CHINA SOFT POWER IN SOUTH AMERICA

Instruments of PRC Soft Power

Policies clearly manifesting PRC soft power in Latin America are still in relatively early stages, but generally include Confucius institutes, people-to-people engagements, media outreach, high-level public diplomacy, and activities by PRC firms – activities overall consistent with Xi Jinping’s 2022 orders for “strengthening and improving international communication work.”

Confucius Institutes

The PRC has established 44 Confucius Institutes in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as 18 affiliated Confucius Classrooms, for the officially sanctioned study of Chinese language and culture (in June 2021 they were renamed “Centers for Language Education Cooperation”). Confucius Institutes in South America are located in Brazil and others in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Venezuela.

Most are set up in major public universities in the region, although the examples of Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogota, and the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC), in the Dominican Republic, suggest that Confucius Institutes may also be established in private institutions where the local politics of the university and other considerations make the option more appropriate. Within the Latin American context, with limited other opportunities for studying Chinese, the Institutes more importantly play a strategic role as a point of entry into the Chinese government system for students with the interest, aptitude and discipline for mastering the difficult Mandarin language and Chinese character set. Although controversy over Confucius Institutes has led to the restructuring of the relationship between the Institutes and the Cultural Promotion Organization Hanban, the institutes orient students with the interest, aptitude and discipline toward the Hanban scholarships provided by the PRC government for university and graduate level studies and other academic opportunities in China, where they may not only be given a positive orientation toward the PRC, but potentially also assessed and compromised for later recruitment by PRC intelligence. In the 2019-2021 China- CELAC Plan, the PRC committed to 6,000 such scholarships for the region. In the 2022-2024 plan, it committed to another 5,000 scholarships plus an additional 3,000 “training places.” As well as the “1,000 talents” program. Through such scholarships for study in the PRC, thus, an important portion of the limited number of China-oriented diplomatic personnel and businesspersons in Latin America and the Caribbean who represent the interests of their countries and firms toward the PRC, enter that service owing their lucrative knowledge and qualifications to the Chinese government.

People-to-People Diplomacy

Xi has  issued high-level policy instructions advancing people-to-people exchange. People-to-people exchanges are often confined to “high-level experts,” politicians, influential businessmen, or other conduits for PRC influence.

Beyond scholarships for Latin American and Caribbean students mentioned above, the PRC invests significantly in bringing a broad range of others from the region to court, influence, and potentially recruit partners. These include trips by political and party figures through the International Liaison Division (ILD) of the Chinese Communist Party. Between 2002 and 2017, the ILD held 300 meetings with representatives of 74 parties in 26 Latin American countries, including many which were brought over to the PRC. Within Latin America itself, the ILD also coordinates networks of “friends of China,” senior business and political personnel who may influence their governments on matters of interest to the PRC, while at the same time benefitting from the business opportunities that such special ties to the PRC afford.

Media Outreach

The PRC pursues its objectives in the traditional and social media space in a range of increasingly sophisticated forms. Most overtly, it produces its own material through formats such as the official media agency Xinhua and China Global Television Network (CGTN), as well as through the internationally distributed China Daily. It also buys lucrative advertising supplements in a range of periodicals in the region. These supplements have a high-quality, journalistic style appearance, allowing the promulgation of information serving the PRC government to be mistaken and less critically received as regular journalism by Latin American audiences. The payments for such supplements, including in prestigious periodicals like Chile’s La Tercera, also create a powerful inducement for the benefitting news organizations not to take positions excessively critical to the PRC in other areas, lest they lose their Chinese patrons. Beyond these, PRC media such as CGTN provides often free images, video, and audio feeds to news outlets in the region. Due in part to the limited budgets of Latin American media outlets, and the difficulty of obtaining similar material on their own within the PRC, Latin American media often accept and use the media, without recognizing the choices made by the PRC government in producing the images themselves have propaganda effects. These include the depicting Chinese leaders and institutions in a consistently dignified fashion, and showing images of the PRC which are clean, orderly, and free of protests.

High-level Public Diplomacy

In recent years, the Chinese diplomatic corps in Latin America has become increasingly skillful in representing their country’s position, operating in the local language, and speaking with confidence in defense of China’s positions, by contrast to the more reserved posture of a prior generation of PRC diplomats. Since 2019, Chinese diplomats have notably become more outspoken, as well as sophisticated in their use of social media such as Twitter.

Since 2015, the PRC has participated in three summits with leaders and foreign ministers of the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC), a region-wide organization that excludes the United States and Canada.

As of 2022, one country, Paraguay, in South America has diplomatic relations with Taiwan; the remaining nine countries recognize the PRC.

Since taking office in 2013, President Xi Jinping has visited Latin America 11 times, including trips to Ecuador, Chile, Argentina and Peru.

The PRC funded the Maduro regime in developing the Fatherland Card technological platform and the database containing the confidential data of this national smart-ID card. These initiatives, in tandem, are used with the intention of controlling access to food and build a system to supervise individual’s social, political, and economic behavior.