Richard Fontaine

Thank you.

It's great to be here.

China's economic gravity has continued to grow over the decades.

And we're in this strange phenomenon now where China is the top trade partner of most countries in the Western Hemisphere.

That, of course, was the United States for a very, very long time.

It's a reflection both of China's appetite for inputs, especially raw materials, the likes of which come from countries like Brazil.

And its exports, particularly of lower cost and increasingly somewhat higher cost manufactured goods, which are exported to countries throughout the hemisphere.

And so you have a real rewiring of the top trade relationships between countries like Brazil compared to the way it used to be.

China is the number one trade partner of most countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Most countries in Latin America, I mean, virtually every country in Latin America.

And I mean, this is also true in other regions of the world.

It's the top trade partner of most countries in Southeast Asia.

It's the top trade partner with a lot of countries around the world, including countries that sometimes consider themselves skeptical of Chinese geopolitical intentions or at least at a minimum non-aligned with China, but nevertheless have a deeply intertwined economic relationship.

Well, one, it shows how interested countries are and how forthcoming China has been, particularly in infrastructure building in different places.

I mean, one can travel in Latin America, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in lots of the so-called global south, and see Chinese infrastructure projects literally all over the place.

Buildings here, bridges there, railroads here, ports there.

And for China, there's economic and sometimes geopolitical advantages to these kinds of projects and countries that wish to upgrade their infrastructure, build it where they haven't before, find it attractive to have potentially low cost financing for those kinds of projects.

carefully.

India had to manage its tricky relationship with China even before 1962 and everything that happened that year between the two countries.

And so has become practiced over the years at maintaining