Alice Han

Part of it talks about the quote-unquote five programs for building a China, Latin America, and Caribbean community with a shared future.

Now, the shared future terminology, it seems, has come from Xi Jinping, who not only wants to have a level of collaboration economically and diplomatically, but also, it seems, increasingly culturally with these Latin American countries.

And one key thing that stood out to me was the inclusion for the first time of development assistance.

Now, this is a degree of

of foreign aid and foreign assistance at a time where you're seeing more and more U.S.

retrenchment.

So I think this is going to be quite significant when we think about China's longer-term Latin America strategy.

I don't think China is going to retreat from Latin America, even although it has, I think, suffered a significant setback with the Venezuela crisis.

I think that there's a lot of, beyond economic, strategic interest in Latin America.

One other statistic that stood out to me was that

China has more space infrastructure in Latin America than anywhere else outside of mainland China.

And that's because the satellites need to communicate with the ground stations across Latin America.

And again, this has been a cause of concern for Americans because that level of proximity poses a national security risk in terms of information interference and espionage.

So I would take a more, I think, sobering view, which is that when the dust settles, China is still going to be involved in Latin America.

It's going to be hard to get it completely out of the U.S.

's backyard, as Washington would like to see.

But certainly this crisis will force, I think, Xi Jinping and the leaders together.

to craft an alternative strategy because they can no longer, especially in Latin America, make the anti-US argument given that the US has shown that it has a lot of military and diplomatic heft in the region.

So I think that increasingly they will try to move towards dual-use technologies, economic strategies to try to continue to exert influence in the region.

But certainly I agree with you, this is a setback.