Chinese government propaganda outlets condemned the ongoing Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles on Wednesday as an irrelevant “sideshow,” encouraging Latin American countries to ignore President Joe Biden’s economic proposals and sign onto China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) instead.
The BRI is a global infrastructure plan in which China offers predatory loans to poor countries meant to finance the construction of roads, ports, railways, and other infrastructure projects by Chinese companies. China gets the money back through payments to its state companies and — when the countries inevitably cannot pay their debts — the Communist Party seizes land and other assets from that country, eroding sovereignty. The most high-profile victim of this scheme currently is socialist Sri Lanka, which lost control of its key Hambantota port to China in 2017 and is currently facing emergency shortages of food, medicine, gasoline, and other basic goods.
China sells the BRI as an attempt to reconstruct the ancient Silk Road, a historic trade route linking China to western Europe. No part of the Ancient Silk Road passed through the Western Hemisphere, making the BRI a poor fit for Latin America. In the past, however, Chinese propagandists have made false claims about Eurasia having an unspecified trade connection to Mexico in the pre-Columbian era.
The Summit of the Americas is a meeting of the members of the Organization of American States (OAS). China has no legitimate territorial presence in North or South America.
China’s bid for attention from Latin America during the Summit of the Americas appears to be an attempt to upstage a deal Biden is reportedly set to debut on Thursday featuring “stepped-up investment, strengthening supply lines and building on existing trade deals,” according to Reuters.
“The US is reportedly planning to unveil a new plan called ‘Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity,’ something of an upgrade of the Trump-era Growth in the Americas initiative,” the Chinese government propaganda newspaper Global Times noted on Wednesday, “which experts said imitates the BRI to vie for influence, at this week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.”
The outlet went on to warn that the American economy was simply not strong enough to deliver on that promise, while China could fulfill its duties under the BRI – a statement clearly at odds with the economic crisis that the Communist Party created in China after forcing a brutal lockdown on its largest city and economic core, Shanghai.
“Analysts said although the Growth in the Americas plan aims to promote private-sector investment in energy and infrastructure projects, the US lacks the necessary economic complementarity and has limited financing resources,” the Global Times claimed. “The result: Growth in the Americas has failed to produce any tangible results in the past three years. Consequently, initial enthusiasm from Latin American countries has faded.”
“Analysts said the US having its own economic plan to cooperate with regional countries and some benign competition may help improve the quality of BRI projects,” the article continued, “but if the US tries to stigmatize the BRI and attempts to force countries to choose sides, it is doomed to hit the wall as countries are fed up with attempts to politicize economic matters and to stir up ideological confrontations.”
The Global Times went on to cite one regime-approved analyst who confidently concluded that America “lacks the financial power to make such things happen.”
According to the state newspaper, 21 Latin American countries have signed onto the BRI despite the ancient Silk Road having nothing to do with the Western Hemisphere. Most of the Latin American countries involved in the deal are either run by left-wing presidents or communist dictatorships, such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile. Last month, the former socialist president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet – key to making Chile financially reliant on China – absolved Beijing of its ongoing genocide of Muslim communities in East Turkistan from her current position as United Nations human rights chief.
Bachelet’s preferred candidate in the 2021 Chilean presidential election, current President Gabriel Boric, has described himself as “to the left of the PC [Communist Party].”
Similarly, far-left Argentine President Alberto Fernández has signed major trade deals with China. During his visit to Beijing in February, Fernández paid respects to the corpse of mass murderer Mao Zedong, laying a wreath at his tomb.
In addition to dismissing America’s ability to fulfill commercial agreements with other countries, Chinese propaganda outlets this week attempted to play up the boycott of the Summit of the Americas by far-left Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who announced on Monday that he would not travel to Los Angeles in solidarity with the region’s uninvited human rights violators Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. OAS rules prohibit non-democracies from attending the Summit.
“They say ‘human rights are violated in Cuba, human rights are violated in Guatemala, human rights are violated in I-don’t-know-where.’ So what?” López Obrador said during a press conference announcing his absence. He went on to accuse all Cuban-Americans of “genocide” against Cubans of the island and argue that ethnic Cubans should have less political power than Mexicans in the United States.
While rumors last week suggested that Fernández, Boric, and other regional leftists would join López Obrador’s boycott, most are attending the summit, belying López Obrador’s claims to leadership in the region. Chinese propagandists nonetheless proclaimed the boycotts a sign of “discontent” in the region.
“The US has chosen to turn the summit into a platform from which to lecture other countries, rather than one for frank dialogue among partners,” the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, denounced on Thursday. “Nothing illustrates this better than the Biden administration’s decision to not invite Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the summit on the fabricated pretext that attendees must meet US standards of democracy.”
“Moreover, the very Inter-American Democratic Charter the US has used to criticize the conditions in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua states that democracy is more than about elections, and also depends on advances in other areas, such as poverty alleviation and the elimination of racial discrimination,” the outlet continued, repeating the Chinese government’s near-daily assertions that America is a serial human rights violator while China is an exemplary regime. “And yet the US continues to be beset with shootings, targeting of racial minorities, police violence, and structural racism that socially and economically affect the most vulnerable, including the African-American and Latino population in the country.”
The Global Times ultimately dismissed the entire summit as irrelevant.
“What happens in Los Angeles is of no global strategic importance to anybody. It is a sideshow in a secondary geopolitical area,” the newspaper declared, citing an alleged “Mexican scholar.”
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