 Welcome again to the fourth annual Great Decisions series co-sponsored by Mead Public Library and the Sheboygan Branch of the American Association of University Women, an organization dedicated to empowering women and girls and advancing equity through advocacy, education and research. We are presenting our sessions virtually this year because of the pandemic and are grateful to WSCS for filming the programs. Great Decisions is a project of the Foreign Policy Association, which also publishes a book with information about the timely topics. You can call 1-800-477-5836 to order a copy. That's 1-800-477-5836. As always, we are indebted to Mead Librarian Jeannie Gartman for arranging the schedule of these programs. The topic for tonight is China's Road into Latin America and will be presented by Martin Ferrell, Ph.D., a retired Rippon College professor. Dr. Martin Ferrell is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed conference papers, periodical articles, encyclopedia entries and book chapters. He has led student and alumni study abroad experiences eight times and has personally studied and done research in 45 countries on five continents. In 2015, he was recognized as Wisconsin Peace Educator of the Year by the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. At Rippon, he also co-directed an international film series which to date has brought over 700 international films to the Rippon campus. Dr. Ferrell. It's my great pleasure to be back speaking in the Shaboygan Great Decision series again this year. And as I start, I'd like to thank the sponsors, the Mead Public Library here in Shaboygan and the local AAUW chapter. Thank you very much for making this series possible. Sorry that we can't have our usual session in person where we could have interaction, question and answer, comments and so forth. But hopefully this will still provide us an opportunity to look at tonight's topic. And my topic will be China's Road into Latin America. At first though, I would like to put this topic into the context of overall US-China relations which I'm sure you're aware have been deteriorating or becoming more tense over the last few years up to the point that some now speak of a new Cold War between the United States and the People's Republic of China. In understanding how we have come to this point and we'll be brief on this because that topic could engage us for the entire time that we have, but just to provide some context, we go back to 1971 in Henry Kissinger's secret trip to China followed by Richard Nixon's public trip in 1972. This was really based on a real politic consideration by the United States as a way to divide China and the Soviet Union at that time. And it was largely successful in doing that. There weren't very many greater hopes for China's evolution at that time, still very much under the thumb of Mao Zedong who had taken China's politics in a very radical direction. However, by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, we began to be, even despite the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, I think there were hopes that by engaging China into the world community economically, diplomatically, politically, that this would have a beneficial impact on Chinese behavior and their internal institutions. After all, a number of other dictatorships, whether they be on the island of Taiwan or the country of South Korea, with economic development did develop larger and larger middle classes, more property owning classes who bit by bit gradually demanded representation in the government and those governments evolved into functioning democracies. And there was a hope that this would occur in the People's Republic as well. Unfortunately, China has seen spectacular economic growth but that has not been accompanied by the type of internal liberalization that had been hoped for. So we actually see, in fact, if anything, intensified authoritarian controls under Xi Jinping, who also took the two term limits off his tenure as party chairman. We see a great deal of internet censorship. We see personal surveillance, millions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province forced into detention centers, crackdown on civil rights and liberties in Hong Kong, aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea. And then we could add to that a litany of trade issues, some of which are, in my opinion, legitimate issues, others are more illusory. But in any event, China has not evolved as many had hoped earlier. Having been in China quite a few times myself, starting as early as 1981, I know that the people in general enjoy much greater personal freedom and economic freedom than they had before under Mao or even his first successor. So today, there's much more freedom of mobility in China. The local registration system is being abandoned now as China sees the need to urbanize on a more freewheeling basis. And most people can pursue jobs, careers, as they see fit rather than before having all of those decisions made for them by the government. So there is a great deal more individual freedom, but only so long as they do not infringe on what the Chinese Communist Party sees as its legitimate monopoly on power. So they are freer, but they are not free to challenge their government. And that, of course, is disappointing and also does not provide the kind of constraints on Chinese behavior that might moderate that behavior internationally in a way that would be inclined them in a more peaceful way, although they certainly have not been aggressive in the manner of Russia in actually taking alien territory and annexing it for themselves. China has not done that as yet, but nevertheless, for all the reasons I've just mentioned, there is growing tension between the United States and other countries, India in particular, Japan and others and the People's Republic of China. And so this is the context in which we need to take a look at what China has been doing in Latin America in recent times. To sum it up very briefly, China has been extending its influence into Latin America very dramatically over the last 20 years or so. And this has been made possible by a couple of factors. First of all, China's record-breaking economic growth coupled along with policy initiatives such as it's going out strategy adopted by Zhang Zhemin in 1999, the Belt and Road Initiative launched by Xi Jinping in 2013, and the Asian, excuse me, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank which was established in 2015. So if we could go to the first slide, we'll be able to see China's economic growth. Okay. Trying to advance. Oh gosh. We went way to the middle of the presentation. Well, we will come back to that if we can, but I think most people are familiar there. Now we are able to see China's tremendous economic growth which has outstripped all the other developed nations and developing nations. The light blue line is actually American debt which we have seen building up quite a bit, but actual economic growth is much less. So China has explosively grown their economy since 1999. Now we'll take a look at the Belt and Road Initiative. This, of course, is very well-known, also known as the New Silk Road. You might believe that it's the Silk Road name indicates that the main focus of this initiative would be from China westward into Central Asia and then beyond into the Middle East and even into Europe. And that is all true and that is the major focus. But what