China's strategy towards the countries of Latin America

Pursuing a policy of national energy security and diversification of energy suppliers, taking advantage of decrease in the activity of American political and economic actors in the Latin America region, Beijing successfully develops a cooperation with countries of the region, giving it the rank of a „strategic partnership“. Since the foundation of the People's Republic of China, the Maoist authorities' foreign policy focused mainly on distributing the ideology and limiting the economic cooperation to the necessary minimum. This concerned mainly the third world: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. With the collapse of the Maoist radicals and implementation of the „opening to the world“ policy by Deng Xiaoping, the political cooperation with countries of Latin Amer-ica gave way to the development of trade exchange, and since there has occurred a loss of self-sufficiency in raw materials and energy, a pressure of Beijing to intensify economic cooperation, with an emphasis on this sector of the national economy, particularly sensitive, especially in the changing structure of a multipolar world, clearly increases. China, using „soft elements“ of the foreign policy, effectively builds their position in Latin America, using the potential accumulated in huge foreign exchange reserves of the state and central man-agement system for the largest economic and bank actors, creating, „incidentally“, new markets for their increasingly processed products with higher and higher degree of techno-logical advancement. Despite the intensification of cooperation, Latin American countries are becoming increasingly assertive towards China, being afraid of possible consequences of „cooling“ of the economic growth in the Middle Kingdom and development of its political influence in the region