One of the leading scholars of China-Latin America relations, Francisco Urdinez is known for coining the concept of “economic displacement”, a theory that also gives its name to his Cambridge University Press book title published in November. The idea holds that China’s rise has reduced US relevance in the region by making partnerships with Beijing more consequential and ties with Washington less essential for many governments. Now, in the wake of US attacks on Caracas and the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, Urdinez examines how Venezuela could upend that framework and reshape perceptions of US-China competition in Latin America and beyond. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click
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Can you please explain your concept of economic displacement, how that applies to the US-China competition in Latin America?
I had a feeling that it was impossible to really explain China’s amazing economic rise in the Global South, in Latin America, but also Africa and Southeast Asia, without taking into consideration how the US behaved during that same time. To do this, I thought I needed a metric, an index, a parsimonious variable that could exemplify or show me at a certain time, in a certain year, in a certain country, how much leverage and economic weight China exerted on one country. And to me, it was very important to have a similar comparison to the US.
What I did was use the existing literature in political science and international relations to compose an index of the main variables, which include trade, aid, finance and investment, into one single metric, which is weighted or measured relative to the country’s GDP. You end up with a measure of relative weight: how much China’s activities represent in a certain country vis-a-vis what the US is representing.
By doing that, which is a very simple idea but very hard to bring to reality due to lack of good data, as the simple metrics of China’s engagement in the world sometimes are lagging behind and are of not good quality, I observed the first trend, which is the graph that you see in chapter one, how the US retrenched, coming from what was in the 2000s a pretty strong presence to half of it in 2020. You see the US reducing its economic weight by half. And in the meantime, China’s economic weight grew 15-fold in Latin America. But you also see the same trend in the rest of the world.
What does Maduro’s removal mean for Chinese investments in Venezuela?
What does Maduro’s removal mean for Chinese investments in Venezuela?
Between 2001, we could say, when China entered the World Trade Organization, and 2023, when I finished the analysis, the dramatic growth of China is, of course, of historical dimensions, and that story has been told many times. We have read many people expressing how China’s growth is unprecedented.