APEC's Prelude to the 'Chinese Century'

The APEC Summit not only showed China's readiness to become a beneficial global leader, but highlighted America's rapid decline as a viable partner for global south nations.

This past Saturday, during a visit to Lima, Peru for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken held a press conference at Monserrate Train Station. With a line of yellow rail cars behind him, he announced a US plan to “support the city of Lima in building a new passenger train line that will expand access to reliable and affordable transportation for over 200,000 people every single day.” 

This, of course, brought a flood of negative responses on Twitter. 

The announcement was indeed an embarrassment, but for a completely different reason than the brain-scrambled right wing of Twitter seems to think. Blinken was not announcing US investment or aid for Peru, but instead putting a charitable spin on the fact that Caltrain (the San Francisco to San José rail service, which recently upgraded to an all-electrical fleet) found a purchaser to take its disused Diesel engine and railcar fleet off its hands.

In exchange for 19 locomotives and 90 passenger cars, the city of Lima paid $6.32 million. In other words, Blinken’s announcement didn’t represent a cost to US taxpayers; it represented a quick and profitable means for Caltrain to get the obsolete hulks out of storage.

However useful the trains may be for Lima’s commuters though, the announcement paled in comparison to events a day earlier and 35 miles north in the city of Chancay, where Chinese president Xi Jinping attended the opening ceremony for the city’s newly-completed mega port:

The massive deepwater port, the largest of its kind in the South American west coast, has the capacity to dock 18,000 ultra-large container vessels, will reduce shipping times between Shanghai and Peru from 35 days to 23 days (as ULCVs will no longer need to use Mexico’s ports as a transfer point), reduce shipping costs by 20%, generate $4.5 billion annually, and bring approximately 8000 jobs to the region. 

Having invested $1.3 billion USD into the project, and with state-owned firm COSCO’s exclusive operation of the port, Puerto Chancay represents the largest accomplishment for China’s Belt and Road Initiative thus far. With the Peruvian government’s $10 billion investment into planned railway lines from Barranca to Ica, scheduled improvements to the Pan-American highway, and real estate investments in the region already picking up, Puerto Chancay represents a potential 2-3% boost in growth for the Peruvian economy.

As rapidly as Peru has been modernizing its infrastructure and technology, and as liberalized it has been with its willingness to engage in foreign investment and free trade, the country struggled since the early 2010s to find an investment partner for the construction of its deepwater port. With a water depth of 18 metres, and Chancay’s convenient proximity to the Pan-American Highway, US investment in the project could have created even larger access to Latin America and the Asian Pacific for American firms, as well as helped rebuild trust in a region that has mostly been ravaged by extractionist US foreign policy. 

But it took until 2019 for Peru to find an investment partner for the project. Having adopted a policy of economic, infrastructure, and technological improvement for its lesser-developed trade partners, China (through the COSCO shipping conglomerate) partnered with Peruvian mining firm Volcan to redesign and redevelop the project in order to increase its ambitious scope. Five years later, China now has an export doorway to move finished goods to and through South America, and South America has an export doorway to move agricultural and natural resource goods to China. 

While the bow-cutting ceremony on this multibillion dollar project was happening, Anthony Blinken was rehearsing a speech to announce the arrival of old, obsolete diesel trains in Peru’s capital. Unsurprisingly, US media did not take the inauguration of Puerto Chancay well, calling the megaport’s opening a sign that South America is “disrespecting the US,” and that the Chinese had gained “a foothold in America’s Backyard.” To US observers, in keeping with the long-dead Monroe Doctrine, any business conducted by China or Russia — regardless whether profitable opportunities had long since been passed over by America — necessarily represents a threat to US interests. Global south nations aren’t of course, populated by human beings, but abstracted away by numbers on spreadsheets to justify a two century-long policy of plunder and wanton slaughter.

With the Trump administration incoming, and a tariff increase (of some size, if not the self-immolating figure of 60%) on Chinese-produced goods almost certain to arrive with it, the global south appears to be finally coming out from underneath the shadow of economic and military force inflicted by the US and its western allies. With a senior partner in China (which of course makes these investments for long-term profit far more than any pious sense of altruism), countries like Peru as well as Trinidad & Tobago, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile have completed the sort of projects (highways, hydroelectric dams, fiber optic networks) that they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish on their own. Without firing a shot, China has not only effectively displaced the US as the world’s leading hegemonic power, it’s done so to the measurable, material benefit of its partners in the developing world.

There are, of course, major exceptions to this trend. In the past, Congolese mines have been massively undervalued by Chinese firms, and the paltry infrastructure investments promised in return have not been fully honoured. Mismanagement and even physical abuse by Chinese management staff in Zambia’s copper mines soured the nation’s mood enough to elect a president who campaigned on a platform promising economic sovereignty. In the interim, President Hichilema lobbied western interests to help Zambia restructure its debt, and re-opened Zambia to the IMF (which, through its disastrous structural adjustment programs in the 1970s, gutted Zambia and reduced it from one of Africa’s richest nations to one of its poorest).

But these exceptions pale in comparison to the policies of military entrenchment, forced austerity, and political capture that tend to mark any partnership that global south countries engage with the US. 

Though Puerto Chancay might be the last megaproject of its kind in China’s Belt and Road strategy, when compared with Blinken’s train announcement, it is certainly emblematic of an emerging truth. The age of American global dominance is coming to a close, and along with a Chinese century comes the hope that the west’s former imperial subjects can finally become a new First World in their own right.

The 2026 APEC Summit, by the way, will be held in China.