| dc.description.abstract | In less than one century, the People’s Republic of China has emerged from an inward-looking nation unable to feed or protect its citizens to a global actor that has shifted the distribution of power and caused alarm in the international community. A crucial aspect of China’s emergence is its regional engagement to secure access to resources and markets. These pursuits sustain China’s domestic economy and enable its worldwide growth.
However, the discourse encompassing a rising China often lapses into the well-traveled space of predicting what type of power China will become and its consequences. Debates regarding status-quo or revisionist power, and peaceful rise versus confrontation with the existing hegemonic order, while initially applicable, are increasingly outmoded questions with reduced capacity to provide novel insight. So too, is the question of whether a grand strategy motivates China’s rise, viewed here as less fertile ground for new exploration. Moving past these questions to a holistic examination of China’s rise offers another path for understanding.
The missing piece to the puzzle of China’s engagement with regions worldwide, such as that found in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a deeper understanding of concepts of power can be found in the nexus between that regional presence and the development of structural power. The present research examines the transitional space of agenda-setting power located at the sub-international system level rather than assessing it only after that power has allegedly already been attained.
It is argued that power-as-resources approaches, or actor-centric relational power concepts, provide an incomplete solution to the puzzle. On the other hand, theories of structural power offer a more nuanced approach to understanding China’s engagement. Susan Strange’s analytical framework of structural power emerges as a particularly useful paradigm. Building on Strange’s original idea that the control and exercise of certain key elements by a state can produce structural power, this study examines China’s activities in Latin America and the Caribbean through a structural power lens to provide new insight.
Understanding the far-reaching implications of China’s rise is enabled by utilizing an approach that conceptualizes power as less direct, less perceptible, and less coercive. It is a subtle form of power that can have systemic effects. This project leverages these ideas to construct a bridge between China’s presence in Latin America and the Caribbean and the development of capabilities that advance its capacity to realize system level structural power. | en_GB |
