Decolonization Models for America’s Last Colony: Puerto Rico

China and Latin America

166 China and Latin America February 23, 2006 Chinese civilization, which is thousands of years old, has been the most successful in the history of the universe. Its most extraordinary icon is the Great Wall, constructed more than two thousand years ago. It is the biggest construction project ever undertaken. Construction took dozens of years, and it is the only structure on the planet that can be seen from the moon. The wall was to protect China’s civilization from barbarians. By the thirteenth century, the Chinese people already had printed books (one thousand years before Gutenberg’s “invention”) and gunpowder and had developed centralized systems of government. Today in the economic field China continues its ascending path. The [Chinese] State Statistics Office announced several weeks ago that the Chinese economy grew 9.9 percent in 2005. China has surpassed France and the United Kingdom and is now the fourth most important economic power in the world, after the United States, Japan, and Germany. The Chinese economy has experienced an average growth of 9.6 percent since 1979. At the end of 1994, the president of China, Hu Jintao, visited Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba, launching a big political and commercial offensive by China in Latin America. Latin America, with 500 million inhabitants , is the second most important foreign investment target for China. On his visit to Latin America, Hu made investment promises of $100 billion in the region as a whole. Hu’s tour resulted in concrete investments of $7.7 billion in Brazil and in letters of intent for projects in Argentina in the amount of $17.9 billion. The Asian giant, with the largest population on the planet, is interested in China and Latin America  167 Latin America, which is rich in the raw materials China needs to sustain its dramatic growth. China is seeking oil, gas, coal, steel, cement, rubber latex, copper, iron, aluminum, platinum, and nickel as well as soybeans and other foods. The region’s trade with China jumped from less than $10 billion in 1993 to more than $50 billion in 2004. The Chinese petroleum company Sinopec has signed an agreement with the Brazilian government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the construction of a gas pipe that will connect the South of Brazil with the North. Hu and Lula have signed cooperative agreements in the aerospace field with the objective of launching a satellite jointly in 2006. China has become Brazil’s second most important trading partner. In Argentina, [Néstor] Kirchner’s government announced new Chinese investments in the amount of $20 billion in infrastructure, energy, and telecommunications development as well as in satellite technology and computer science projects. Hu’s visit to Santiago, Chile, formally initiated negotiations for a free-trade agreement with China. The mining concerns Coldeco in Chile and Minmetals in China have signed a long-term agreement for the Chilean company to supply China with copper shipments in the amount of $1.8 billion. China has displaced the United States as Chile’s principal copper buyer. Last year during the inauguration of the Mexico–China Business Forum, Mexican president Vicente Fox remarked that “Mexico and China are two clear examples of the advantages of opening the economy to trade and investment.” In 2003, China became the second-largest provider of goods to Mexico, after the United States. Venezuela, which owns the principal oil reserves outside the Middle East, is the main attraction for China, which has become the second-largest importer of oil in the world. Last year China signed nineteen agreements with Venezuela, where it is already operating oil wells and purchasing 120,000 barrels of oil per month. China has extended Venezuela a line of credit of $700 million for housing construction. In the last of his three visits to China, President Hugo Chávez unveiled a statue of Simón Bolívar in Beijing. Trade between Venezuela and China is worth nearly $3 billion, an increase of more than 100 percent. 168  Newspaper Columns China is investing in projects in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. The recently elected president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, visited Beijing in January 2006 and managed to negotiate an investment agreement to develop the energy sector of his country through conversion of Bolivian natural gas to diesel, thus minimizing damage to the environment. I do not mean to say that diesel is cleaner than natural gas, but...