Double Handshake

A few noteworthy links from around the web (a few that I’ve had on my desk for some time now). With a little down time in the coming weeks, I’ll hopefully give a few of these stories their proper treatment. But, for now, the short list:

Bloomberg reports that newly christened 2016 Olympic city Rio de Janeiro is looking to China to help finance the its planned US$11 billion in Olympics-related infrastructure projects. (China knows a thing or two about the topic). State-owned China Development Bank loaned Brazilian state-owned oil giant Brasileiro SA US$10 billion earlier this year.

On the subject of oil, the Latin Business Chronicle republished an article from the Wharton Business School on China’s quest for oil in Latin America. Buried half-way down in the piece is a good breakdown of China’s proposed deal to buy Argentinean oil exploration and refining firm YPF for around US$17 billion – which would be the largest-ever overseas deal by a Chinese company.

R. Evan Ellis, whose book China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores has been reviewed nicely here, published another exhaustively cited bird’s eye view of what China’s presence in Latin America means for the US earlier this month for the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief.

Two of his four main claims raised an eyebrow for me: “[China] is enabling the survival and spread of regimes oriented against the United States, Western-style democracy and economic models” and “[China] is undermining the United States as a source of political and economic influence in the region, as well as U.S. options for regional engagement.” Ellis takes pains to point out that China is, of course, not directly undermining democracy and US influence, but rather propping up the economies and the political lives of leaders like Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa with its investment and trade dollars. Still, should we be alarmed or is Ellis being alarmist? Is the US’s capacity for “regional engagement” actually hindered by China’s presence or is the US simply in less of a position of power?

Chile is the only South American country to commit to its own pavilion at next year’s Shanghai Expo, spending US$6 million on construction rather than renting, according to Shanghai Daily. Fear not: Easter Island will be represented at the Chilean pavilion, as will this groan-inducing design idea:

At the Shanghai event next year, Chile will attract visitors with three special wells. People will be able to look into the wells in the pavilion in Shanghai to see scenes and hear the sounds of some Chilean cities on the opposite side of the earth.

Finally, here is a new trilingual corporate blog from the newly launched SinoLatin Capital, which specializes in China-Latin American investment deals. The blog got off to a roaring start in August, but posts have since grown a bit infrequent. I can relate. There’s more to be written about SinoLatin Capital, but for now, find some background on the company here.

So, now it’s official – Brazil will be the first-ever South American country to host the Olympic Games, in 2016. I can only imagine the parties going on now on the beaches of Copacabana…

Like last year’s Summer Games in Beijing, the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro promise to be “coming out party” for one of the world’s largest and most important developing countries. No offense to London, but 2016 stands to be a momentous occasion – beyond sporting competition – for not only a city and a country, but a continent as a whole. As an article in the NY Times earlier this week put it:

For Brazil, which has bid three times before — Rio twice and Brasília once — Friday’s vote comes after several years of economic growth and the nation’s emergence as the continent’s business and diplomatic leader. The Olympics, Mr. Osorio said, would have “a clear alignment with the country’s long-term strategy of presenting itself in the world.”

There will be much to say on the Rio-Beijing comparisons in the coming days, but for now: Enjoy the party!

I spent Saturday afternoon at the Centro Cultural Beijing (北京文化馆) with two dozen, mostly young, Peruvians studying Chinese. The center is the biggest Chinese language school I’ve come across in Lima and is run by Benjamín Gutiérrez González, a Peruvian who lived and studied martial arts in China for years. One Saturday per month, the center puts on Chinese cultural activities. The occasion this past Saturday was the return of two Peruvian girls from their semester abroad in Beijing.

The girls sat at the front of the classroom, in front of posters of Summer Palace and the Great Wall, and addressed the group in Spanish. Most bases were touched: food, weather, safety, friendliness of the people, classes, professors, pollution, censorship, social life, etc. They gave Beijing fairly good marks, with exceptions being pollution – “the sky is gray; people wear masks,” initial comfort – “no one can really speak English, not professors, not other students, not people on the street, let alone Spanish,” and food – “it is not like in Peru, where we love meat; most food is cut into small pieces and greasy.”

I sat next to Ettorena, a Peruvian in her early twenties with long hair and faded blond highlights, and a predilection for all things China. Rena, or 琳娜 or 爱多琳娜 or 小爱 depending on who’s asking, has studied Chinese for two years and works in the center as a secretary during the week. When I first met her two weeks ago, she greeted me at the doorway with chopsticks stuck in her hair. We spoke in Chinese for an hour, and she showed me her key chain with the Olympic Fuwa. I asked her if she got bored at the office during the day with no one else around.

“It’s not so bad,” she told me, “I just chat with my Chinese friends on QQ. I can type characters really fast!” She jotted down some characters in my notebook, about twice as fast as I could have written them.

Rena’s dream is to go and study in China, of course. She told about a job she was planning to apply for here in Lima, at a casino called Atlantic City. The casino is looking for Chinese and Spanish speakers to cope with the influx of Chinese tourists (and gamblers). She reckons if she could land that job, she’d be able to pay for her plane ticket to Beijing sometime next year. During the talk last Saturday, Rena leaned forward with her elbows on the desk, engrossed.

After the talk, we broke into small groups around wooden tables. There were a handful of young Chinese guys there too, from Liaoning, Jilin and Beijing – themselves Spanish students at another language school twenty minutes away. The Chinese speakers dispersed to the seven tables and the groups spoke in a mash up of Chinese and Spanish.

There were three other people at my table: Pablo, a 21-year-old engineering student who’d studied Chinese for six months; Roxana, a Guangdong woman in her 70s who immigrated to Peru in 1982 and owns a shop in Chinatown; and, A Long, an angular foreign student to Lima who’d dropped out of college in Beijing and arrived here six months prior. The conversation was disjointed and tended to flow through Roxana, who was the only one who spoke both languages well.

“Let me tell you about my husband,” she began and proceeded to sketch a biography of the man for about 10 minutes, including his salary a various milestones. I followed about three-quarters of it. Pablo nodded.

“Where are you from?” Pablo asked me when Roxana had finished.

I told him and asked what the hardest part of learning Chinese was.

“Speaking and listening are not hard. Writing is hard. Reading is hard.” He paused for a beat and spoke rapid Spanish to Roxana.

“Money, health, family,” she answered, in Spanish.

Later, on my way out, I stopped by Rena’s table, which was littered with papers filled with Chinese characters.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Call or email me the next time you’re having Cultural Saturday, ok?”

“Dangran!” (Of course!) she beamed. “Zai jian!”