The port of Chancay, Peruvian chifa cuisine, and the endless string of presidents who make pilgrimages to Beijing.
I write these lines gazing out at the Pacific from Lima, the fascinating capital of Peru. I spent a good part of my childhood and youth on this continent; my mother’s family is from here; I went to school here and learned its history and geography; and I have maintained friendships here for over fifty years. I have lived in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Nicaragua, due to my father’s diplomatic postings. This is not, therefore, a detached account, even though the subject I address necessarily has technical aspects: I feel like a man straddling Europe and an America that I deeply love.
I say this because what I’m about to tell you isn’t just some theoretical hypothesis. It’s what I see, and what I’ve watched grow over decades.
On August 18, across the same ocean, Xi Jinping received Daniel Noboa at the Great Hall of the People with an honor guard and a red carpet. Noboa, the Ecuadorian president closest to Donald Trump in the region, was making his first state visit to Beijing. Xi, a generous host, reminded him there of the right of Latin American countries to choose their partners with “autonomy.” Spoken to a declared ally of Washington, the phrase was not accidental: it is Chinese doctrine summed up in a single line.
Noboa closes, for now, a list that is beginning to seem endless. Lula, Boric, Petro, Boluarte, Castro, Díaz-Canel, and now Noboa: the string of Latin American leaders who have made the pilgrimage to Beijing in the last three years continues to grow. What is revealing is not that the regional left is doing it—that was a given—but that the more Atlanticist right is also beginning to do so. Milei promised during his campaign not to negotiate “with any communist,” and yet he has just renewed for five years the swap agreement with the People’s Bank of China—essentially, a currency exchange between central banks to hedge against exchange rate risk—: 130 billion yuan that protect more than 40 percent of Argentina’s reserves. Geopolitics, Milei himself has said to justify himself, is one thing; trade, another. Half the continent could endorse it.
The figures explain China’s patience, and it’s important to present them clearly. China’s trade with the region exceeded $515 billion in 2024; the United States’ trade was around $1.178 trillion. But three-quarters of that US figure is with Mexico: excluding its neighbor, Washington trades less with the rest of Latin America than Beijing. China is already South America’s leading trading partner: the real boundary of this trade dispute coincides with the Central American isthmus. Twenty-two of the thirty-three countries have signed Belt and Road Initiative agreements. The China-CELAC Forum, established in 2015, held its fourth ministerial meeting in Beijing in May 2025 with representatives from some thirty countries: a new Joint Action Plan for 2025-2027, $9.1 billion in new loans, and, as a bi-regional courtesy, visa exemptions for travelers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay.
None of this is by chance or charity. It’s a long-term strategy, executed with the patience that the West—and Spain in particular—finds so difficult to maintain. And nowhere is this more evident than here in Peru.
Boluarte traveled to China in June 2024 with one thing on his mind: the port of Chancay. Xi Jinping reciprocated five months later by inaugurating it himself, taking advantage of his presence in Lima for the APEC summit. The megaport, with an investment exceeding US$3.5 billion and 60% owned by the Chinese state-owned company COSCO Shipping, reduces the maritime journey between Peru and China from 33 to 23 days and lowers logistics costs by at least 20%. In its first year, it boosted between 5 and 10 percent of all Peruvian export growth. China has been Peru’s top trading partner for 12 years now, with bilateral trade increasing from US$34.9 billion in 2022 to US$50.9 billion in 2025, and on track to surpass US$60 billion this year. Chancay aspires to be more than just a bilateral port: a transshipment hub between South America and the entire Asia-Pacific region, with projections even towards the Atlantic.
Washington has responded with concern, and rightly so. A January 2026 ruling by the Peruvian Constitutional Court limited the powers of the state regulator, Ositrán, over the port, and the White House bluntly warned about “cheap Chinese money” that “costs sovereignty.” US Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar even called for the new Peruvian government to “recover” Chancay. That government is that of Keiko Fujimori, sworn in on July 28 after defeating the far-left candidate Roberto Sánchez in the second round, and its strategy thus far has been to avoid choosing sides publicly: not a single mention of China or the United States in her inaugural address, while she has been making numerous friendly gestures toward both powers. Washington has declared Peru a “major non-NATO ally” and announced $1.5 billion to modernize the Callao naval base, less than 80 kilometers from Chancay; Beijing has reciprocated with a congratulatory letter from Xi Jinping and a visit from its Minister of Science and Technology. The decisive meeting will come in November, when China hosts the APEC leaders’ summit in Shenzhen.
