Xi Jinping’s sinister plan to encircle the United States is almost complete

China’s latest gambit is the massive Chancay port in Peru. Marco Rubio doesn’t have much time to fight back

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Xi Jinping has arrived in South America to attend the APEC Economic Leaders meeting, and for a state visit to Peru to inaugurate Puerto de Chancay, a new deep-water port built and equipped entirely by China. This massive facility cost as much as $3.6 billion. It will strengthen China’s geostrategic grip in the region and challenge US plans to restore its neglected engagement in its traditional “backyard”. 
After China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, it moved rapidly to invest in the developing world, with a focus on the “Global South” and areas where US influence was limited or waning. The spearhead for this was Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which chiefly invests in critical infrastructure projects that create strategic dependencies in client states. 
By 2021, China’s bilateral trade with the Caribbean and Latin America had reached $450 billion, making it the region’s largest trading partner in place of the US. Since China surged into the southern hemisphere, its self-proclaimed benign partnership with “equals” increasingly aims for regional hegemony at US expense. 
The ground truths are uncomfortable. Xi Jinping has visited Latin America 11 times since he took power in 2013. Twenty-one countries in the region have signed up to the BRI. China’s relations with Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Mexico are at the highest level – what Beijing describes as a “comprehensive strategic partnership”. Free trade agreements abound. 
The intention is to frame China as a “better” partner than the US and its allies. But this is illusory. Bilateral trade is based on China importing strategic raw commodities such as copper, lithium, soybeans oil and petroleum, all needed to bolster its efforts to revive economic growth, while exporting cheap manufactured goods which undermine local economic diversity and consolidate “resource curse” dependencies. This, combined with massive non-transparent investment in mining, energy, transport and digital infrastructure projects, generates poor governance, a decline in democratic values, and grave threats to national autonomy and security. 
As Xi Jinping’s 14 November public message to Peru regally highlights, a copper mine owned by China contributes 1 per cent of Peru’s GDP, and in 2023 36 per cent of Peru’s exports went to China. (The 2021 figure for Chile was 38 per cent).
According to Xi, when fully operational the new Chancay port would generate $4.5 billion per year for Peru. But during construction, Peru was coerced into changing local legislation so that China would have sole operating rights there. 
The port will save several Latin American countries shipping costs by cutting out transit of the Panama Canal en route to Chinese ports. But the net advantage in terms of economic security will be China’s, not to speak of the potential “right” to use Chancay as a naval base for Pacific and Southern Ocean power projection. China already sells considerable quantities of weapons to Peru and several other Latin American countries.   
Here it is important to revisit the strategic objectives behind investments like Chancay, work on which began in 2022. That year, a bipartisan group of US senators introduced a bill to direct the Departments of State and Defence to devise and deliver a proper strategy for dealing with Chinese and Russian influence in the Caribbean and Latin America. 
One of its sponsors commented that “there is no greater threat in our region than the growing meddling of Russia and China in Latin America and the Caribbean”. He said that it was important to “foster and improve our security co-operation with democracies in our hemisphere as well as facilitate trade in order to deter malign actors from coercing countries in our own backyard”. The speaker was Senator Marco Rubio, whom Donald Trump has chosen to be his Secretary of State. 
Rubio, of Cuban heritage, is one of the most experienced, well-informed US political thinkers on Latin America. He has worked ceaselessly to expose anti-US and anti-democratic Chinese activity in the region and help the US government organise effective responses. It is to be hoped that Rubio will be able to continue this vital work when he takes the leading role in implementing America’s foreign policy. 
Beijing has paused crucial domestic economic measures until Trump’s China policy emerges. Key Chinese clients, including Brazil, are holding engagement with the BRI at bay for the same reason, in case they fall foul of new US tariffs and sanctions by association. The entire free world must deal with China’s threat while there is still time; only resilient US policies, co-ordinated with its allies, can deliver success.     
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