by Lidia Irma Fagale
General Secretary of Union of Press Workers of Buenos Aires, Journalistic Director of Radio Program Clave China, Argentina
The transcendent role that the People’s Republic of China has been acquiring in recent years – on the international stage such as in Latin America and the Caribbean – is a reality reaffirmed and at the same time analyzed from different perspectives and ideological matrices. Its achievements in education, poverty reduction, development and promotion of its technological productive forces, health, transportation, housing and its various peace missions, both in the conflicts of greatest contemporary resonance – and still current – such as that of NATO. Ukraine-Russia, as well as that of Hamas-Israel that has claimed thousands of victims among the Palestinian civilian population. Just as their own territorial conflicts are treated with negotiated proposals without this meaning giving up their rights or principles.
Whoever writes these lines has seen how all content linked to the reality of China, from a commercial, cultural or political perspective, has been on the rise; we must even consider the strengthening and dynamics of its own media structure and content production, which constitutes one of its most strategic aspects to link outside its borders and challenge other media narratives that often distort the reality of China and that have also reached a level of production of stories that try to question its human rights policy, its technological development, the true objective of its scientific bases (Neuquén, Cuba), its economic and commercial capacity, as well as the questioning of the one-China principle, when the Taiwan question is addressed, to which is added the ostensible war of tariffs that were encouraged since 2018 during the time of Donald Trump and that persist to this day.
However, this occurs in a context of crisis of the Western hegemonic power at the same time that it promotes from its cultural, ideological, economic and political plants on a global scale systematic campaigns to discredit historical revolutionary experiences or any attempt, even reformist or minimally more distributive, where they breathe ideas of the end of history, of ideologies, as well as the death of Marxism. And, today China (socialism with Chinese characteristics) and its achievements is one of its main targets of discredit. On our continent we have as a recent example the permanent attacks on the Republic of Cuba since 1959, on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, since 1999 and now Colombia is added, since 2023.
These tendentiously distorted visions that have always existed today gain more strength in some media that vehemently point out “the dangers” of a possible imperialist projection of China. And although the information treatment varies, it is aimed at positioning Chinese foreign policy as a “threat” to the West. What is clear is that the dispute with the United States is expressed in the field of strategic investments, which in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean have achieved prominent positions in China’s trade ladder, but it is also an ideological dispute.
The policy of multilateralism promoted by China within the framework of the peaceful coexistence of states implies the renunciation of war as a means to resolve international disputes and their solution through peaceful means, as well as mutual understanding and trust among other principles. This global proposal that invites a shared future for humanity constitutes an alternative that is at the opposite end of Anglo-Saxon policies: interventionist, warlike and supposedly hegemonic.
In this context, the information that circulates is deliberately biased and is generally conditioned by the ideological conception supported by the government in power in the different countries and its alliance with various power factors, as well as the international alignment it adopts, in the style of the cold War.
In the case of Argentina, we are witnessing a foreign policy that manifests itself in a diplomacy that responds to a right-wing position, enemy of the State called anarcho-capitalism, which declares itself an enemy of any social policy that it describes as communist or collectivist. Based on esoteric and messianic ideas, the current Argentine president proposes, in his words, “to destroy the structure of the State to establish total market freedom,” explicitly positioning himself on the US-Israel axis. This position of the current president of Argentina has led to a series of diplomatic setbacks with China, with criticism of its political system and ideology which, for these reasons, has renounced joining the BRICS as well as not participating in the MERCOSUR meeting and clashes with Bolivia, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Colombia and México.
However, other areas are added to Argentina’s current ideologized foreign policy that cooperate, clarify, advance and deepen ties with the People’s Republic of China from the information, academic, commercial, political and cultural spheres. For example, Argentina has been assigned as the venue for the convocation of different national universities for the First Congress of Sinologists to be held in Buenos Aires where, among other topics, the five principles of peaceful coexistence proposed by Zhou Enlai will be disseminated and analyzed, namely: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. These principles encourage not only the academic sector, they encourage the generation of content in some media to continue showing the characteristics of the People’s Republic of China and its link not only with our country but with the world.
Another aspect worth highlighting is the report released less than a month ago by The Rosario Stock Exchange, which published about investments for lithium extraction in Argentina, mentions seven projects for a total of 3.4 billion dollars. And this week another was added for commercial activity in Salta, such as the Centenario-Ratones project, the fourth operational project in Argentina and the first in the world that will use the direct lithium extraction method on an industrial scale.
The truth is that in the face of a warlike world, the proposal for peaceful coexistence of the People’s Republic of China implies the construction of a new global civilization and its proposal is interpreted in several areas as a strategic collaboration to build a more just, more balanced world. less unequal, where there is an ethic of harmony. It is about collaborating with the construction of a world system with universal consensus, without coercion, for the benefit of all peoples.
China’s role today in the world due to its enormous capacity for development, its achievements in its fight against poverty, its technological growth in all dimensions, as well as its strength and temperance in its diplomacy have placed it as an object of permanent study and attracted the attention of analysts around the world. .
Its prominence and the ultimate objectives of China’s international deployment are the subject of a fervent academic and political debate, which has created a new informational geopolitics with all that this entails. Those of us as journalists who dedicate ourselves to all the content produced by the reality of China face daily those who find in its global projection the “imperialist” potential of the Asian country.
The failure of socialization of capitalism-imperialism has caused attention to turn towards China. It is not strange, as well as known, that Western power plants generate, in the context of their crisis, false, manipulated, unfounded information to hit those who they consider endanger their battered hegemony.
Therefore, knowing China, not only from a theoretical or academic perspective, an aspect that I do not underestimate nor reading China from the major Western media that today operate as interested economic groups and in coordination with the economic interests of the Anglo-Saxon alliance and its armed wing, NATO, It is not enough to break the information fence. In my opinion, it implies expanding the idea of traditional diplomacy to encounter thousands of information areas (of different formats) that, outside the traditional structures of Western countries, struggle every day to contribute to the truth and not only about China. And for those of us who practice journalism, it is a challenge to disseminate proposals that place human beings at the center of their initiatives inside and outside its borders. China forces us to think, to reflect, to believe that another world is possible. And to confront the systematic production of ignorance that circulates in the cultural nervous system of the planet against any initiative that creatively faces the most painful sides of a humanity excluded from its own home, the earth. And in that sense, I highlight the prominence that the Platform of International Organizations of Belt and Road Journalists has assumed since its creation in 2019, a timely and strategic initiative that must continue to grow.
*The views and opinions expressed in the articles are solely those of the individual authors and do not reflect the position of the Secretariat of the Belt and Road Journalist Network.