ABSTRACT
Latin America has been linked to China throughout its recent history. During the 1960s the Latin American communist parties participated in the ideological struggle between China and the Soviet Union; in the 1970s they regarded China as the paladin of the struggles of the Third World. In the 1980s South American countries began to feel the presence of a new China so concerned for its own process of economic modernization that it was beginning to compete with them for financial aid in the international organizations. As China’s economic growth accelerated in the 1990s, its exports began to inundate the markets of Latin America. Yet, at the same time China began to regard these countries as potential suppliers of raw materials and agro-industrial products. For these economic reasons and because of the weight China had acquired in the international stage, the contacts between these two regions increased notably in the first years of the new millennium.
