Wandering China

The overt American pivot meets Chinese sleight of encirclement…

Tit for that no matter the perception filter. Is this setting indicative for the early half of the twenty first century? Two camps incapable of consensus in action, attitudes, or rhetoric making us the rest of pawns in their proxy backyard wars, invites lament.

For more, see

Paranoid Republic: No summit can bridge the political gap between Washington and Beijing by Minxin Pei in Foreign Policy, June 6, 2013

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China’s New Backyard
Does Washington realize how deeply Beijing has planted a flag in Latin America?
By R. Evan Ellis
Source – Foreign Policy, published June 6, 2013

For the past decade, Washington has looked with discomfort at China’s growing interest in Latin America. But while Beijing’s diplomats bulked up on their Spanish and Portuguese, most U.S. policymakers slept soundly, confident that the United States still held a dominant position in the minds of its southern neighbors. In April 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing on China’s influence in the hemisphere and concluded that the U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere was much stronger than China’s and, moreover, that Beijing’s economic engagement in the region did not present a security threat. But that was 2005.

In late May of this year, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden went to Latin America for a three-day, three-country tour, Beijing was hot on his heels. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Trinidad and Tobago just days after Biden left: Whereas Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, characterized her discussions with Biden as “at times brutal,” Xi’s stop in Trinidad and Tobago included the unveiling of a children’s hospital funded with $150 million from the Chinese government, discussion of energy projects, and meetings with seven Caribbean heads of state. Xi’s itinerary took him to Costa Rica and Mexico on June 4 to 6, but his shadow followed Biden all the way to Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, Biden referred to a new “strategic partnership” between the United States and Brazil, yet his words’ impact was undercut by the strategic partnership that Brazil has had with China since 1993 and the much-publicized fact that China overtook the United States as Brazil’s largest trading partner in 2009 (trade between China and Brazil exceeded $75 billion in 2012). It’s not an accident that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff made a state visit to China in April 2011, prior to paying one to the United States.

Make no mistake: China is now a presence in the region. Xi’s trip to Trinidad and Tobago is only the second visit by a Chinese president to the Caribbean — his predecessor, Hu Jintao, visited communist Cuba in November 2008 — but China and the Caribbean’s economic and political ties have been growing rapidly. On this trip, Xi promised more than $3 billion in loans to 10 Caribbean countries and Costa Rica. Xi’s choice of three destinations near the United States, followed by a “shirt-sleeves” summit with U.S. President Barack Obama on June 7 and 8 at the Sunnylands resort in California, sends a subtle message that the new Chinese leadership seeks to engage the United States globally as an equal — without the deference shown in the past to the United States in countries close to its borders.

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