Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
China’s growing importance as a trade partner with Latin America has wide-ranging implications for international economic geography and geopolitics. We examine China’s engagements in Latin America through a study of elite strategy in soy exports from Uruguay and Argentina. Drawing from in-depth interviews with experts in the agro-industrial sector, we observe how Latin American political and entrepreneurial elites sought to adjust how they conducted agricultural business and policy to attract China’s attention and the benefits it could bring in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We show that this process – what our interviewees characterized as acercamiento with China – involves building trust and harmonizing operating procedures with their Chinese counterparts. Our case reveals the mechanics of acercamiento and generates insights into how trade with China is changing the geopolitical landscape and development strategies of its partner counties.
Bervejillo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.