On Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over the opening ceremony of a new dialogue platform linking China and Latin America. The forum brings together China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a 33-member bloc made up of the South American, Central American, and Caribbean states. China and CELAC agreed to create a joint forum at last year’s CELAC meeting in Cuba, and the inaugural ministerial meeting opened in Beijing on January 8.
As this is the first-ever China-CELAC forum, the main item on the agenda is to put in place regulations — defining rules, setting up regular dialogues, and providing “a system guarantee” for implementing plans and political consensus. This first meeting is also expected to set the agenda for China-Latin America cooperation from 2015 to 2019.
China has already floated some ambitious goals. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that China wants to increase direct investment in Latin America to $250 billion by 2025. China also pledged to increase bilateral trade to $500 billion in the same time frame, nearly double the $261 billion value of China-Latin America trade in 2013. That would cement China’s position as the second-largest trading partner for the region, still far behind the U.S. (which totaled $850 billion in trade with the region in 2013).
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