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With the booming of Brazil’s off-shore oil drilling, the Sino-Brazilian energy cooperation is facing historical opportunities, manifested in the fields of oil trade, market access, technology transfer and bioenergy exploration. To achieve a steady and robust development in bilateral cooperation, China should take a proactive energy diplomacy approach to overcome challenges arise from its increasing engagement., Com a expansão da perfuração brasileira de petróleo offshore, a cooperação energética sino-brasileira está diante de oportunidades históricas, manifestadas nas áreas de comércio de petróleo, acesso ao mercado, transferência de tecnologia e exploração debioenergias. Para alcançar um desenvolvimento estável e robusto na cooperação bila-teral, a China deverá adotar uma abordagem proativa em sua diplomacia energéticapara superar os desafios emergentes em decorrência de seu envolvimento crescente.

This chapter examines the trade and economic relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which have been expanding exponentially since the dawn of the new millennium. China’s economic engagement is a key driver of the commodity boom in the first decade of the twenty-first century, because China imported massive amounts of raw materials from Latin America, which in turn boosted the fast economic growth in the region. Latin American officials, pundits, and journalists developed a keen interest to “rediscover” China and its growing impact on the transformation of the global economy and on the Western Hemisphere. A new wave of China’s presence in LAC has been ushered in since Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated his position in 2013.

The era of transition between China and Latin America seems to be following a perfect timing between commitments and responses and policy dynamics. Therefore, this book is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes China’s new economic and political commitments to Latin America and the subsequent responses from the governments and citizens of the countries in the region. The second section elaborates on the traditional realms of interaction between China and Latin America, namely, trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), and introduces two increasingly pertinent topics in the field of Sino-Latin American studies—agriculture and intellectual property. This book would have been incomplete without presenting the specific studies that have taken dominance in Sino-Latin American and Caribbean (Sino-LAC) relations in the twenty-first century: the cultural dimensions, the relevance of civil society in this engagement, and the social impacts derived from different forms of interaction; these studies have been included in the third section of this book.