Newly translated documents discussed in these analyses include:

1. The “Old” and the “New” of the Monroe Doctrine by Sitegeqi, Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of International Strategic Studies, Central Party School of the Communist Party of China.
2. U.S. Foreign Strategy Adjustment and Latin American Strategic Autonomy by Zhang Yifei, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
3. The United States’ “New Monroe Doctrine” by Song Junying, Director and Associate Research Fellow of the Department for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, China Institute of International Studies.
4. The Policy Trajectory of the U.S. Monroe Doctrine and Prospects for China–Latin America Cooperation by Zhou Zhiwei, Director of the International Relations Research Office at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
5. New Opportunities for China–Latin America Economic and Trade Cooperation in the “Trump 2.0” Period by Xie Wenze, Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
6. U.S. Elites’ Perceptions of China–Latin America Relations and Their Impact by Yan Jin, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations; and Shao Jingyi, a research intern at the Institute of Latin American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Jump to commentary from:

Alvaro Mendez | Margaret Myers | Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente

A striking assumption unites recent Chinese scholarship on U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): that intensified U.S. pressure on the region will automatically translate into deeper cooperation between China and Latin America. The logic is intuitive but flawed. Zhou Zhiwei argues that the “endogenous driving force” of China-LAC relations “will not be undermined by interference from U.S. factors.” Song Junying contends that countries in the region “do not wish to sacrifice China-Latin America relations as the price paid for developing U.S.-Latin America relations.” Zhang Yifei goes further, asserting that regardless of the U.S. posture, “China and Latin America should draw closer.” Yet the relationship between U.S. coercion and China-LAC cooperation is anything but linear. 

Heightened U.S. pressure increases political risk, regulatory uncertainty, and domestic polarization in Latin America, dynamics that can constrain as much as facilitate Chinese engagement. Consider Colombia, where opposition figures and civil society have criticised Gustavo Petro’s erratic foreign policy: theatrical provocations that alienate Washington, a reactive pivot to Beijing that yielded little, then a hasty reversal after Donald Trump warned Petro could “be next” to receive the Maduro treatment, followed by renewed U.S. alignment after their February 3 meeting. Or consider Panama, the first Latin American country to endorse the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017: It became the first to withdraw in February 2025 under U.S. pressure during a visit by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Panamanian Supreme Court ruling, subsequently annulling CK Hutchison’s Balboa and Cristóbal port concessions, reinforces the point that external pressures are filtered through domestic politics and institutions and can produce rollbacks rather than advances of Chinese interests. 

The analysts correctly identify the escalation trajectory. Xie Wenze’s “two rings” framework links homeland security to dollar hegemony across the Americas, capturing the deeper logic of Trump’s approach. The January 2026 U.S. military operation in Venezuela, the first overt intervention in the region since Panama in 1989, validated these warnings about the return of interventionism. Yet even as events confirmed the diagnosis, the prescribed treatment reveals a critical blind spot. 

Venezuela exposes China’s own financial vulnerability. Its billions of dollars in Venezuelan loans outstanding, premised on repayment in kind in Venezuelan crude exports, entails a non-trivial risk of default and write-downs, if Washington’s newly gained control of that oil flow is consolidated. U.S. pressure does not automatically spell strategic opportunity; in fact, it has reduced China’s room for manoeuvre already.  

The deeper problem is that Latin America appears in these analyses primarily as an arena for great power competition, rather than as a region of sovereign states with their own dynamics, interests, and agency. When Latin American “autonomy” is mentioned, it is framed almost exclusively as resistance to U.S. hegemony, not as a genuine strategic calculation that might also produce wariness of China. Zhou Zhiwei writes, “resisting U.S. neo-colonialism and hegemonism has consistently been a core concern of Latin American countries,” which is true but not completely. Missing are domestic electoral cycles, civil society unrest, intra-regional cleavages, and the reality that some LAC governments choose closer U.S. ties for their own reasons. Milei’s Argentina and Bukele’s El Salvador are not anomalies to be explained away; they reflect Latin American agency operating according to its own logic. 

