Latin America’s Pivot toward Asia
This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s conceptual framework with regard to China’s economic integration with select LAC countries since 2000. The author disputes realist interpretations of China’s rise in Latin America as a security threat to US hegemony and argues that China needed to internationalize its development strategy to compensate for its natural resource deficit. China’s ten LAC strategic partners now represent the majority of trade, loans, and FDI outflows from China to Latin America, and China is now the second-most-important trade partner for the region after the US. This relationship is contributing to the development of select LAC countries in order to propel China’s own growth and development. The author then moves to the political economy scenarios that have evolved within those LAC countries that have the strongest trade links and FDI inflows from China, in order to dispute the critique of neo-dependency scholars before offering the main takeaways.