The first wave: Economic priming and the Washington Consensus in twilight

The initial wave of rigorous academic inquiry into Sino-Latin American relations, emerging in the late 2000s and solidifying in the mid-2010s, was overwhelmingly economic in its orientation. This scholarship was animated by a central, transformative event: the unprecedented boom in commodity prices driven by Chinese demand, which provided a powerful tailwind for growth after the often-painful structural adjustments of the 1990s. As detailed in historical overviews in volumes like China, Latin America, and the Global Economy, the 1990s were a period of deindustrialization and social dislocation for many countries that followed the neoliberal playbook of privatization and trade liberalization. Against this backdrop, the arrival of China as a major economic partner, as Chris and Álvaro. argue in China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics, offered a profound break from the past. It represented not just a new market but a new type of partner: a state-led economy offering massive state-to-state financing without the intrusive political conditionality and austerity requirements historically attached to International Monetary Fund or World Bank loans, presenting both immense opportunities and significant new structural risks. This rhetoric of “no political strings attached,” at least in its initial formulation, was a cornerstone of China’s appeal, allowing Latin American leaders to pursue domestic agendas without external policy dictation, a potent proposition for a region with a long history of US intervention and International Monetary Fund–mandated austerity. This dynamic was framed by both Chinese and many Latin American leaders, like Brazil’s Lula da Silva, within the discourse of south-south cooperation, presenting the relationship not as one of dependency but as a partnership of equals from the Global South, forging a more multipolar world in defiance of northern hegemony.

The core argument of this era was that the “China boom” effectively created a new, albeit informal “commodity consensus” that supplanted the Washington Consensus. This new consensus, characterized by state-led extraction and export of primary materials, offered Latin American governments a fiscal windfall that granted them greater autonomy from Washington and the international financial institutions it dominated. This dynamic is explored in several of the reviewed volumes, which show how the new consensus empowered the region’s Pink Tide governments. However, the literature also warned of the perils of this model. Contributors to volumes like China and Latin America and China, Latin America, and the Global Economy highlight the risk of “reprimarization,” in which economies become overreliant on exporting a narrow range of raw materials, and the potential for Chinese manufactured goods to “crowd out” local industries, thereby hollowing out domestic industrial capacity. This created a fundamental tension: While the boom provided short-term gains and policy space, it also reinforced historical patterns of dependency on primary commodity exports, posing a long-term challenge to sustainable and diversified development. This reprimarization had deep domestic political consequences, as it empowered traditional agrarian and mining elites over nascent industrial sectors, altering the balance of power within countries like Brazil, where the bancada ruralista (agribusiness caucus) gained immense influence in Congress, and Peru, whose economic health became almost singularly tied to Chinese demand for copper.

The volume Connecting China, Latin America, and the Caribbean enriches this early narrative by shifting the focus from abstract macroeconomic trends to the tangible realities of infrastructure projects on the ground. While much of the first-wave literature focused on trade flows, this bottom-up perspective examines how the initial economic engagement manifested in the construction of ports, roads, dams, and railways. These projects were often the first and most visible signs of China’s presence, framed by both Chinese and Latin American governments as symbols of modernization and south-south partnership. However, as case studies in the book reveal, they also brought complex social and environmental consequences. The construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam in Ecuador, for example, while celebrated as a landmark energy project, was fraught with controversies over its financing terms, accusations of shoddy construction leading to operational failures, and its significant environmental impact on the Coca River basin, affecting Indigenous communities downstream. The book details how these projects created new forms of labor relations, often involving the importation of Chinese workers, which led to tensions with local labor forces and challenges in applying domestic labor laws. This ethnographic lens provides a crucial corrective to purely state-centric analyses, demonstrating that the economic opportunity was experienced and contested in profoundly different ways at the local level, where the language of geopolitics was translated into everyday struggles over land, water, and livelihoods.