One contribution stands apart. Yan Jin and Shao Jingyi, writing in Contemporary International Relations rather than the coordinated CASS journal series, acknowledge legitimate U.S. concerns and call for “trilateral cooperation” between China, the United States, and Latin America. Whether or not such voices can influence policy remains uncertain, but the predominance of the consensus position and its alignment with official narratives suggest that they face an uphill struggle.

Latin American agency remains the variable that Beijing has neglected to take adequately into account. Latin Americans have their own reasons for the strategic choices they make, and those reasons do not always align with Washington’s preferences or expectations, nor with Beijing’s. To assume that U.S. overreach must inure to China’s benefit is to risk serious strategic miscalculation.

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China–Latin America relations have entered a period of recalibration, propelled by a series of developments. Chief among these is the likely watershed effect of U.S. operations in Venezuela. In the short term, at least, U.S. actions in Caracas will force both Beijing and some regional capitals to consider the prospect that Washington will aim to shape or constrain activities in other parts of the region, including aspects of Latin American nations’ relations with China. 

At the same time, China’s imperative to sustain domestic growth is placing new pressures on parts of the region, which are absorbing rising inflows of both high- and low-tech Chinese goods even as they grow more dependent on China as an export destination. That dependence has not only narrowed policymakers’ room for maneuver in managing the bilateral relationship, but also complicated efforts to respond to local discontent as domestic industries struggle to compete with Chinese companies. 

Though written before U.S. operations in Venezuela, the papers in this series offer a clear-eyed assessment of the first of these developments. They trace an apparent shift in U.S. thinking about the hemisphere (what several authors label a “Monroe Doctrine 2.0”) that predates events in Venezuela and consider the implications for both U.S.–Latin America relations and China’s own positioning in the region. The authors carefully map the drivers and contours of the Trump administration’s regional approach, while also emphasizing, as the Central Party School does particularly astutely, that this Monroe Doctrine 2.0 hasn’t quite crystallized, noting contradictions among its stated objectives and its implementation. 

What stands out across these papers is a shared assessment that Washington’s current approach is likely to erode U.S. influence and standing in the region. However, the authors seem conflicted about how China should respond, if at all, to a more assertive and increasingly erratic U.S. posture. The net effect is a sense that debate is ongoing in Beijing on this topic and has probably intensified amid developments in Venezuela and by the prospect of future U.S. moves in Cuba, where China maintains a long-standing “Good Brother, Good Comrade, Good Friend” partnership. 

Still, the authors broadly agree on Latin America’s continued strategic importance to China—as a source of key commodities, a growing market for Chinese goods and services, and a potential partner on shared policy priorities. But here, their outlook is strikingly optimistic. Several suggest that stronger ties can be built largely on the basis of existing bilateral cooperation, or, as Zhang Yifei contends, by “forming a sharp contrast with the United States” through greater support for the region’s development goals. 

Of course, in reality, even as frustrations with U.S. trade and other policy persist across Latin America, regional perceptions of China, and of what Beijing can realistically deliver, are also shifting. Latin American leaders will continue to travel to China in pursuit of new deals and stronger ties, just as Uruguay’s president did in early February, but China’s trade dynamics, slowing investment, and occasionally problematic projects weigh heavily in parts of the region. Zhang Yifei argues that the Trump administration’s sticks-only approach will ultimately clarify“who coerces whom,” “who exploits whom,” and “who becomes whom,” pushing the region to reassess U.S. claims about China’s coercive presence. While that debate is certainly underway, for some segments of Latin American society, China is already viewed through a similar lens—even as U.S. actions at home and in the region draw mounting concern in Latin America. 

The region is indeed intent on diversifying its partnerships, as several of the authors note—but in doing so, will aim to reduce dependence in all its forms.

