Anthropological Quarterly

China and the Future of History in Latin America

China’s global rise forces “politicians, businesspeople, and researchers to debate and formulate fresh solutions to an old problem: what balance of state, market, and civic inputs can best harness the world’s shifting economic currents?” (3). This especially holds true for latin America. China is challenging national economic policies throughout the region, and efforts to block its influence on domestic markets appear certain to fail.

This is the message of anthropologist and political sociologist Adrian H. Hearn’s book Diaspora and Trust: Cuba, Mexico, and the Rise of China. He challenges entrenched debates about China’s role and influence in latin America that have tended to vacillate between the opposing visions of a promising “China Model” of South–South relations versus a “Beijing Consensus” as imperialistic and threatening as the Washington one. Hearn goes beyond these contrasting visions rooted in policy debates. He takes Chinese migrant communities as the entry point to look at larger economic, political, and cultural entanglements between China, Mexico, and Cuba. After nearly two centuries of Chinese diaspora settlement in both countries, these migrant communities make encouraging transnational bridging figures that promise to facilitate economic development. Moreover, as “the Chinese government now looks outward with a brand of economic pragmatism unknown to Cold War contenders,” it is the “cooperation forged through the Chinese diaspora [that] is advancing a unique blend of materialist and idealist agendas” (209f). In order to exploit this human and social potential, latin American states have to learn how to [End Page 917] engage with Chinese migrant associations, brokers, and business owners more effectively. This means creating a climate of general trust and legal protection for a minority group historically mistreated and discriminated against, as well as offering predictable public–private cooperation to enhance vertical trust with community leaders and local entrepreneurs. Not an easy task. The overall picture at present, as Hearn suggests, is quite different from such a rosy socio-economic future.

Both Cuba and Mexico share a complicated history of Chinese immigration, and their current economic outlook is closely tied to China (who is the second largest trading partner of both countries). They differ starkly, however, in their economic policies. Neoliberal Mexico and state socialist Cuba stand at opposing ideological ends within Latin America, yet policy makers in both countries “recognize the need for forms of public–private cooperation that diverge from conventional development models” (3).

With the comparison of Cuba and Mexico, Hearn not only contrasts two countries that face similar challenges from very different historical and political standpoints, but goes beyond the conventional analysis of Chinese interest in natural resources. The book is a timely reminder that China’s role in latin America is not limited to extractivist practices. Research in the emergent field of China–latin America has been greatly centered on state-backed Chinese investments and loans in the agricultural, hydrocarbon, and mining sectors. This engagement in resource extraction is certainly significant and politically and socially explosive, but there is more going on in latin America–China relations. The two national contexts that Hearn compares embody trans-Pacific relations beyond resource extraction, as their economic relations with China are multi-sectorial, and—in contrast to other, especially South American, countries—their problems with China do not seem to rest on a “re-primarization” of their economies.

The book can be seen as a response to repeated calls to go beyond macroeconomic and geopolitical analysis and to explore the potential mutual benefit of the rapid growth of China–latin America trade relations in the last decade (Strauss and Armony 2012). Hearn explores bottom-up forms of Sino–latin American engagement (see also Hearn, Smart, and Hernández Hernández 2011). Similar to other anthropologists in the field (DeHart 2012, Pinheiro-Machado 2012), he links Chinese international migration to the country’s foreign trade and policy agenda. The book adopts an approach that compares seemingly very different countries and...