🇨🇳 Chinese Dominance

Today we’re sharing part of our conversation with Iván Duque Márquez, Colombia’s President from 2018 to 2022, about China’s growing trade with Latin America.

Iván Duque and our Chief Editor Gabriel Cohen in Miami - 12/11/2024

---

If one trend has shifted Latin America’s political economy over the last two decades, it’s been the emergence of China as an economic superpower.

Let’s put it this way: at the turn of the century, two-way trade between China and our region broke just $14B. By 2022, it had reached nearly half a trillion dollars.

This trend has become especially pronounced in South America, where today Beijing is the largest trade partner of major regional economies such as Brazil, Chile, and Peru, as well as among the largest for other economies like Argentina and Venezuela.

One by one, the continent’s countries have begun trading more with China than with the historically-dominant United States, powered usually by soaring exports of everything from soybeans and oil to iron and copper.

Which isn’t to say this is merely a local trend. Increased trade with China is “not exclusive to Latin America—it’s the whole Western Hemisphere,” said Iván Duque Márquez, President of Colombia from 2018-2022 and a current Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center, in conversation with Latinometrics. Even in the case of the United States, “maybe with the exception of 2023, China has been the major trading partner in the last decades.”

Will China become LatAm's largest trade partner?

---

Subscribe to Premium Subscription to read the rest.

Become a paying subscriber of Premium Subscription to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Upgrade Translation missing: en.app.shared.conjuction.or Sign In