How China’s resources and ground-up relationships helped it push out the US to dominate South America

Name: South America’s largest solar farm backed by Chinese tech and money
Uploaded: 2022-02-18T07:33:29.000Z
Duration: 59 s
Description: South America’s largest solar farm backed by Chinese tech and money

Jujuy province in Argentina, home to one of the continent’s largest solar energy plants, shows how China is going local to expand and strengthen its financial grip

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Jujuy province in Argentina is home to veins of copper, lithium and zinc, the raw materials of 21st century, including batteries for electric vehicles. Photo: Shutterstock Images

Bloomberg

Published: 3:33pm, 18 Feb 2022Updated: 6:40pm, 18 Feb 2022

In the hinterland of Argentina, Mario Pizarro’s office looks like a shrine to China. There’s the framed photo of a Chinese peasant with Pizarro’s face superimposed beneath the conical farmer hat. There’s the blue-robed smiling Buddha statue. And there’s the model wind turbine from a Chinese company with an inscription in English and Mandarin: “Create Our Future Together.”

Pizarro, 62, is the energy secretary of Jujuy, a province high in the Andes that borders Bolivia and Chile. Overlooking a river, his office building is ordinary, shabby even, but the projects he and his colleagues oversee are anything but. And the one country that has made them all possible is China.

Chinese technology and money have helped build one of Latin America’s largest solar energy plants in Jujuy, where hundreds of thousands of panels coat the desert like giant dominoes. Chinese security cameras guard government buildings across the provincial capital. Servers hum in a Chinese data storage plant. Beneath the remote, craggy hills and vast salt lakes lie veins of copper, lithium and zinc, the raw materials of 21st century technology – including Chinese-made electric-car batteries.

It is no secret that China has been pouring resources into South America this century, chipping away at the US’ historic dominance and making itself the continent’s No 1 trading partner. But while international focus has turned in recent years to China’s ventures in Africa and Asia, an important shift has gone largely unnoticed in the country’s approach to South America: going local to expand and strengthen its financial grip.

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South America’s largest solar farm backed by Chinese tech and money

Instead of focusing on national leaders, China and its companies have built relationships from the ground up. In 2019 alone, at least eight Brazilian governors and four deputy governors travelled to China. In a September 2019 speech, Zou Xiaoli, China’s ambassador to Argentina, said his country’s infrastructure push was helping weave Latin America into the global marketplace. “China will lend strong support to Argentina’s economic and social development,” he said.

As Argentina’s Jujuy province illustrates, no region is too remote for China’s scrupulous attention. With perhaps a touch of hyperbole, Gabriel Marquez, chief executive officer of a Jujuy lithium research and development centre, describes the effectiveness of the approach: “You have this poor governor from Argentina who has Xi Jinping’s phone number.”