The growing role of China and the Asia-Pacific region on the global stage reflects a critical shift in the world power map, with implications for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This shift expresses the crisis of a historical cycle of capitalist hegemony led by the United States since World War II. Moments of crisis in the world order generate new tactical and strategic margins for the deployment of processes of insubordination in the peripheries, whose peoples seek to break, modify, or weaken relations of dependency and undertake more autonomous development projects. Therefore, it is essential to identify the underlying trends in the rise of China and the Asia-Pacific region and their impact on the current world and regional order.

In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), these shifts in the geography of power coincided with the rise of governments critical of neoliberalism and unipolarity. For them, the rise of China and other emerging powers contributed to a relative multipolarity that generated a new international landscape. The very increase in Chinese demand for raw materials produced in LAC impacted global and regional trade relations and explains the rise in commodity prices that sustained the redistributive policies of progressive, national, and populist governments. 

As an emerging economy, China's rise is based on production, while declining powers tend to maintain their supremacy through military and financial power. China experienced average annual growth of 10% for 38 years from 1980, while between 2013 and 2016 its average annual growth was 7,2%, surpassing the Global North: 2,1% for the United States, 1,2% for the Eurozone, and 1,1% for Japan. Its GDP, measured by purchasing power parity, is 20% higher than that of the US, and its global banking system has surpassed that of the Eurozone. Furthermore, it has become the world's largest exporter, increasing its share of global exports from 3,16% in 2000 (at current prices) to 10,6% in 2018, according to the World Bank. Another aspect to highlight is how the domestic market has become the engine of Chinese growth. Some data illustrate this: average industrial wages tripled in the last decade; in the three-year period from 2012 to 2014, China consumed more cement than the United States did in the last one hundred years. In global competition, it is already vying for top positions in the most economically complex sectors; the transnationalization of its companies, the internationalization of the yuan, and the establishment of the petro-yuan are making inroads in the world economy; in geoeconomic and geopolitical terms, the initiative known as the Belt and Road Initiative involves more than 70 countries, it is developing counter-hegemonic alliances with Russia and the Global South, supporting the strengthening of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as the central security body in Eurasia, and promoting financial entities that threaten to eclipse those controlled by the United States. In the military sphere, China is developing its military complex and rapidly modernizing its Armed Forces. Its military budget in 2017 represented 13% of the world's and it is the third largest arms seller globally.   

China's economic development is a central axis for understanding China's strategic relationship and relevance to our region. Trade, investment, and finance demonstrate its importance. First, trade between China and Latin America reached US$260 billion in 2017, an 18,8% year-on-year increase, making China South America's main trading partner. Beijing aims to increase its trade to US$500 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, Latin American imports from the United States, which represented 50% of the total in 2000, fell to 33% in 2016 (two-thirds of which is due to Mexico). During the same period, Latin American imports from China increased from 3% to 18%.

Secondly, in terms of investment, Latin America became the second largest recipient of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the Asian giant, accounting for 14%, after Asia itself. Since 2003, China has invested more than US$110.000 billion (up to 2017), with more than half of that investment occurring in the last five years. Estimated Chinese FDI increased from an average annual amount of US$1.357 billion between 2001 and 2009 to an average of US$10.817 billion between 2010 and 2016, and its relative weighted share of regional FDI rose from 1,67% to 6,30%. Beijing plans to increase investment to $250.000 billion by 2025. Among the investment projects are large strategic infrastructure works for the region (dams, nuclear power plants, interoceanic canals, transcontinental railways) that would give Beijing great influence and are viewed with great concern by the United States.

Third, regarding financial matters, a key indicator of China's influence in the region is that its state-owned banks have lent more resources to Latin American and Caribbean countries than the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) combined this decade. Furthermore, as part of its strategy to internationalize the yuan and expand its financial influence, China has signed currency swap agreements with Argentina and Brazil and established the first financial center for the internationalization of the yuan in Santiago, Chile. 

Another key dimension for understanding the proposed topic within the Latin American and Caribbean context is geopolitics. In this regard, China, despite not seeking conflict with the United States, has counterbalanced its power and capitalized on strategic gaps and errors made by the North American giant in its relations with the region. Regarding the strengthening of China-LAC relations, the importance and support given to CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) must be mentioned. This commitment by the Asian country was evident in the importance it placed on the CELAC meeting in Chile in 2018. At that meeting, the region's countries renewed their commitment to the strategic initiative of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which positions China as a key player in the region's global megaproject. Furthermore, Beijing is promoting trade agreements with several Latin American and Caribbean countries and organizations. Its leading role in the BRICS opened new spaces for economic and financial relations in the region, and supported new spaces for dialogue in the region.

For the reasons stated above, the proposed topic is of critical importance to the region, and therefore we propose the following topics to address it:

1) The rise of China in the world system: power struggles, geopolitical changes and global capitalism

2) China, accumulation pattern and innovation system: State capitalism or market socialism

3) China between the new hegemony and the Global South project: BRICS, Silk Road and changes in international organizations 

4) China and Latin America and the Caribbean: economic and strategic relations, the challenges for the region, the problem of dependency and primary commodity dependency, and the dispute in the US "backyard".

5) China, geopolitical regions and power centers. Trade war, conflicts, alliances and the Eurasian question.

