China's presence in Latin America: Too big to fail?
- By Guo Jie
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 9, 2015
Nowadays, the countries which export most to China are mainly in South America, Central America, and Mexico. The trade with China is focused on several primary products. Peru, Chile, and Bolivia are China's source of imports of copper, iron, lead, zinc and gold, since they have abundant mining resources. The metal mine products make up the largest part of trade with China. Peru is a typical example. According to its report on China-Peru trade released in November 2013, in the past six years, the traditional products including major mine products and some fishery products like fish oil still make up a large proportion of the exports. The first three quarters statistics of 2013 show that the mine products made up 95 percent of Peru's total exports to China. Copper and iron made up the biggest part, 72.6 percent and 14.8 percent respectively. The Peruvian government has tried for years to promote export of other non-traditional products, but hasn't worked so far. (Figure 3). But China exports a variety of products to Peru, including engines, electronics, video and audio equipment and component parts, machines and parts, automobiles and components. China's exports are rising year by year in these three categories: raw and processed materials, daily products and capital goods. (Figure 4)
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Source: MINCETUR-OGEE-OEEI, "Reporte de Comercio Bilateral Perú-China, III Trim-2013," p.5. |
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Source: MINCETUR-OGEE-OEEI, "Reporte de Comercio Bilateral Perú-China, III Trim-2013," p.5. |
The same thing also happened with China's trade with South American countries such as Brazil and Argentina. According to Brazilian foreign trade statistics, plant and mine products such as soy beans, iron ore, wood pulp, cane sugar, marble, copper cathode and granite were major exports to China in 2013, 80 percent of them primary commodities. But China's exports to Brazil in 2013 were mainly electromechanical, chemical and textile products and raw materials. Furniture, toys, base metal and products, as well as optical, horological and medical equipment were also big exports to Brazil from China. In Argentina, the statistics of first three quarters in 2013 showed that 75.8 percent of exports to China are agricultural products (the volume was US$3.5 billion out of the total volume of US$4.63 billion). At the same time, China's exports to Argentina were mainly electromechanical products, making up 57.3 percent of total Argentina's imports from China. The second is chemical products which took up 11.6 percent and other imports of transport equipment, furniture, toy, plastic, rubber and base metals and products made up 19.2 percent of China's total export volume to Argentina.
