Chinese and Indian Latin America Entry: Resurrecting Old-Model Relationships

Abstract

From a comparative perspective, this chapter depicts and analyzes China’s and India’s engagements across Latin America. Its methodological foundation lies on the idea that both powers are not economically constrained in their international actions; therefore, to build their power they resort to a complex tool-box filled with ideas, institutions, and material interests. Understanding parcels of this multilayered international reality demands a general analysis on different levels and specific issues related to how China and India engage with some Latin American actors. In this three-dimensional study (ideas discourse, institutions, and material interests), actors are not analyzed trapped in fixed clusters, but flowing in intertwined agendas and spaces, most of the time beyond national borders. Relations between Latin Americans with Beijing and Delhi must be understood in a multilateral context and not in a bilateral one.