Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies

Over the weekend, President Biden and other Group of 7 leaders announced a new Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars toward infrastructure and other development projects. 

The Trinidad and Tobago government Tuesday defended its decision to seek a multi-million dollar loan from China, rather than from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), saying Beijing was not imposing any stringent conditionalities on the oil rich twin island republic.

The Group of Seven (G7) has come a long way since its inception in the mid-1970s 

The Caribbean is vital to the strategic interests of the United States. It is the U.S. “front door” for maritime logistics, finance and tourism and generations of immigrants from the Caribbean that have helped shape U.S. society and culture.

China’s Belt & Road Initiative is somewhat enigmatic when it comes to who is behind the project. There appears to be no official secretariat, no centralised office, and no specific official responsible for discussing its objectives.

America’s latest policies toward China will prove self-defeating. US–China relations now exemplify Freeman’s third law of strategic dynamics: for every hostile act there is a more hostile reaction.

Standing at a new historical starting point, China is ready to work with Suriname to carry forward traditional friendship, enhance policy alignment and political mutual trust, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Saturday.

The Government will have to foot the tab for additional engineering and consultancy project management services for the Southern Coastal Highway Improvement Project (SCHIP), which is now costing over US$133.9 million more than budgeted to complete.

As the harsh realities of China's growing power sink in, the country's appeal is diminishing in the West. To keep it in check, more coordinated efforts are needed and come September the tone from Germany may be decisive.

In this episode I'll be chatting with Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente. He is a Lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands and studies China's relations in Latin America and the Caribbean. We chat about Chinese loan making in the Caribbean (with a particular focus on Jamaica) and the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for Caribbean development. 

In 2020, loans from Chinese policy banks in Latin America fell to historically low levels. In the last days of the Trump administration, Washington agreed to lend Ecuador $3.5 billion, in what U.S. authorities considered a novel approach to confront China in the region. But does the region stand to benefit?

With five approved COVID-19 vaccines, China aims to give shots to 40% of its population in the next four months, while also delivering huge amounts of doses to Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico.

In this episode I am joined by Barbados's Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, His Excellency Ambassador Francois Jackman. We discussed several major foreign policy and geopolitical themes centered on the Caribbean's diplomatic posture towards China and the North Atlantic.

The Belt and Road Research Platform has developed a new map to display the Belt and Road Initiative in relation to China’s international trade. Although there are already plenty of maps which attempt to display the Belt and Road Initiative, we believe that there was a need for a novel approach: integrating the BRI into China’s international trade patterns.

The political debate in Paraguay reflects a broader battle raging across Latin America about China’s swelling influence. As countries in the region grapple with a cascade of challenges to their developing economies, they increasingly look not to the North but to the East. Today, China is South America’s top trading partner.

Dr. Evan Ellis, Latin America Research Professor for the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, talks to Haverford School headmaster Dr. John Nagl about the challenges and opportunities that will confront the incoming Biden administration in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Taiwan has opened a representative office in Guyana, the island’s foreign ministry said on Thursday, drawing praise from the United States, worried about deepening Chinese influence in Latin America, and a rebuke from Beijing.

A few days ago, China’s president, Xi Jinping, addressed the opening of this year’s Davos World Economic Forum. His remarks imply that China is positioning itself to be the voice for a new multilateral world order.

Too often, United States government officials and scholars have characterized China’s relationship with Caribbean nations as a one-way affair in which the former, as a malign foreign actor, takes advantage of the latter, a small and weak group of states. 

Organized by the UNESCO Transcultural Programme and the South-South Collective of Jamaica, the International Creative Exchange Caribbean (ICEC) 2020 Online - the Asia Connection event, which took place on 27 and 28 November 2020, brought together artists from Asia and the Caribbean in a productive exchange of ideas and experiences.

The U.S., Latin America and China know mercantilism well. British restrictions on direct trade between its colonies and Europe to advantage its own industry was a driving factor in the American Revolution.

United States authorities have admitted that China’s role in the Caribbean remains a talking point in discussions on a range of bi-lateral and other issues of national interest among the US and its regional partners.

Despite the steady stream of commentary framing geopolitics in terms of a “new Cold War,” a return to bipolarity, and widespread recognition that Sino-American competition is expanding beyond the confines of the Indo-Pacific, one region remains generally overlooked: the Caribbean.

The Caribbean Basin is very important to U.S. interests. However, while we have been distracted by other things, China has been making significant inroads into the Caribbean, where it is eager to displace American economic and military influence.

While the U.S. is distracted, China is rewriting the rules of the global order.

U.S. and Chinese attempts to shape Latin American governments’ lending options raise issues of sovereignty and choice.

