Latest update April 30th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 03, 2013 Editorial
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the Caribbean might be the first as President but he has been here before as a Vice-President in 2009 and 2011 and knows the region fairly well.
While most commentators have focused on the economic and commercial aspects of his visit, there are the larger, geopolitical issues, especially China’s relationship with the US that must also be factored in.
On his way to the US during one of his trips, he passed through Mexico as he will again do this time. Addressing overseas Chinese there, he let his hair down and was uncharacteristically blunt in alluding to the US interventionist proclivities that have long troubled the region: “”There are some foreigners who had eaten their fill and had nothing better to do, pointing their fingers at our affairs. China does not, first, export revolution; second, export poverty and hunger; or third, cause unnecessary trouble for you. What else is there to say?” At that time he had already been identified as the preferred candidate for the Presidency.
It is noteworthy that the man who is now President of China was speaking in the country most literally in the US “backyard” and it appears that China is making a conscious effort to develop linkages across the world that are based on more positive variables than the ones he criticized.
After taking office in March, President Xi made his first visit to Russia and three to resource rich African countries – Tanzania, South Africa and Congo-Brazzaville. It is a sign of the times that China, the home of Mao and his “little red book”, once the bible of third world revolutionaries, should boast that it does not export “revolution”. The Chinese President’s scheduling of his second official tour directly into the US backyard cannot be coincidental.
While Mexico is very important economically to China – it is their second largest trading partner in Latin America and two way trade has risen10% to US$36.7 billion – the Asian behemoth is very conscious of the troubled relations between the two countries based on the refusal of the US to change its strategy on its “war on drugs”.
The visit to Costa Rica is also very pertinent in this regard. It is the first, and so far only, country in Central America to switch (in 2007) diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China.
The two countries concluded a free trade agreement in 2010 and business has since boomed, with two-way trade up 30.5% in 2012 to $6.2 billion. The Chinese might be hoping Costa Rica will have a demonstrator effect on the rest of the region.
When Xi Jinping was VP he made this point explicitly to ECLAC in 2008. China exports to Latin America reached $121.7 billion last year, while its imports bounded to $119.8 billion.
The country Xi Jinping heads is poised to replace the US as the largest economy in the world based on purchasing power parity, by 2016.
The tools of modern Chinese diplomacy are simple: massive grants and loans for development projects and strict observance of the UN rule on “non-interference” in the affairs of other states. These positions, in stark contradistinction to the “conditionalities” of the western-controlled IMF/World Bank, has earned China much credit in those countries that believe they should be allowed to evolve their own path to prosperity.
In 2011 when another Chinese VP Hui visited Trinidad for a China-Caribbean economic and trade forum, he announced his country would provide up to $1 billion in soft loans to Caribbean countries to help bolster its economic relationship with the region. It was to take advantage of that offer that the CJIA expansion plan was evidently proffered the Guyanese government.
This visit by President Xi Jinping, might have been prompted by the US waning interest in T&T’s natural gas because of its own shale exploitation, but it is quite likely that he will offer other concrete development initiatives to those countries that only received “moral” support during US VP Joe Biden’s recent visit.
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