An exclusive interview with Juan Enrique Serrano-Moreno, Assistant Professor of Institute of International Studies, University of Chile and coordinator of the Master’s in International Strategy and Trade Policy.
The role of China in Latin America has proliferated since the beginning of the century, and it is now the most significant trade partner for most of the countries in the region. Chile is recognized as a pioneer in the region's relations with China: it was the first South American country to recognize the People's Republic of China in 1970, supported its entry into the WTO in 2001, and signed a free trade agreement with the country in 2005. Today, the bilateral relationship focuses on the green transition. The rapid expansion of collaboration in renewable energies, green hydrogen, and lithium mining offers new areas of cooperation while raising questions about state capacity, human rights, and environmental standards. This presentation will explore how the Chinese ecological civilization paradigm may contribute to Chile's climate and sustainability efforts. What is the main question regarding Chinese trade and investment in Latin America? What is the “eco-civilization” paradigm of China? What are the main challenges in applying the eco-civilization paradigm to Latin America? Can Chile benefit from eco-civilization while overcoming the risk of being a raw materials exporter? How can Latin American countries like Chile adopt eco-civilization while addressing local challenges? Juan Enrique Serrano-Moreno，Assistant Professor of Institute of International Studies, University of Chile and coordinator of the Master's in International Strategy and Trade Policy recently gave an exclusive interview to W.E. Talk at China News Service to offer his explanation of these issues.
Here are excerpts from the interview:
CNS: What is the main question regarding Chinese trade and investment in Latin America, especially in Chile?
Serrano-Moreno: Before attempting to answer this question, I want to start unorthodoxly. Last year, two science fiction movies, one Chinese and one US, invited us to think about how societies imagine the future of their relationship with nature.
The first is “Avatar 2”, in which a multi-planetary company invades a virgin planet to exploit its resources. Faced with extractive industry, the planet’s inhabitants resist and defend their traditional lifestyle in harmony with nature. The Indigenous peoples of Latin America explicitly inspire these characters. Of course, the movie has a happy ending. The natives defeat the evil and save their ecosystem.
However, this story hides a fatalistic message. One must choose between development and harmony with nature. There is no compromise. In other words, industrial development is not possible without the destruction of nature. To quote the philosopher Francisco Martorell, this story is a “pessimistic dystopia”, which leads us to think that the destruction of nature is more likely than the destruction of liberal capitalism.
The second movie I like much more is “The Wandering Earth 2”, a Chinese blockbuster based on a story by writer Liu Cixin, author of "The Three-Body Problem." A cataclysm threatens the Earth; the sun is dying, and salvation lies in moving the planet out of the solar system to find another habitable zone.
We have a happy ending here, contrasting with “Avatar”. Technology, state planning, and international cooperation manage to save the world. Without being hegemonic, China leads an engineering megaproject that saves the human species. It is an "optimistic dystopia" that reflects the idea of eco-civilization promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012.
CNS: What is the “eco-civilization” paradigm of China?
Serrano-Moreno: In the last decade, many observers have claimed that China has become the global champion in the fight against climate change and sustainability. This common perception has been formalized in the concept of “eco-civilization”.
Zhang Yongsheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, characterizes eco-civilization as a new paradigm of economic development in which humanity would once again find a harmonious relationship with nature, which was disrupted during the industrial era. However, this would not mean abandoning technological advances. On the contrary, eco-civilization is possible thanks to new technologies developed by the “green transition”.
Its proponents present this new paradigm as an alternative to Western theories of sustainability, which are considered intrinsically unsustainable because they reproduce neoclassical economic theory’s postulates. These include anthropocentrism, materialism, consumerism, and individual rationality.
Eco-civilization would thus be a “Chinese remedy” for Western economic individualism, which reduces nature to a commodity and environmental damage to a negative externality. This paradigm would find its roots in the millennial Chinese philosophical tradition, in contrast to the liberal economic theories that emerged during the Industrial Revolution in the West.
Eco-civilization was introduced into the CCP’s constitution in 2012, the 2016 Five-Year Plan, and the PRC’s constitution in 2018.
It has been implemented through internal institutional and legal reforms that signal that the state has adopted an “iron hand”.
CNS: What are the main challenges in applying the eco-civilization paradigm to Latin America?