In retrospect, this first wave of scholarship was essential in establishing the empirical reality and economic significance of China’s arrival. However, its limitations have become clearer with time, a point underscored by the more recent, critical perspectives in volumes like China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics and China, the United States, and the Future of Latin America. The initial focus on the commodity boom often meant that less visible forms of engagement received less attention. These included burgeoning technological ties and, crucially, the steady accumulation of sovereign debt through opaque, resource-backed loans, particularly from the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China. The “oil for loans” deals with Venezuela and Ecuador, for example, created a new and troubling form of financial dependency that was not fully appreciated until the commodity boom unraveled. In this model, China provided billions in upfront financing in exchange for future oil shipments at prearranged prices. When global oil prices crashed after 2014, these nations found their debt burden skyrocketing in real terms, forcing them to commit ever-larger volumes of their primary export just to service their debt to China, a vicious cycle that severely constrained their economic sovereignty. This model, often criticized later as “debt-trap diplomacy,” lacked the transparency and adherence to international lending standards of the Paris Club, creating significant long-term vulnerabilities. As the contributions in Denoon’s volume begin to articulate, the early economistic literature often failed to apply a realist or geopolitical lens to China’s actions, treating it as a neutral economic force rather than a strategic actor with a coherent long-term vision. It was the unraveling of the boom, combined with the sharpening of U.S.-China tensions explored in later works, that would expose the substantial structural risks of the new dependency and force the scholarly paradigm to shift, moving geopolitics from the subtext to the headline.

The second wave: The crucible of geopolitical competition

By the mid-2010s, the narrative of a benign, purely economic partnership began to buckle under the weight of geopolitical realities. The end of the commodity supercycle laid bare the vulnerabilities of dependent economies, while Xi Jinping’s more assertive foreign policy—marked by the launch of the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative in 2013—and the United States’ official pivot toward great power competition, as codified in its 2017 National Security Strategy, fundamentally altered the strategic landscape. The scholarly literature responded in kind, initiating a second, more anxious wave of analysis that recentered the discussion on the geopolitical implications of China’s presence. The central argument of this new wave, powerfully articulated in recent volumes like China-US Rivalry and Regional Reordering in Latin America and the Caribbean (2024) and foreshadowed in collections like China, the United States, and the Future of Latin America (2017), is that Latin America has transitioned from being a beneficiary of global growth to an arena for global rivalry. This new paradigm posits that the region’s relationship with China can no longer be understood primarily through the economistic lens of trade and investment, but instead must be analyzed as a central component of a larger, global struggle for influence, in which economic decisions become securitized and diplomatic relations are framed as zero-sum tests of loyalty.

The 2024 volume China-US Rivalry and Regional Reordering exemplifies this paradigm shift. Its contributors move decisively beyond a simple “triangle” of economic choice to depict a crucible of coercion. The core premise, as laid out by the editors Li Xing and Javier Vadell, is that the intensifying, zero-sum competition between Washington and Beijing has become the primary structural force shaping the region’s foreign policy and development choices. The book systematically dissects how this rivalry manifests across various domains, including in “gray zone” competition—coercive actions that fall below the threshold of armed conflict. In diplomacy, for example, chapters detail the diplomatic tug of war in Central America and the Caribbean, where Beijing has successfully induced countries like Panama (in 2017), El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, using promises of investment, infrastructure projects, and access to the Chinese market as powerful inducements. In economic decision-making, the volume explores how a country’s choice to join the Belt and Road Initiative or accept Chinese financing for a strategic asset like the Chancay megaport in Peru—majority owned by the Chinese state enterprise COSCO Shipping—or a deepwater port in Ushuaia, Argentina, is no longer viewed as a sovereign commercial decision, but as a geopolitical statement that invites intense scrutiny and potential countermeasures from the United States. Case studies on phenomena like “vaccine diplomacy” during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate how access to Chinese Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines became an effective tool of soft power and diplomatic leverage, often arriving faster and with fewer conditions than their Western counterparts, thereby strengthening China’s political partnerships in the region at a time of acute crisis.

