CHINESE INFLUENCE IN LATIN AMERICA IS A SIGN OF GLOBAL INTEGRATION

                                                                                 

           GROWING CHINESE PRESENCE IN THE AMAZON IS A SIGN OF GLOBAL                                                                               INTEGRATION

                                             (Mauricio Santoro)

                      CHINA'S GROWING INFLUENCE IN LATIN AMERICA

                          China is South America's Top Trading Partner

                                                  

                                               ALEKSANDRA DLUSKA'S MASTERS THESIS (2020)

                                                                             

                                                   EXTRACTS

The way China is framed in the US media is dealt with in a considerable number of studies. The studies on US newspapers’ coverage of China bear out similarities between the depiction of China and the state of Sino-American relations. Moreover, the predominant tone in the coverage of China presents the country in a negative light (Chang 1989, Peng 2004). Turner (2014) writes that the images of China in the American imagery from the eighteenth century depicted China as exotic and mythical land. But aside from the idealized image of the Asian country, Americans portrayed it as backward and inferior to the West. In the contemporary American political discourse, the rise of China in the 21st century further stirred hopes of its potential to conform to American values of trade liberalization, but also build ups the notion of the country as threatening the Western dominance and the US security

China’s growing attention towards strengthening economic relations with countries in the Global South at the end of the 20th century coincided with a downward trend of the US’s stake in the region (Li 2007). The demise of the US’s agenda on maintaining Latin America as its ‘backyard’ and the sphere of influence was announced in the then Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech on the end of the Monroe Doctrine in 2013 (Johnson 2013). One conspicuous instance of transformation in the balance of political and economic power in the region, is the turn made by Panama, a country with a historic US influence in the past century, towards strengthening its relations with China while singing 19 cooperation agreements and joining the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Giolzetti 2019). Almost 20 years after the US ceded control of the Panama Canal in 2000, the canal of a geostrategic importance may supply the massive China-led infrastructure project with the access to a logistic center for both North and South Americas (Hsiang 2018)

In the history of the United States and Europe, China has been depicted in the popular culture as exotic but also fearful ‘Yellow Peril’ (Mawdsley 2008). As it was touched upon in the previous section, since the formation of the People’s Republic of China, the ‘Red Scare’ denoted the Cold War animosity of the US media towards the Communist country. Later, the ‘opening up’ of China and the promise of capitalist reforms were seen as a In the contemporary US foreign policy, it is the emergence of China as a competing economic power to the US, that underpins the perception of ‘China as a threat’ (Pan 2004). Some argue that, it is in fact the US’s self-imagination that is projected on to the US-China relationship (Jespersen 1996, Pan 2004). The history of depiction of China’s images in the US is summarized by Turner (2014) as “Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening”. As the focus of the thesis is the period of President Obama and President Trump’s administration, this section proceeds to examine the official rhetoric of the White House towards China during the years 2009-2016 and 2017-2019, respectively. 

Based on the recurring themes, I suggest that the two elite newspapers delivered the “interpretation package” of China’s activities in the Amazon through three prevalent frames in the period of examined coverage: the US as a displaced power, China as unscrupulous and Latin America as vulnerable. The findings in this analysis, support the arguments of the negative bias in the US media coverage on China (Chang 1989, Peng 2004) and point out similarities in the depiction of Latin America to Mawsdley’s (2008) argument of the UK newspapers portrayal of Africa and Africans as weak and vulnerable in relation to China. 

While reading the majority of the articles, one could pose a question whether the American or Western companies were ever present in the Amazon. Given the definition of a frame by Entman (1993), what was bypassed or downgraded in its significance in the reporting, is also regarded as a part of the frame. Hence, with no reference or comparison to other foreign companies, the information delivered by the media might suggest that either Chinese companies are the only investor coming to profit from the Amazon jungle or, perhaps, it is only China that brings in the all the detrimental ventures to Latin American countries and the rainforest. For instance, in The NYT op-ed, China appears to be the solely responsible actor for generating pollution in Latin America (Galzon and Salazar-Lopez 2017). In the same newspaper, one article, while mentioning the infamous ‘Devil’s Railway’ or Madeira-Mamoré Railroad as the example of a failed project in Brazil that claimed thousands of workers’ lives and China’s plans to follow that path, did not include an indication of American connection to the venture (Romero 2015a).