The Infrastructure of China-Latin American Relations

Session Submission Type: LASA Section Presentation

Abstract

Roads, dams, railroads, canals, and ports: infrastructure has been one of China’s most visible and debated forms of engagement with Latin America over the last decade.  Accordingly, this panel takes up the politics of infrastructure, investigating its technical, political, economic, sociocultural, and symbolic dimensions.  Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and comparative cases from across Latin America, it asks not only which kinds of infrastructural projects China is pursuing in the region, but also how they are assembled, and what they illuminate about the contours and stakes of this new era of transpacific relations.  For example, what kinds of new legal, regulatory, and commercial groundwork has been laid to undergird these projects? How do they mesh with or contradict local environmental, developmental, or cultural regimes? What do they tell us about China’s changing interests and roles in the region and how they may differ from earlier generations of infrastructural initiatives supported by other international actors?  What do they tell us about the complex interplay of public and private investment, as well sovereignty and exploitation in the construction of the region’s future? In analyzing infrastructure and its place within changing development priorities on both sides of the Pacific, the panel raises larger questions about both the aspirational and controversial implications of infrastructure for transpacific relations.

Sub Track

• Section Sessions

Session Organizer

• Monica C DeHart, University of Puget Sound

Chair

• Monica C DeHart, University of Puget Sound

Individual Presentations

• The Shape of Things to Come? Infrastructural Imaginaries in the Building of Chinese-Costa Rican Relations - Monica C DeHart, University of Puget Sound

• China’s Infrastructure Initiatives in Latin America: Motivations, Players and Challenges - Shoujun Cui, Renmin University of China

• Beyond Trade: Expanding China’s Strategy in Latin America through Infrastructure Investments - Victoria Chonn Ching, University of Southern California

• Commitment and engagement: China’s infrastructure projects in Latin America in comparison - Benjamin H Creutzfeldt, SAIS Foreign Policy Institute

• From Trinkets to Infrastructure: China development models and their impacts on Paraguay - Rosana Pinheiro Machado, University of Oxford

Discussant

• Cynthia A Sanborn, Universidad del Pacífico