The 2017 edited volume China, the United States, and the Future of Latin America serves as an intellectual bridge to this new reality. Its essays, written at a moment of transition, capture a field in flux. The volume stages a vibrant debate between differing perspectives within the US policymaking and academic communities. On the one hand, chapters authored by economists and development scholars, such as Albert Keidel, continue to operate within a modified economic framework, arguing that China’s economic needs are largely complementary to Latin America’s strengths and that the U.S. should seek pragmatic cooperation rather than confrontation. On the other hand, contributions from security analysts such as R. Evan Ellis sound a much louder alarm. They highlight the growing strategic risks, pointing to China’s use of economic statecraft as a tool for political influence, its efforts to build influence within regional militaries through training and exchanges, and the potential for dual-use infrastructure projects—like the Chinese-run space tracking station in Neuquén, Argentina—to serve future military purposes. This duality is also a central theme in China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics, where contributors grapple with the tension between China’s discourse of south-south cooperation, often promoted in forums like BRICS and the China-CELAC Forum, and its actions as an emerging global power with its own clearcut interests that do not always align with those of its Latin American partners. These works underscore the growing realization that China’s economic statecraft is inextricably linked to its geopolitical ambitions, directly challenging US hemispheric leadership.

When this geopolitical framework is placed in dialogue with the earlier economic one, the analytical landscape is sharpened considerably. However, this powerful lens carries its own risks. A relentless focus on the U.S.-China dyad can inadvertently flatten the immense diversity of Latin America itself, a point that contributors to China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics explicitly address by centering the concept of agency. A nation’s stance toward China is often as much a product of its internal electoral cycles, the lobbying of its domestic industrial and agricultural elites, and its ideological currents as it is a calculated response to signals from Washington or Beijing. This is where a volume like China, Latin America, and the Global Economy, with its focus on “national issues,” provides crucial depth. Its chapters illustrate how distinct national development models—such as Brazil’s complex relationship with developmentalism, which creates internal conflict between a protrade agribusiness sector and a protectionist industrial sector, versus Chile’s entrenched neoliberal framework, which prioritizes market access above all else—produce vastly different foreign policy outcomes and modes of engagement with China. Furthermore, the ethnographic focus of Connecting China, Latin America, and the Caribbean on “everyday life” serves as a powerful reminder that state-level agency is itself a complex negotiation, often contested by subnational actors, social movements, and local communities who may resist or co-opt the grand projects conceived in national capitals.

Many Latin American states have attempted to practice a foreign policy of “active nonalignment” or strategic “hedging,” seeking to maximize benefits from both sides while avoiding definitive commitments. This is not simply passive balancing but an active strategy of diversification across domains: pursuing deeper trade and investment ties with China while simultaneously reaffirming security partnerships and democratic values with the United States and Europe. Therefore, while the second wave of scholarship has been crucial in correcting the political naivete of the first, it must guard against creating a new form of determinism—a geostrategic determinism that sees Latin American states as little more than flotsam on the waves of great-power politics. The most pressing challenge, which the newest scholarship reviewed here is beginning to tackle, is to integrate this top-down perspective on structural pressures with a bottom-up understanding of Latin American agency in all its complex, multilevel, and often contradictory forms.

The new frontier: The dilemmas of technological sovereignty

As the geopolitical rivalry intensifies, its most decisive and enduring battles may be fought on the terrain of technology. A third, nascent wave of scholarship, represented by works like Sascha Hannig Núñez’s Technology Transfer to Latin American Countries and with themes echoed in Connecting China, Latin America, and the Caribbean, is excavating this critical new frontier. This literature moves beyond traditional metrics of trade and investment to investigate a more intangible but arguably more consequential dimension of China’s influence: its role as a purveyor of advanced technology and digital infrastructure. This analytical shift, as Núñez argues, posits that the nature of twenty-first-century dependency is being redefined. It forces a radical reframing of the core questions for Latin America, moving from the cyclical vulnerabilities of commodity dependency to the structural and potentially irreversible specter of dependency on foreign code, data, and technical standards. This represents a qualitative evolution in the nature of external influence. While commodity reliance shapes a nation’s economic cycles, technological dependence, as argued in volumes like China-US Rivalry and Regional Reordering, can shape the very central nervous system of a modern state and society—how a government communicates, a military operates, an economy functions, and a state monitors its citizens.