Serrano-Moreno: In the Latin American context, eco-civilization has both conceptual and material limits. First, there are doubts that it represents a true paradigm shift.
According to authors like David Harvey and David Graeber, eco-civilization, like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), could be broadly interpreted as a “spatial fix” and a “technological fix” to the capitalist overaccumulation crisis that China noticed in 2006-2009.
Following this logic, eco-civilization seeks to fuel economic growth without questioning the foundations of the current development model. The development of new technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles is helping China's green transition domestically, and, at the same time, its industry is the world leader in exports of these goods, contributing to its economic growth. In other words, the environmental crisis is also an opportunity or, short put, “green is gold”.
The “green transition” will bring wealth by exploiting new resources, such as critical minerals like lithium, copper, and nickel. This requires an infrastructure network for Chinese trade and investments promoted by the BRI.
CNS: Can Chile benefit from eco-civilization while overcoming the risk of being a raw materials exporter?
Serrano-Moreno: Suppose countries such as Chile do not manage to climb the value chain and develop their industrial productive capacities. In that case, the current situation may consolidate its semi-peripheral position in the world economy (Wallerstein). That means exporting unique minerals without added value. As my colleague Professor Ahumada reminds us, “Neoliberalism is for developing countries, and industrial policy is for the rich”.
Similarly, the term “civilization” here is a floating signifier that draws on traditional legitimacy, implying that China surpasses the nation-state model, which is anachronistic for the environmental crisis. However, it moves away from Bruno Latour’s conception of civilization as a “mode of existence” and his calls to redefine our relationship with nature by recognizing its rights and agency.
As with other Chinese public policies, the story of eco-civilization can be told as an ascent from the provincial to the national and finally to the international level. This is clear with the BRI, but with eco-civilization, the step to foreign policy remains to be seen.
CNS: How can Latin American countries like Chile adopt eco-civilization while addressing local challenges?
Serrano-Moreno: Studies on foreign investment and the environment often end by pointing out that beyond theoretical considerations, when we get to the concrete, we face the classic problem of institutional capacity.
I am referring to traditional aspects of economic administrative law that concern states and not the international community. These include urban planning, land-use planning, administrative policing, and free competition in public procurement—areas that the subsidiary Chilean state model has relegated as much as, if not more than, industrial policy.
The policy briefs we have developed at the University of Chile point in this direction: the case of the Rucalhue Hydroelectric Plant—a project by China Three Gorges—, the purchase of CGE by State Grid, and FDI in salmon and cherry industries, among others. These case studies conclude that environmental damage and social conflicts originate from the Chilean state’s lack of capacity to resolve them, and the investors are not to blame.
In summary, there is no need to “reinvent the wheel”. Chinese foreign investment can benefit the environment, provided an administration is capable of creating productive capacities and achieving technology transfers. Chile can learn from the Chinese eco-civilization paradigm to find its path to rebalancing the relationship between humanity and nature.
Concretely, the free trade agreement between China and Chile could be updated in the future to oblige the local producers of minerals and agriproducts to raise environmental production standards. This could encourage local companies to export products with high added value, such as certified sustainable fruits, fish, meat, or nuts.
Concerning the mining industry, Chile has 44% of the estimated world reserves. Thus, only 20-30% of them are currently exploited. Last year, the government drafted the National Lithium Strategy with ambitious objectives: encourage technological transfers from foreign companies and preserve as many ecosystems as possible. To do so, as we speak, international companies such as Tianqi are preparing their letters of interest to be allowed to explore the existing lithium resources in the Atacama Desert and later exploit them with long-term contracts. As we know, the Chinese development model encourages public-private cooperation more than the Western one, so it is expected that Tianqi's proposals will be inspired by the eco-civilization paradigm, and by doing so, they will guarantee its support in developing local industry. The successful case of Chinese FDI in the nickel industry in Indonesia should inspire the Chinese strategy in Chile.
In Chile and the region, recognizing Indigenous people’s collective and individual human rights has led to important court victories that contributed to preserving their ancestral way of life. But more must be done to introduce Indigenous cosmovision into our legal framework. This, combined with an ambitious foreign and industrial policy, could be the path to defining an eco-civilization with Latin American characteristics.
Edited by: WANG Zonghan
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