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Introduction
Over the past two decades, economic and diplomatic relations between China and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have considerably intensified in a comparable fashion to relations between China and African countries (Narins, 2016), despite the former not receiving as much academic attention. Bilateral trade between LAC countries and China reinforced the Chinese export-oriented economic model, helping China cope with its natural resource deficit. Exports of natural materials to China boomed after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. China's increasing demand for raw materials led to LAC countries winning the “commodity lottery”—with the price of oil, copper, iron and soy doubling, or even tripling, from 2003 to 2013 (Barton and Rehner, 2018). Bilateral trade with China linked LAC to the fate of the Chinese economy, which helped the region recover from the 2009 global financial crisis (Gallagher, 2016, pp. 41–61) and boosted presidential popularity and prospects of reelection of leftist candidates during the so-called Pink Tide (Campello and Zucco, 2016).
Despite the waning of the effects of the commodities super-cycle in 2013 (Gruss, 2014), Chinese trade and investment in the region continued to flourish; thus, spurring the invitation to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The fact that the Americas were never a part of the ancient Silk Road, which was the primary inspiration for the original idea of the BRI, did not hinder Chinese diplomacy from inviting LAC countries to join the initiative. The invitation was formalized at the Forum of China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (China-CELAC Forum) in January 2018 where China's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, presented the BRI and asserted that Latin America was a “natural extension” of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. The BRI's arrival in the region illustrates the extent of the initiative's evolution and presents an alternative globalization model with “Chinese characteristics” that could challenge the eroding American hegemony in the provision of global public goods. At the same time, BRI's arrival to LAC is an example of China's strategic overstretching (Pu and Wang, 2018).
While “only a handful of Latin American countries have realized the strategic importance of the BRI and made efforts to participate in its early steps” at first (Gonzalez Levaggi and Abdenur, 2018,...