By Lidia Fagale
News Director of Clavechina, Argentina
There was a first approach to China through the literary paths he named in his imagination, fiction, and metaphors, which, in his labyrinthine games, created characters who would illuminate our Western blindness. Yes, a fantastic journey, hand in hand with his Chinese lacquer cane. Yes, it was Borges who traced the first path of my adolescence, making me part, as the Argentine and universal writer maintained, “of that empire, infinite in time, which erected its wall to build a magical enclosure.”
And they were also the first Spanish translations of The Art of War, which completed the required reading for politicized generations in Latin America, as well as the first rapprochements between the new China and the group of non-aligned countries. And long before that, paper, gunpowder, the printing press, and the compass gave life to history, to memory, to a present that was conjugated in all times, as in the vast wisdom of the pre-Columbian cultures that the conquistadors annihilated during the Inca, Aztec, and Mayan empires.
And China also came to me through the Il milione (The Million), also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, the Italian (Venetian) merchant whose voyages, discoveries, and customs from different countries and cities lifted the veil on a fantastic world, crisscrossed with realities, legends, and myths. This world of magic and legend was as real as it was different from the West. A country, almost a continent, where its philosophy is rooted in the very bones of a culture that prioritizes the collective over the individual, exactly the opposite of the main cultural-ideological paradigm that underpins the West. A trait that has earned it its success today and has unwittingly made China a friendly, cooperative, and supportive option compared to the West.
Many years after the 1949 revolution, Mao offered us new cartographies and colors to the old school world maps of the West. Just as his ideas, already well-known in the 1930s in our region, emerged with greater force beginning in the 1970s under different interpretations and adaptations, simultaneously with the independence and liberation movements of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Geographically distant, China was being built as part of that route it would one day travel.
Amid the shadows that the West seeks to impose, a butterfly flutters once again, strong and alive with the memory of struggles and resistance against the various plundering imperialist invasions of which it was a victim. And China presented itself to the world as a key player on the global stage and revived the Silk Road in the 21st century, with an unprecedented global initiative that today unites dozens of countries around the world.
Today, that almost continent-like country promises many futures, in times when the verbs of history are conjugated without giving us respite. With the world mired in all kinds of violence, with wars that persist despite peace negotiations, with splinters turning into commercial, military, or ideological communications bullets, China offers a shared destiny for a humanity that is increasingly approaching an endangered species.
I write these lines from the southernmost country, Argentina, currently gripped by a neo-fascist political and economic situation. However, many of us are part of that global south that sees China as an example seeking a collective solution for millions of human beings.
In times when government diplomacy errs due to temporary political issues, the culture of the people remains, which, like water, merges with other rivers and walks hand in hand with other subjects, where the closest thing is the history of shared resistance, although in some cases we think from the bitter taste left by—for the moment—lost battles.
That’s why China today is that light—that magical place—that once illuminated us when fleeting justice shone on the bodies of men, women, and children. That is the desire for a shared destiny.
It is China, and all of us who believe in multilateral relations, without hegemony, who must collaborate in charting a path where only goods and goods do not circulate freely.
It’s always about the human being, a species that is currently dying in the burning ashes of the most voracious system of mass destruction: capitalism-imperialism and its cultural-military-technological industry on a global scale.
However, it’s impossible to ignore the cultural bridges that unite shared histories and the opportunity to see another world, as we’ve witnessed the global hegemonic transition for more than 20 years.
In this sense, the idea of viewing the world outside the antinomies imposed during the Cold War and whose paradigms the West continues to try to impose is gaining momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The voices heard at the last meeting of CELAC + China (The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and China), held in Beijing in May 2025, 10 years after its creation, mark a path that guides us to deepen regional integration and cooperation among member countries, and to continue strengthening Latin American and Caribbean identity to address common challenges such as poverty, inequality, and climate change, and to assume a leading role on the international stage. This is no small feat: CELAC represents 600 million people in a world where, among other issues, the digital divide still persists. Narratives prevail (not only at the regional level) that reinforce paradigms of low or no trust in institutions in general and the State in particular, based on the clear weakness of liberal democracies that have failed to solve problems related to employment, healthcare, education, and public works, thus foreclosing on more promising futures. The worrying thing is that social outlets—especially among young people—are being co-opted by narratives that promote individualism as the only option for personal development. These narratives are largely based on conservative and xenophobic values, where the collective is subsumed by social media on a global scale. It should be noted that CELAC encompasses 200 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29, representing 30% of the region’s total population.
Those of us who have the opportunity to challenge the meaning that is being imposed on our societies must increase our knowledge capacities—not only technical but also theoretical—about the characteristics of the world we wish to transform, narrate, or simply tell stories about.
The butterfly fluttered its wings on the other side of the world and stirred the wind. It will be us who must change the course of this river, which for now proposes wars of all kinds and colors. And to do so, all the areas in which we operate as journalists are worthwhile, all those who produce, through art in its various forms, narratives that can weave a new social narrative about what we express and what we desire. And I close this article with the message that cartoonist Héctor Germán Oesterheld —detained and disappeared by the military dictatorship— captured in his fictional comic strip, El Eternauta , now available as a series and which has recently caused a worldwide sensation: “No one is saved alone.”
*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.