6) The Chinese political model and its internal contradictions

7) Long-term, Sino-centric systems and the modern world system: contradictions and perspectives of the 21st century

The current historical transition of the world system manifests itself, among other ways, as a structural capitalist crisis and a crisis of the global geopolitical order. These are two sides of the same coin. Accumulation is always linked to the political and military power that guarantees the enforcement of the rules of the game, the construction of monopolies for the valorization of value, the conquest of territories, the disciplining of rivals, the granting and withdrawal of legitimacy, and so on. Political and military power feeds on economic power and the endless accumulation of value to secure the resources for its own expanded reproduction.

The characteristics of the contemporary global situation, with its cyclical and secular trends, reveal a bifurcation of power and a scenario of disputes—systemic chaos—for the coming years. On the one hand, there is the financialization of capital, the crisis of the Atlanticist axis's hegemony in the world economy, and the decline of the maritime powers that traditionally led modern capitalist civilization, centered primarily in Northern and Western Europe and currently under US leadership. On the other hand, there is the reorientation of economic dynamism toward China and East Asia, the rise of regionalism, and the emergence of hinterlands as potential new geopolitical foundations for the global economy and the construction of a multipolar world-system. In this sense, the rise of Asia-Pacific in general and of China in particular constitutes one of the central phenomena of the crisis of US-Anglo-American hegemony, by calling into question the current international division of labor, the global power of transnational (financial) capital and its institutions, and the hierarchies of the interstate system with its center-periphery dynamic.

As we understand it, China's rise and economic dynamism cannot be reduced to its adherence to neoliberal capitalism and/or its status as an epiphenomenon of globalization and the offshoring of production from the Global North, as explained by a significant portion of Western academia. China's current position is related, firstly, to the significant levels of autonomy and political-military strength (sovereignty) it achieved, along with a degree of basic well-being in health and education, as a result of the 1949 revolution. Then came the takeoff with the reforms initiated in 1978, which attracted capital from the Chinese diaspora, absorbed lower levels of the Japanese outsourcing process, developed significant communal and state-run economic networks, and later, absorbed large volumes of Western capital under its own conditions, ultimately transforming it into the world's leading industrial platform. It accomplished this through its own project and with a unique hybridization—a combination—of modes of production. Further analysis of this topic can make a fundamental contribution to dependency theories and the study of center-periphery dynamics in the world system, the place of the Global South, and the implications of its insubordination.

On the other hand, China's rise must be considered from a long-term perspective. Until the 18th century, China was the world's leading economic region for almost two millennia, accounting for between 30 and 35% of global GDP. It boasted a strong state, an efficient bureaucracy, significant infrastructure projects, a widespread and deep market economy, and was a center of technological innovation. Therefore, China's decline, which began in the 19th century (a process some analysts call the Great Divergence), is actually a two-century impasse, something rather exceptional in world history. This approach implies a critique of the dominant Eurocentric Western perspective in Latin American social sciences, which ignores universal history. 

In terms of analyzing the current situation, the rise of China and the Asia-Pacific region raises two fundamental questions that warrant investigation and give rise to significant theoretical debates: A) Is the end of the primacy of the fundamental forces of the West in the world system, and especially the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon world since the mid-19th century, with the combination of industrial revolution, capitalist expansion, colonialism, and military supremacy, a definitive and structural trend? This question is compounded by a deeper one: Are we witnessing a definitive crisis of capitalist modernity as a historical system? B) Closely related to the above is the systemic challenge posed by this rise: Would it imply the incorporation of one-fifth of the world's population into the center of the global system (something impossible under the current system)? And, C) If so: would this occur under a hybrid development model that doesn't fit within the Western capitalist framework, given that collective land ownership is maintained, the core sectors of the economy are controlled by large state-owned strategic enterprises, and there is significant development of collectively owned village and town enterprises (TVEs), which are the main employers in the economy? Therefore, this transition wouldn't be a transfer of power from a Western, capitalist state to a stronger, more dynamic one, to initiate a new hegemonic cycle of the modern world system. This also raises various research and prospective questions about future scenarios: What development model will prevail in China? Is its rise sustainable, and/or can it be blocked? What does China's rise imply for the Global South and the Global North? What types of world orders and polarities might emerge?

As happens when a hegemonic cycle enters a crisis, a period of “systemic chaos” unfolds, lasting several decades. This period is marked by geostrategic struggles, geopolitical redefinitions, multipolar dynamics, structural economic crises, and strategic bifurcations. Faced with this situation, various studies formulate the idea of ​​the “Thucydides Trap,” according to which the structural tension between an emerging power challenging the dominant power is regularly resolved throughout history through a major war (not necessarily in its conventional form today). In fact, we are already experiencing a trade war, a financial war, and a war for technological primacy, to which we must add the proliferation of different war scenarios that combine traditional elements with those characteristic of hybrid warfare. Is there a trend toward the intensification of global tensions and power struggles? What are the central characteristics of these tensions and struggles? What does the rise of China on the world stage signify? Does it represent an emerging imperialist power and the next space for accumulation in historical capitalism, or does it express something else? What place does Latin America have in this transition, what scenarios does it face, and what are its strategic options?

The rise of China, the reconfiguration of the world power map and its relationship with the region compels us to a great intellectual effort of study, theoretical reflection and conceptual creation, from some fundamental categories with which we map the world: dependency, center-periphery, historical capitalism and capital, modes of production, development models, hegemony and cycles of hegemony, imperialism, economic cycles, historical-spatial transition, world order and world system, global north and global south, among others.