t seem to have much impact on the economic relationship.
And so while we see the politics sometimes being very, very hostile towards the Chinese, as we saw in Argentina, the economic relationship has been rather robust and sustained all of those ups and downs. So just because we may see these right-wing politicians in Colombia, Chile, and Bolivia run on what ostensibly are anti-China platforms that may not indicate that the economic relationships are derailed. Is that correct?
ALONSO ILLUECA: Yes, but I will add a caveat that is called the United States of America under President Donald Trump. Like in the sense that what I’m witnessing right now, it’s a wave of support for the right wing and particularly the politicization of the China issue in all the significant electoral races for the next year. So let’s try to list it.
We have Bolivia at the run of elections in October. Then we get on November Honduras. In Honduras, in another piece that I wrote for CGSP, you get the two front runners that come from the opposition and are right-wing candidates stating that they will be even willing to re-establish ties with Taiwan.
ERIC OLANDER: And signing up for the Belt and Road and switching has been rather disappointing for Honduras. There’s not been the windfall that many expected.
ALONSO ILLUECA: Exactly. Then you have to add to that Brazil and how important the current dynamics with the United States have been for the political survival of President Luis Ignacio Lula Silva in the sense that he may owe another term in the presidency to Donald Trump because the tariffs have become the perfect excuse for any failings of his own economic policies. But then you have Colombia, and Colombia is another great question put forward by the political elites there in the sense that you get Gustavo Petro that decided to join the Belt and Road Initiative and basically had a very, very public confrontation on X with President Trump and that has recently decided to travel to China and to establish some type of allegiance with Beijing.
And then you have the right-wing conservative candidates basically saying, no, we are taking us back to the U.S. and to the orbit of NATO. We are going back to the way that we used to be. Then you also have Peru.
That’s another place where we have to pay close attention. Yes, because we have Chiang Kai-shek, but we also have in Peru a very complex situation because we had what remains of a left-wing government that will be in direct confrontation with the potential presidential frontrunner will be the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori. So again, you get all of this group of potential presidential or hopeful presidential candidates that are more aligned to Washington and that are using the weapon of Beijing in order to get some type of boost in their political aspirations.
ERIC OLANDER: And do you think China should be worried about what’s going to happen with these elections in the year ahead?
ALONSO ILLUECA: Again, China has the largest diplomatic network in the world. And if the case of Dominica shows something is that they remain very effective in the use of the diplomatic tools at their disposal. So should they be worried?
Yes, of course, they have to be worried. Why? Because they are a global power in the middle of a GST competition and in the middle of the emergence of a new international order.
They are playing their cards. This is the moment for strategy. This is the moment for establishing alliances.
And that’s what they were doing in the Shanghai cooperation organization. But at the same time, you have something that a country as China struggles to deal with. These are all democratic countries.
And in democracies, things are not as stable as they are in autocracies. And particularly in Latin American democracies, they tend to be unstable and, may I say, chaotic. Again, we have, yes, we have a predisposition towards democracy, but also we have some tendency towards chaos.
The best example, again, is Peru. Who was the last president of Peru to finish his full tenure? Every few years, we get a process in Peru.
If it’s not President Vizcarra, it’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. You get many presidents being subjected to some type of prosecution or some type of impeachment mechanism by the Peruvian Congress, and then you get political instability. You get the same things right now in Colombia, the same concerns.
You get the re-emergence of terrorism, the re-emergence of an internal conflict, and so on. This is a very complex region of the world. And China is a very complex sector, but it also has to come to terms with the democratic ethos of the region, but also the chaotic ethos.
So there’s no way of predicting it. They should be worried.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, I want to recommend to everybody to follow the great work that Alonso is doing. It’s on our website, and you’ll see the article, Small State, Big Gains, Why Dominica Matters in China’s Global Strategy. Click on his name and all of his articles will come up.
They’re all open, no paywall there, so you can read and follow everything that he’s doing. Alonso, thank you so much for all of your insights today and for helping us to understand, again, what is an extremely complex region and China’s role in what’s happening there. I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Harry, and as usual, happy to be here. It’s great, and I want to thank everybody for joining us today. We’ll be back again with another edition of the China Global South podcast.
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I appreciate it, and for the entire team around the world at CGSP, thank you so much for listening and for watching.