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Written in early 2025 and published between April and June 2025, the selection of articles translated for Interpret: China now reads as almost prophetic in anticipating the unapologetic revival of the Monroe Doctrine under Donald Trump’s second administration. Yet within seven months, the articles already feel dated in their prescriptions for China’s future role in Latin America and the Caribbean, advancing strategies that seemed plausible in a world order that no longer quite exists. 

The prognoses in the texts largely anticipate the November 2025 National Security Strategy and the subsequent articulation of a renewed “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Sitegeqi argues that any earlier moral reflection on the Monroe Doctrine has been abandoned, with coercion once again becoming an acceptable instrument for advancing U.S. objectives on migration, drug policy, and related issues—offering few positive incentives and relying instead on the threat of punishment for those unwilling to comply. 

These dynamics are illustrated through cases such as successful U.S. pressure on Panama over China-linked concessions in the canal, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and President Trump’s remarks about incorporating Greenland and Canada into the United States. Some authors, such as Zhou Zhiwei, go further, already contemplating the possibility that the United States would infringe directly on the sovereignty of Latin American countries in pursuit of its goals—anticipating, in effect, the widely criticized intervention in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro.

Importantly, the authors converge on the view that the Trump Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine is explicitly aimed at excluding China from the Western Hemisphere. While there are no fundamental disagreements among the various authors, each contributes a distinct analytical insight. Zhou Zhiwei highlights the emergence of a zero-sum commercial logic that stands in clear contrast to earlier liberal optimism. Zhang Yifei, meanwhile, draws attention to the tension between apparent U.S. retrenchment—expressed through disdain for multilateral institutions and alliances—and a simultaneous effort to exert tighter control over the hemisphere. Xie Wenze adds further nuance by resisting a homogenized view of Latin America and the Caribbean, instead differentiating countries and subregions by economic structure and perceived strategic importance. 

From today’s vantage point, the anachronism in these texts lies less in their diagnosis of U.S. behavior than in their prescriptions for China’s future role in the region. Most authors anticipate that China will be well-positioned to fill the gaps left by U.S. unilateralism. Song Junying is especially confident that the “America First” turn will provoke a wave of regional resistance, dismissing it as an “error of the times” and predicting that Latin America and the Caribbean will turn unambiguously toward China’s “genuine multilateralism.” Zhou Zhiwei similarly suggests that the region will resist a renewed neocolonial turn and emerge with greater autonomy. 

Across the texts, there is also broad agreement on the strength of the “endogenous momentum,” complementarity, and resilience of China-LAC relations, alongside calls by some authors for deeper cooperation in areas such as science and technology, finance, security, and defense. Yet this optimism now sits uneasily with China’s apparent inability to do much more than issue diplomatic condemnations in response to U.S. intervention in Venezuela, or with the speed at which several Caribbean governments have negotiated deportation arrangements to appease Washington in the aftermath of that intervention. 

While it remains possible that the region will, over time, assert its sovereignty more forcefully, the pace of recent developments raises questions about the assumption that resistance would be swift, unified, or sufficient to generate a realignment toward China. Were these texts written today, one might expect a more cautious appraisal of the limits of the China–Latin America relationship under conditions of greater geopolitical uncertainty. Given how much has changed in so short a period, there is little choice but to await a new round of assessments to see whether the optimism and strategic choices articulated in these articles will be reaffirmed, revised, or abandoned altogether. 

One final reflection. Platitudes common in Chinese diplomatic and academic discourse—such as invocations of “people-to-people exchanges,”“win-win cooperation,” or respect for “civilizational diversity”—might have sounded hollow a year ago. After all, China’s external economic relations are often elite-driven, its activities in Latin America and the Caribbean have produced uneven impacts across regions and social groups, and the Chinese leadership has pushed a nationalist ideal at home that narrows the realms of acceptable diversity, whether in terms of ethnicity, religion, gender, or other domains. Yet, when set against the openly coercive and frequently disrespectful posture now adopted by the United States in the region, such rhetorical commitments appear, if not fully convincing, at least somewhat less alienating than they once did.

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