The volume Technology Transfer to Latin American Countries is central to this emerging conversation, offering a sober and critical counterpoint to the often-optimistic official rhetoric surrounding cooperation between China and Latin America and the Caribbean in science and technology. The book systematically challenges the narrative that this cooperation represents a straightforward path to modernization. Instead, its contributors pose a series of critical questions about the nature of this “transfer.” Is it genuine capacity building that empowers local innovation, fosters domestic industries, and creates high-skill jobs? Or is it primarily a “turnkey” operation, exporting finished Chinese systems, often financed by Chinese loans tied to the use of Chinese vendors, thereby locking recipient countries into a specific and proprietary technological ecosystem? This turnkey model, often involving package deals from institutions like the China Development Bank, ensures that Chinese state enterprises are responsible for construction and implementation, limiting the role of local firms and the development of indigenous technical expertise.

The book explores this dilemma across multiple sectors, providing granular case studies. A prominent example is the Bolivian Túpac Katari 1 (TKSAT-1) communications satellite. Launched in 2013, the project was financed largely by a Chinese loan and was designed, built, and launched by a Chinese state-owned enterprise. While the project successfully brought unprecedented telecommunications connectivity to remote rural areas of Bolivia, the case study highlights the deep ambiguities of such a partnership. The satellite’s ground control stations were built with Chinese assistance, and for years, its operation relied heavily on Chinese technical expertise. The “transfer” of knowledge was limited, and the project did little to foster an indigenous Bolivian aerospace industry capable of developing a successor satellite. Similarly, the book examines Ecuador’s nationwide ECU 911 integrated security system, a network of cameras and sensors built largely by Chinese firms like Huawei and CEIEC. Publicly lauded for its role in reducing crime rates, the system was also heavily criticized by digital rights activists for its potential use in political surveillance and its lack of transparency, illustrating the profound governance trade-offs embedded in the adoption of such technologies.

A critical theme woven throughout this new literature, and explored in detail by Núñez, is that of “standards setting” as a subtle but potent form of long-term power. Adopting Chinese technological standards—whether for 5G telecommunications (promoted by Huawei), digital television (the DTMB standard adopted by Cuba and Venezuela), or e-commerce and digital payment platforms—is not a neutral act. Although it is true that Western standards also create forms of path dependency, the geopolitical mistrust surrounding Chinese state-linked firms adds a unique security dimension to these choices. It can shape a country’s entire regulatory environment, influence its future industrial development, and determine its integration into competing global economic spheres. By embedding its standards, often through its activities in international bodies like the International Telecommunication Union or via the “Digital Silk Road” component of the Belt and Road Initiative, China can create powerful network effects and path dependency, making it progressively more difficult and costly for a country to switch to alternative systems.

This analysis of technology adds a crucial, disquieting layer to the preceding debates. It complicates the economic calculus of the first wave, as a contract for a 5G network is not like a contract for soybeans; its implications for national sovereignty and economic structure are far more profound and permanent. It also injects the most potent fuel into the geopolitical rivalry of the second wave. As detailed in China-US Rivalry, the US Clean Network initiative, launched under the first Trump administration, was a direct response to this dynamic. This initiative saw the US State Department actively lobby Latin American governments, framing the use of “untrusted” vendors like Huawei not just as a commercial choice but as a national security threat that could jeopardize intelligence sharing and security cooperation with the United States. This techno-geopolitical bifurcation forces Latin American nations into a difficult position in which choosing a technology provider is tantamount to choosing a strategic alignment.

The volume Connecting China, Latin America, and the Caribbean, with its focus on infrastructure and everyday life, provides a vital bottom-up perspective on these high-tech dynamics. It moves the analysis from the abstract realm of data flows and technical standards to the lived experience of people interacting with this new infrastructure. Case studies in the volume explore how Chinese-built subways, ports, and telecommunication networks are physically reconfiguring urban spaces, changing daily commutes, and creating new forms of social connection and disconnection. This ethnographic approach reveals how technology acts as a hard-edged carrier for a softer, more pervasive form of influence that shapes norms, ideas, and even philosophies of governance at the local level. A smart city system is not just a neutral tool; it embodies a particular vision of urban management and social control that is negotiated, and sometimes resisted, by the citizens who live within it.