Reducing the Sino-Peruvian relationship to this geostrategic struggle would, however, miss the most interesting aspect of the case, which is human rather than strategic. The first Cantonese laborers arrived in Peru in 1849, hired—when not outright deceived—to work on cotton plantations and in the extraction of guano, the fertilizer made from seabird excrement. A century and a half later, between ten and twelve percent of Peruvians are of Chinese descent: more than three and a half million. It is the largest community of Chinese ancestry in all of South America, with its own term of identity, tusán, and an associative network that ranges from the century-old Chinese Benevolent Society to Tusanaje, founded simultaneously in Lima and Shanghai in 2017. From this fusion emerged chifa, which began as the humble food of immigrants—chaufa rice was literally cooked with leftovers—and ended up becoming a national treasure. I can attest to this: you only have to cross any neighborhood in Lima to stumble upon a chifa, and no one from Lima would consider lomo saltado, with its soy sauce and Cantonese-style stir-fry, anything other than a Peruvian dish. Diplomacy took a century and a half to reach a free trade agreement; cuisine had been solving coexistence problems since the 19th century.
That contrast—between the slowness of politics and the speed of culture and commerce—is, in my view, the key to understanding the entire relationship between China and Latin America. Beijing does not impose ideology, and ostensibly does not demand alignments: it offers infrastructure, credit, open markets, and, when convenient, silence on the internal affairs of its partner. That is its decisive competitive advantage, because it doesn’t ask questions. No regional leader can afford to reject ties with China, even if they are an ally of the United States. Trump understood this, hence his response: the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, presented at the end of 2025, and the “Shield of the Americas” summit that brought together a dozen like-minded leaders—Milei, Bukele, Noboa, Peña, Paz—in Doral on March 7 to coordinate a response to what Washington openly calls “hostile external influences.” The Chinese embassy responded with a mocking video asking if it was a shield or shackles for the Americas.
The result, so far, is ambivalent. Doral served more to align right-wing governments internally than to curb major Chinese contracts: weeks later, Noboa was traveling to Beijing with a red carpet welcome. Alignments are announced; contracts are signed. Panama did withdraw from the Belt and Road Initiative in February 2025, after Marco Rubio’s visit, becoming the first country to leave after having been the first to join in 2017. But Mexico, captive to Washington by the USMCA, maintains China as its second-largest trading partner despite the tariffs Sheinbaum has had to impose to curry favor with the White House; and Brazil, with Lula reaffirming his strategic coordination within an expanded BRICS by phone with Xi, has responded to the 25% US tariffs by announcing it will seek “other buyers.” Chile, with the region’s oldest free trade agreement and a surplus thanks to copper, has also seen a Chinese company commit to investing $233 million in its vast lithium reserves. And Honduras, which broke with Taiwan in 2023 to recognize Beijing, signed seventeen bilateral agreements during its first state visit: proof that in this arena, diplomatic recognition from the Asian giant is highly lucrative.
What should concern a Spaniard about this whole situation is not so much who wins the power struggle between Washington and Beijing, but the almost complete absence of a third player who, given history, language, and affection, would have ample reason to be at the table. We have ties with this region that neither Washington nor Beijing will ever be able to match: language, culture, faith, and the shared history. We are, at heart, one people with a shared soul. However, while Xi Jinping tours Buenos Aires, Brasilia, and Lima, Spain’s presence on the Ibero-American strategic agenda has become increasingly irrelevant, reduced to ceremonial summits and the occasional business investment lacking a genuine national strategy.
China has applied its age-old patience—multiplied by the scale of a state with superpower aspirations—to the entire continent, while the West argued over tariffs and military bases. The outcome of this game may not be decided on a battlefield, but in a port, on a swap line, or over a plate of fried rice. And that is precisely the kind of war for which the West—starting with Spain—remains unprepared.