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Latin America has found a new ideological beacon. It presents itself as anti-imperialist, a defender of the Global South and a rival to Western capitalism. Paradoxically, that beacon is a regime that represents the most ruthless form of capitalism and the most rigid authoritarianism: China.
The art of dominating without invading: what the world knows but chooses to ignore about China We all know, or at least think we know, how China’s soft power works. You do not need to have read the renowned author Joseph Nye to understand that when we talk about Chinese soft power, we are talking about a machine that combines money, prestige and patient diplomacy, but also a deeply ideological agenda. Beijing does not export culture, it exports legitimacy. It redefines universal concepts such as democracy, human rights, political rights and freedom, and adapts them to its own dictionary. In that dictionary, censorship becomes stability, social control becomes harmony and political silence becomes respect for cultural diversity.
Of course, the excuse is perfect: “every country has its own history, culture and values”. It is an argument that sounds tolerant when serving any regime that does not want to be held accountable. Under that logic, the forced internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang is not a human rights violation but a “re-education campaign”. The silencing of independent media becomes a mechanism of protection against “Western disinformation”. The subjugation of Hong Kong becomes nothing more than a “restoration of order”. Everything depends on who writes the press release.
It is an open secret, and also an uncomfortable truth, that the “Chinese economic miracle” could never have happened within a democratic system. This is not said as praise but as a factual observation. No democracy could move 300 million people from the countryside to the cities in a single generation without facing protests, referendums or court action. No elected government could sacrifice a river, an ethnic group or an entire city in the name of industrialisation without being voted out at the next election. The Chinese Communist Party did it without asking permission and without paying any political price. That authoritarian efficiency, that ability to decide without deliberation, was its competitive advantage.
The formula was brilliant in its cynicism: open the economy, close the political sphere. State capitalism to attract investment, moral Marxism to justify it. Western business leaders celebrated the stability while Party ideologues enjoyed the control. In this way China achieved what once seemed impossible. It became a global power while forbidding something that is basic in Latin America: the right to protest and to think aloud. Perhaps we are not as socially behind as we think.
Even so, the most unsettling part is not what China has done within its borders but what it is doing beyond them. Its model does not stop at the economy or infrastructure but also globalises control. From the digital Silk Road to technological agreements with African and Latin American countries, presented under the idea of “cooperation and shared development”, China’s soft power has turned into a sophisticated system for exporting surveillance and propaganda. It does not simply sell technology, it sells a model of society where the citizen is a data point and governments become promoters of Asian digital dependence.
You do not need to be a conspiracy theorist to see the pattern. The same facial recognition systems used in China to monitor dissidents are sold in Africa as tools for public safety. Data analysis platforms used to track ethnic minorities in Xinjiang are offered in Latin America as innovations in “urban management”. Chinese state-controlled 5G networks guarantee connectivity, but also potential access to strategic information from the countries that adopt them.
The real key lies in the narrative. China does not impose its model. It offers it as an alternative. It presents it as the “efficient and sovereign” version of digital progress, free from the “hypocrisy” of Western regulations. In a hemisphere tired of US surveillance scandals and the IMF’s lending conditions, the proposal sounds almost emancipatory. Yet behind this apparent autonomy lies something more subtle. It is a transfer of values. Every camera, every piece of software, every technological agreement carries with it a particular understanding of the role of the state and the place of the individual.
Latin America is not outside this trend. In fact it is one of the most fertile regions for such expansion. Countries with weak democracies, fragile institutions and political classes fascinated by the idea of technological sovereignty find in China a willing and generous partner that, most importantly, does not ask questions. Under the narrative of “progress without conditions”, they end up absorbing the very model of control they claim to reject.
The paradox is that while the region presents itself on the international stage as a defender of human rights, equality and inclusion, it celebrates agreements with a state that bans free trade unions, persecutes religious minorities and considers independent journalism subversive. This contradiction, this ideological mirage, deserves separate analysis.
China: the distorted mirror of the Latin American left Latin America has spent decades searching for a mirror in which to see itself, and it has found one in China’s distorted image. In a continent where some political and ideological sectors have come to measure their dignity by how far they stand from the United States, the rise of the Asian giant arrived as a symbolic blessing. Finally, a power that challenges hegemony.
The enthusiasm with which certain left-wing sectors embrace this narrative is, to say the least, bewildering. They speak of social justice yet applaud a country that bans independent unions. They champion gender equality yet ignore the fact that Chinese women cannot protest freely or create feminist movements without being silenced. They defend freedom of expression while aligning themselves with a state that has turned the internet into an invisible wall. In the name of anti-imperialism they end up idealising a model that, if applied in their own countries, they would condemn without hesitation.
China has achieved what old Soviet propaganda never did. It is admired without being loved and imitated without being understood. Unlike Russia, which carries its authoritarian reputation openly, China has learnt to build an aesthetic of authoritarian progress. Its authoritarianism is not presented as repression but as efficiency. It does not need the world to see its system as morally superior, only to see it as functional. In a region tired of economic crises and democratic disappointments, the promise of “order with prosperity” sounds temptingly reasonable.
What is fascinating, and dangerous, is how this admiration filters into local political discourse. Every time a Latin American leader praises the Chinese model or the “success of capitalism with state planning”, they are in fact legitimising the idea that development can exist without freedom. This is precisely the type of thinking that erodes democracies from within. Not a military coup, but the belief that freedom is an unnecessary luxury.
Meanwhile, anti-American rhetoric continues to function as the emotional glue of much of the region’s progressive movement. It is easier to oppose “Yankee imperialism” than to confront one’s own contradictions. Because in the end, the fascination with China does not come from love of its model but from resentment of the other. Of the United States and of capitalism, which China also uses, although people seem to believe that the streets of Beijing represent pure twenty-first century communism.
The result is a political paradox. The sectors of Latin America that claim to defend progressive values of equality, justice and human rights align themselves with a state that believes in none of these principles. They do so enthusiastically, convinced they are building a fairer new order, when in reality they are validating a model that destroys the very freedoms that made those ideals possible.
Here the question is: is demonising the United States simply part of Latin American populist politics, or has China managed to convince the world that it is not capitalist in order to appear as the alternative to the perceived injustice of American meritocracy?
