Jorge Heine, former Chilean ambassador to China and now a professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, has written a paper entitled “China’s New Silk Road and the Logistic State in Latin America,” in which he points to the absurdity of the U.S. trying to keep China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) out of Ibero-America and the Caribbean. He argues that the BRI’s focus on infrastructure development and connectivity, encouraging state-led investment and a proactive role for public policies, works. The Washington Consensus’s neoliberal paradigm, emphasizing balanced budgets, macroeconomic equilibria, deregulation and privatization, doesn’t, as seen in the dramatic infrastructure deficit in the region, which is getting worse, as is the case throughout the Global South.
Dr. Heine reviews the history of cross-Pacific trade and economic ties, pointing to the example of the Manila Galleons, which between the mid-16th to the early 19th Century, sailed the route from China to the Philippines and then to Mexico’s port of Acapulco. These trips were always a factor in Sino-Ibero-American relationships, he stressed, so current trends in China’s growing trade with the region are nothing new—the BRI is “part and parcel of these renewed links across the Pacific.” Moreover, he emphasizes, there is a real “confluence between the BRI and China’s proposal on infrastructure and connectivity in Latin America on the one hand, and the development needs of the region on the other.” But U.S. policy aimed at excluding Chinese companies from building Ibero-American/Caribbean infrastructure, either physical or digital, “has it exactly backwards.”