This emerging focus on the technological dimension presents the most urgent challenge to Latin American agency, a central concern in Chris and Álvaro’s China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics. While a country can, in theory, diversify its commodity exports, extricating itself from a deeply embedded technological ecosystem is orders of magnitude more difficult. It requires a level of independent regulatory capacity, technical expertise, and long-term strategic planning that is often in short supply, particularly when faced with the immense resources and global scale of Chinese and US tech giants. The critical question for the next generation of scholarship is thus, Which concrete strategies can Latin American nations pursue to harness technology for development without sacrificing their sovereignty? This requires moving beyond simply diagnosing the problem of dependency, a task these new volumes begin to undertake by highlighting the need for robust national data protection regimes modeled on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, strategic investment in human capital, and exploring regional collaboration in science and technology to create economies of scale. The path to technological sovereignty for Latin America is fraught with difficulty, but as this new wave of literature makes clear, the stakes could not be higher.

Conclusion: Beyond the gaze of giants, toward a scholarship of agency

The intellectual journey charted by these volumes is both impressive and indispensable. It chronicles, with increasing sophistication, the transformation of the Sino–Latin American relationship from a matter of political economy to one of high-stakes geostrategic and technological maneuvering. The analytical lens has shifted decisively. We have moved from the initial paradigm defined by the commodity consensus, in which the primary questions revolved around managing economic opportunity, to the contemporary framework of a “crucible of coercion,” in which, as the contributors to China-US Rivalry and Regional Reordering contend, the region is being fundamentally reordered by great power competition. Most recently, a new frontier of inquiry has emerged, focusing on the sovereign dilemmas of the digital age, where, as explored in Sascha Hannig Núñez’s Technology Transfer to Latin American Countries, the debate is no longer about dependency on soybeans but about dependency on code, data, and technical standards. China’s image has thus been recast from a distant, benevolent trading partner to an intimate, influential, and deeply consequential actor whose presence is reshaping the hemisphere in fundamental and often irreversible ways.

Yet, in concluding, we must also turn a critical eye upon the field of study itself. A potential pitfall running through much of this literature, particularly in its English-language variant, is the persistence of what might be called “external gazing.” In the past, Latin American studies often suffered from a Washington-centric worldview in which regional dynamics were interpreted primarily through their relevance to US interests. The risk today, as this collection of works demonstrates, is that this is being replaced by a bifurcated worldview centered on Washington and Beijing. In this new framing, the region is primarily understood and analyzed as a function of the interests, strategies, and actions of these two external giants. While this perspective, articulated powerfully in volumes like Denoon’s China, the United States, and the Future of Latin America and Xing and Vadell’s China-US Rivalry, is crucial for understanding the structural constraints within which Latin America operates, its dominance risks reducing the region to a chessboard. In such a framework, Latin American agency—while a stated concern in volumes like Vadell et al.’s China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics—can become a residual category, a reaction to, rather than a primary driver of, events. The internal logics, historical trajectories, and diverse aspirations of the nations themselves can be obscured by the long shadows of the competing powers.

The future of the field requires a Copernican Revolution in perspective, decentering Washington and Beijing and placing the diverse political economies and domestic institutional dynamics of Latin American nations at the core of the analysis. To truly operationalize this shift, scholarship must engage more deeply with the region’s own intellectual output, which offers a corrective to great-power-centric narratives. A prime example is the recent report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Las relaciones entre América Latina y el Caribe y China: Áreas de oportunidad para un desarrollo más productivo, inclusivo y sostenible (CEPAL 2025). Far from viewing the region merely as a chessboard for US-China rivalry, CEPAL diagnoses the relationship through the lens of Latin America’s own structural deficiencies—specifically the three development traps of low growth, high inequality, and weak institutional capacity. Consequently, the report reframes engagement with China not as a matter of geopolitical alignment, but as a pragmatic opportunity to overcome these traps through a new generation of productive development policies. By identifying nine specific areas of opportunity—ranging from institutional modernization to cooperation in renewable energy and digital transformation—CEPAL articulates a distinct agency that seeks to utilize Chinese trade and investment to drive an endogenous productive transformation. This work serves as a crucial reminder that for Latin American policymakers, the primary strategic goal is not balancing superpowers, but leveraging external partnerships to resolve internal structural gaps.

