China’s Global Initiatives have emerged as a significant challenge to the Western-dominated international order, yet their theoretical implications for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) remain underexplored. Generally, existing scholarship frames China-Global South relations through dependency-inspired or geopolitical rivalry paradigms (Jureńczyk 2020), both of which reproduce a structural determinism that forecloses meaningful analysis of regional agency. This article intervenes in that debate by mobilizing the concept of multipolar autonomy, a framework derived from the Latin American International Relations (IR) tradition, to theorize how LAC governments engage China’s initiatives not as passive recipients but as actors pursuing sovereign insertion strategies within a multipolar order. Conceptually, multipolar autonomy refers to the proactive diversification of diplomatic, economic, and political relations by Global South States across multiple regions and partners, enabled by the fragmentation of the international order and driven by ideological opposition to hegemonic alignment (Maresca 2026a).
Moreover, this work argues that the conceptual vocabulary of dependency and hegemonic substitution is analytically insufficient to capture the heterogeneous, negotiated character of China-LAC interactions, and that multipolar autonomy offers a more accurate theoretical account of the region’s differentiated responses to Beijing’s global governance agenda. The central argument is that LAC governments engage China’s Global Initiatives not as dependent recipients of Beijing’s governance agenda, nor as passive objects of Washington-Beijing rivalry, but as actors exercising multipolar autonomy: selectively leveraging Chinese proposals to diversify their international insertion and reduce structural dependence on the Global North, driven by their own sovereign priorities and ideological orientations. The article proceeds as follows: it first situates China’s Global Initiatives within the context of hegemonic decline, then identifies the limitations of existing scholarship, and finally develops multipolar autonomy as an analytical framework for understanding the region’s differentiated engagement with Beijing’s global governance agenda.
The Structural Backdrop: Hegemonic Decline and the Rise of China’s Global Initiatives
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis marked a critical turning point in contemporary world politics, exposing the limits of Western predominance and accelerating the crisis of U.S.-led hegemony (Babic 2020; Morales Ruvalcaba 2025). Power scattering has not been a linear process, but its cumulative effects have been decisive. The two Trump administrations’ unilateral actions against the United Nations and its affiliated bodies, the closure of USAID, and the imposition of unilateral tariffs have delegitimized Washington’s perceived power worldwide. According to the Pew Research Center (2017), the start of the first Trump administration signaled a 74% average level of distrust in the US president across more than thirty countries polled. Actions such as withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the JCPOA are evidence of unipolar conduct that, in reality, reflects hollowed-out hegemony (Shidore 2025). In response, Global South countries located on the periphery of a world-system in which they were politically and economically dependent on core countries (Wallerstein 2004) began to find alternative resources to express their agency in the new multipolar world. To this end, China’s economic capacity has undoubtedly been a driver in reaching the Global South and leading developmental initiatives that were previously exclusive to the West, particularly in a region where US dominance was meant to be unquestionable: LAC.
In LAC, the 2000s represented a unique moment to gain autonomy in international relations. The idea of autonomy is a longstanding feature of the region, meaning the quest to assert national sovereignty and diversify foreign policy portfolios vis-à-vis the US. Countries like Brazil began to advance different forms of autonomy, among which is precisely diversification (Vigevani and Cepaluni 2011), to seek expanded and innovative partnerships with international actors. China has been an instrumental actor in helping LAC countries articulate those autonomous partnerships, deepening its presence even with countries with whom it does not maintain diplomatic relations, such as Paraguay (Maresca and Martinez Cabrera 2025). The 3rd Chinese Policy Paper on LAC outlines a range of initiatives spanning diplomatic, economic, developmental, and environmental realms. Furthermore, Chinese options appear to be welcomed as alternatives to the securitized and interventionist foreign policy of the Trump 2.0 administration.
What the Literature Misses
China’s Global Initiatives have drawn sustained attention from US policymakers and analysts. The Global Security Initiative (GSI) has proven particularly consequential, insofar as it presents itself as an alternative to Western-led security architectures. That challenge has been most acutely felt in the Middle East, where Beijing positioned itself as a mediator in the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement of 2023, peace talks conducted without accounting for Israeli demands and perceived accordingly as a challenge to Tel Aviv’s interests (Gross 2025; US-China Economic and Security Review Commission 2023). In Africa, the GSI sparked interest for its potential to address instability in the Sahel and the Horn, filling a vacuum left by Western military retrenchment (Jash 2025). The Global Governance Initiative (GGI), meanwhile, has proven particularly useful for governments facing Western criticism over human rights violations. Algeria’s National Human Rights Council president, Maya Sahli-Fadel, praised China at the Beijing Global Human Rights Governance Forum for advancing governance without impositions and with respect for national sovereignty, a pointed contrast to the U.S. Department of State’s (2024) finding that torture and arbitrary arrest remain common practices in the country (Algeria Press Service 2026).
