While Beijing may not deliberately promote authoritarian regimes in Latin America, implicit risks to the dynamics of democracies arise out of engagement with China.
In its public discourse, unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China has avoided directly challenging Western-style democracy as a system of governance. Nonetheless, Beijing has been increasingly assertive that its own system provides lessons for economic and political organization for developing societies. That posture inherently, if subtly, presents China to the developing world as an alternative to the Western model.
In its Global Civilization Initiative Beijing seeks to undermine the moral capital of the West on democracy and other values by positing the validity of other (unspecified) alternatives.
Beyond such discourse, China’s commercial and other engagement – and its increasingly dominant position in the technologies and systems that define communications and the new digital economy – has had a transformative effect on the dynamics of and discourse about both democracy and development globally.
Background photo by AP Ng Han Guan, Pool, reposted from article (https://thediplomat.com/2024/07/engagement-with-china-has-had-a-multifaceted-impact-on-latin-american-democracy)