Second, future research must move toward more granular, comparative analyses within the region. Instead of treating Latin America as a monolith, we must ask why countries with similar structural positions respond so differently to the pressures of the rivalry. A deeper dive into the literature reveals the stark contrasts. Consider Mexico versus Brazil, a comparison implicitly invited by the national case studies in Schneider and Teixeira’s volume. Mexico, deeply integrated into the North American production chain via the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), perceives China largely as a formidable manufacturing competitor. Its China policy is thus heavily constrained and shaped by its relationship with the United States. Brazil, as a fellow BRICS member, a major commodity exporter, and an aspiring global player, engages with China on a much more complex, cooperative-competitive basis, viewing Beijing as both a vital economic partner and a potential rival for influence in the Global South. Answering why these differences exist requires centering internal variables: the relative power of a country’s foreign ministry versus its economic ministry; the intense lobbying by specific domestic sectors, like the powerful agribusiness caucus in Brazil or the industrial lobby in Mexico; the growing influence of subnational actors like provincial governors who sign their own deals with Chinese companies; and the role of civil society and social movements in contesting the socioenvironmental impacts of Chinese projects. The kind of bottom-up, ethnographic work seen in Enrique et al.’s Connecting China, Latin America, and the Caribbean provides a powerful methodological model for this, showing how macro-level forces are experienced, negotiated, and resisted in the context of everyday life.

Finally, the field must develop more robust frameworks for analyzing and understanding Latin American strategy—both at the national level and, crucially, at the level of regional collective action (or its notable absence). This means moving beyond simply labeling state behavior as “hedging” and instead dissecting the specific, innovative statecraft tools that countries have employed to maintain maneuverability, a key theme in Chris and Álvaro’s focus on agency. For a nation like Chile, this has meant a decades-long policy of proactive economic diplomacy, securing a free-trade agreement with China far ahead of its neighbors while simultaneously maintaining its close security partnership with the United States. For a country like Argentina, strategy is often dictated by financial necessity, using the prospect of Chinese finance as crucial leverage in its perennial negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and other Western creditors. Equally important is a critical analysis of the failure of regional collective action. The collapse of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the chronic paralysis of Mercosur have created an institutional vacuum. This has allowed China to effectively pursue a “hub and spoke” strategy of bilateral engagement, picking off countries one by one and maximizing its own leverage. The China-CELAC Forum, mentioned in several volumes, can be seen as Beijing’s successful attempt to create its own region-wide multilateral framework, stepping into a space that Latin America has failed to occupy for itself.

The coming decade will be a defining test of Latin American sovereignty. The choices made in boardrooms, ministries, and laboratories from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego will shape the region’s trajectory for generations. The urgent task for scholarship, therefore, is not merely to document the growing shadows cast by the giants of the north and east. The external gazing paradigm, while providing essential context, is analytically insufficient and can have real-world consequences, reinforcing a narrative of fatalism that limits the perceived policy options for Latin American actors themselves. A scholarship of true value must be a scholarship of agency. It must illuminate the diverse and difficult paths that Latin American nations themselves are forging—through internal political contestation, creative diplomacy, and strategic innovation—as they seek to claim their own future. The most compelling stories are not just in the strategic documents produced in Washington and Beijing, but also in the contested spaces within Latin America where these global forces are being debated, resisted, adapted, and remade. Empowering this search for autonomy, rather than simply observing its constraints, is the most vital contribution the scholarly community can make.