In LAC, China’s Global Initiatives have not received the wider analytical attention they have attracted in the Middle East and Africa. Taken individually, some initiatives have been analyzed for their regional relevance: Cerda-Dueñas (2024) notes that Caribbean Island States, particularly Dominica, have welcomed the Global Development Initiative (GDI) for its potential to help vulnerable states access vaccines and address food security. In Central America, the GSI’s invocation of LAC’s status as a Zone of Peace has generated proposals for Chinese contributions to cybersecurity capacity in countries such as Costa Rica (Méndez-Coto and Vázquez Guzmán 2025). These contributions are valuable, but they represent a minority compared to the dominant analytical tendency: framing China-LAC interactions through either dependency or great-power rivalry.
Multipolar Autonomy as an Analytical Framework
The Latin American IR tradition offers productive analytical resources for fully grasping the current state of China-LAC relations. The concept of regional autonomy, developed by Jaguaribe (1979) and Puig (1980), was designed precisely to theorize how peripheral States navigate asymmetrical international structures without reducing their behavior to alignment or dependency. Autonomy, in this tradition, is not a condition achieved once and for all. It is a relational practice: an ongoing effort to expand the margin of foreign policy maneuver by building diversified, non-exclusive international partnerships. Multipolar autonomy builds on this tradition by adding the structural condition of multipolarity as its enabling environment. It captures how LAC States translate systemic opportunities generated by the dispersion of inter-State power, most notably US hegemonic decline and China’s rise, into concrete foreign policy strategies of diversification and South-South engagement, driven by the political will of executives ideologically disposed to resist dependence on the Global North. It is precisely at the intersection of structural multipolarity and progressive presidential leadership that multipolar autonomy operates as an analytical concept.
Applied to China’s Global Initiatives, this framework suggests a fundamental reframing. LAC governments do not simply accept or reject Beijing’s proposals. They engage them through the logic of multipolar autonomy: extracting elements consonant with their own sovereign insertion strategies, leveraging China’s presence as a diversification tool against US hegemony, and pursuing national interests without subordinating themselves to Beijing’s agenda, contrary to what dependency frameworks would predict. On the diplomatic front, LAC governments that participate in the Group of Friends of the GDI, endorse the GSI’s language on sovereignty and non-interference, or engage with the GGI’s reform agenda are signaling a foreign policy posture oriented toward Global South solidarity rather than alignment with Washington. On the rhetorical dimension, the GSI’s invocation of sovereignty and non-intervention maps directly onto a pre-existing Latin American normative vocabulary, the Estrada Doctrine, constitutional prohibitions on foreign military bases, and the longstanding defense of LAC as a Zone of Peace, which governments invoke to articulate their own positions through an internationally legitimized vocabulary. On the economic dimension, participation in GDI-linked projects constitutes a tangible expression of the diversification central to the multipolar autonomy strategy.
Conclusion: Autonomy, Not Alignment
The theoretical contribution of this article is, at its core, a reorientation of the analytical gaze. China’s Global Initiatives in LAC cannot be adequately studied using frameworks that portray the region as a passive arena for great-power competition. The multipolar autonomy framework, rooted in the Latin American IR tradition and grounded in the region’s own diplomatic and intellectual history, offers a more accurate and analytically productive starting point. LAC governments engage Beijing’s initiatives not because China is replacing the US as a hegemon, but because multipolarity has created structural openings that progressive presidential leadership has historically been willing and able to exploit.
The stakes of getting this right extend beyond academic debate. As the Trump 2.0 administration intensifies pressure on LAC governments to limit ties with China, understanding what those ties actually consist of, which elements of the Global Initiatives have been adopted, adapted, contested, or ignored, and why, becomes essential. A region that has historically fought for the right to define its own international insertion is unlikely to trade one dependence for another. But it may find, in China’s global governance agenda, resources for a more assertive articulation of its own sovereign voice, not because Beijing offers liberation, but because multipolarity, for the first time in decades, makes genuine diversification structurally possible. The multipolar autonomy framework also carries implications beyond the China-LAC case. As Beijing expands its Global Initiatives across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, the analytical temptation to read those engagements through the lenses of dependency or rivalry will be equally strong and equally limiting. What the Latin American IR tradition offers, and what this article has sought to recover, is a theoretical vocabulary built from the periphery outward, one that takes seriously the agency of states that are structurally constrained but not structurally determined. Dependency is a condition, not a destiny.
For LAC specifically, the coming years will test whether multipolar autonomy can survive the intensified pressure of a White House that has demonstrated its willingness to use hard power in the region, as evidenced by the 3 January 2026 military intervention in Venezuela (Maresca 2026b). In that context, China’s Global Initiatives are unlikely to function as a shield. But they may function as a resource, diplomatic, economic, and political, for governments seeking to maintain the margin of maneuver that multipolarity has opened.
Notes
This research has been funded through the BOF doctoral scholarship BOF/DOC/2025/009 and the FWO grant K220726N.
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