Jamaica has to make a decision as to whether it is going to look East to the “two headed dragon” or North to the United States when it comes to deciding where its economic priorities lie.

China’s leaders issued a blueprint for the next five years – and beyond. 

A quest to modernise dilapidated infrastructure in Central Europe has quickly transformed into a geopolitical contest.

The BRI-driven trend towards a Chinese sphere of influence is neither inevitable or irreversible. 

China’s entry into foreign assistance 20 years ago has largely coincided with the evolution and advancement of international development architectures in support of shared development good practice and norms.

Two prominent China analysts debated on Tuesday whether Beijing is attempting to supplant Washington as the foremost global power.

There are still many unknowns surrounding the Blue Dot Network – a new infrastructure quality certification initiative jointly launched by the United States of America, Japan, and Australia that is often compared to the Belt and Road Initiative of the People` s Republic of China. 

Beijing is training its envoys in Spanish, Portuguese, and local politics and letting them loose on Twitter in America’s backyard.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reportedly ordered British diplomats to try to counter the “expansionism” of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Belt and Road initiative following accusations that the regime in Beijing pressured Barbados to remove the Queen as its head of state.

Speaking recently at Bocas Lit Fest, Jamaica’s former Prime Minister, P.J. Patterson, observed that in recent years there had been a “deliberate attempt” to split the Caribbean.

The decision by Barbados to axe the British monarch as titular head of state has unleashed anti-China paranoia claiming malign influence from Beijing. This is the poverty of Cold War zero-sum thinking.

Of all the fanciful reasons imputed to the decision of the government to make Barbados a Republic, shedding its monarchical status with Queen Elizabeth II as Head of State, the most surprising has come from the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons, Tom Tugendhat.

China has poured billions of dollars of investment into the Caribbean while signing tax and trade deals in an attempt to wrest the region out of the West's sphere of influence and bring it under the sway of Beijing.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday made a direct pitch for fast-growing Suriname and Guyana's new leaders to pick US firms, warning of the risks of China amid an oil boom.

The new head of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Mauricio Claver-Carone, an American promoted by President Donald Trump to a position that has always been in the hands of Latin Americans, seeks to fulfill “the dream of Pan-Americanism” in the face of China’s advance in the region.

Jamaica received US$2.1 billion in Official Development Assistance (ODA) from International Development Partners (IDP) to advance the Government’s strategic objectives and priorities under the 2018-2021 Medium Term Socio-Economic Policy Framework (MTF).

COVID-19 did not just change the world; it also showcases the significance of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As China recovers from the pandemic, the surge in exports bears testimony to the strong connection binding China and BRI-participating nations and the unbreakable supply chain with Beijing. It also underscored China's leading role in worldwide trade during the COVID-19 pandemic. And this is by itself a good sign for worldwide trade recovery.

Shanghai Party Secretary Li Qiang hosted a meeting with a delegation of envoys from 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries to China in Shanghai yesterday. Li welcomed the envoys on behalf of the Communist Party of China Shanghai Committee and the Shanghai municipal government, and introduced to them measures taken for the prevention of COVID-19 pandemic as well as the development of economy and society in Shanghai.

Argentina could become the biggest economy in Latin America to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an action that would allow its heavily indebted government to deepen trade and investment ties with China even further. Argentina is one of the main economies, after Brazil, in the Mercosur trade bloc, which includes directly or via associate nations, most of South America.  Thus far, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela together with Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana and Suriname have signed up to the initiative, although China has been financing projects to non-BRI member states in Latin America. 

China and the United States are failing in their roles as world leaders, and the poor state of their relationship is impeding international collaboration in the fight against 
Covid-19, academics said on Wednesday.  “I see some key global challenges – right now that would be this health pandemic, global climate change, debt problems, bond payment crisis – I really see a failure of the US and China to provide leadership,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said at a webinar organised by Centre for China and Globalisation (CCG), a Beijing-based think tank.

On Friday, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., paired up with U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-NJ, on the  “Advancing Competitiveness, Transparency, and Security in the Americas (ACTSA) Act.”

Rubio’s office noted that the bill “would strengthen economic competitiveness, expand safeguards for physical and digital infrastructure, and address human rights abuses from digital surveillance technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean” and is “the first comprehensive effort to improve U.S. economic engagement and diplomatic presence, and address the Government of China’s economic, political, security, and intelligence activities in the region.”

Whether it chooses to take sides or not, the Caribbean is about to find itself swept up into the now almost inevitable superpower confrontation between the United States and China.

Kenya's president said Wednesday that African nations should be free to cooperate with both the United States and China, warning that foreign powers were exacerbating the continent's divisions.