we can see today is as well, Latin America has been involved. And just in the last few years, 19 Latin American countries have signed on either to Belt and Road projects from this particular initiative or the AIIB, the Infrastructure Investment Bank, and are participating in these projects even though they are well outside Central Asia and the main regions that are of concern for China in these initiatives. Now, the Belt and Road Initiative in and of itself has already spent several hundred billion dollars on investments in roads, in port facilities, many infrastructure projects throughout Central Asia on into the Middle East, and is projected to spend $1.3 trillion by the year 2027. Now, if we take a look at another very important element of China's initiatives, and this actually relates to technology. And so here we see on a worldwide basis, China has been providing fiber optic cable and the upper left hand diagram with the blue coloring that is providing fiber optic cable, and you can see a number of Latin American countries, but also some of Chinese companies have done that even in the United States, as we can see from this map. On the right hand side, Smart City Technology, that includes surveillance technology, which can have a sinister tone for sure, especially the way China is using it internally. On the other hand, we do use it for our own purposes in many of our cities. I did get a stop sign violation not too long ago in the city of Chicago, even though I was not pulled over, but a camera had caught me making a right hand turn on red where I wasn't supposed to. That will be the end of my candid confessions for the evening. In the lower right hand corner with the green coloring, we see smart appliances. Again, some Latin American countries more advanced, such as Chile, are participating there. And finally on the left hand side, Telecom Equipment, and Latin America, as we'll see later, is a tremendous market for cell phones, over 200 million cell phone subscribers in the Latin American and Caribbean region. So that is a huge market for those activities. Now, if we look here at the AIIB, and that is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, again, you see the main focus is in Asia, but quite a number of Latin American countries are also involved, either members or prospective members and that also includes Canada. This is an investment bank which is, again, gives loans for infrastructure projects of various kinds. It's meant to compete with the World Bank. It has about a $100 billion capitalization, which at this point is about half that of the World Bank. However, China as the main contributor along with Japan, those two countries will have a majority together between them of the voting power in the AIIB. So China has much more control here as compared to the World Bank or some of the other development banks that it has earlier participated in. Now, countering these initiatives by China, the Obama administration negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership and this was designed to incorporate 20 of the leading economies of both Latin America but also the Eastern Pacific region. It excluded China, so the goal was to counter these moves by China of the Belt and Road Initiative and the AIIB. But of course, when President Trump became president, he immediately scuttled American participation. The other members, which in Latin America included Chile and Peru as Pacific countries, as Pacific countries, Pacific Coast countries as well as Mexico and of course Canada as well. But this was scuttled by President Trump arguing, I guess, that trade deals are always inherently unfair to the United States somehow. I noticed that at the Republican Convention recently, Donald Trump Jr. mentioned Trans-Pacific Partnership in passing and scoffed at it by saying that would have just drained manufacturing jobs from the United States. However, other countries do not agree with this and all the other members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership renegotiated and entered a new agreement which they call the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trade in the Pacific and they are going ahead with it because they feel that trade is actually beneficial to both parties and in terms of trade agreements always costing manufacturing jobs for the United States. Again, I think most economists would question that and you can find out for yourself, talk to your local manufacturers as I do. I know that Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac and Alliance Laundry in Ripon, which is the leading commercial laundry equipment manufacturer in the world, right in my little town of Ripon, Wisconsin, they benefit greatly from foreign trade and that includes sales which are growing internationally much faster than in the United States but also using foreign sources of supply where places can make certain items, component items, usually smaller items more efficiently at a better price for acceptable quality than American firms and that is why they use them and that is why both they and most other manufacturers built up global supply chains. It's because of market forces and efficiency, not stupidity as is sometimes implied and this is gonna reflect on a lot of the things that we are gonna talk about here this evening. Now let us turn even more specifically to Latin America and now I will look at several components. Some are economic, so we will look at trade. Then we will look at foreign direct investment which is generally of two kinds. One is mergers and acquisitions. When a foreign country in this case, China buys a company or a facility or land, some kind of a resource base in a foreign country in a Latin American country in this case. Then we have greenfield foreign investment. That means brand new factories not being bought up but actually being built from scratch using foreign capital, in this case Chinese capital. And then we'll look at loans like such as from the AIIB but also from other sources within China. Loans to governments, loans to private companies, things of that nature. Okay, so if we can move to the next slide then. Oh that's again we're just showing the membership of the AIIB and again the different types of membership but as we can see here from the map on the left hand side and on the right hand side we just see a picture of the headquarters of the AIIB but in China but you see in Latin America today both South America and Central America, the only countries not participating in either the Belt and Road Initiative or the AIIB would be Paraguay, Columbia and Mexico. So all the others are participating to some degree in one or the other of those organizations. So that's very strong representation and just because Mexico is not affiliated with these organizations doesn't mean they're not doing a lot of business with China, they are. Okay, now we see the merchandise trade balance between China and the Latin American and Caribbean countries. The top line in red shows us China's exports to Latin America, the green line shows us the China's imports from Latin America and the blue line at the bottom shows the balance and so yes right now China is with regard to Latin America as a whole exporting more to Latin America than they are importing from Latin America but the balance isn't that great. The negative trade balance and again this is not cover services but only goods, actual physical goods is only four tenths of 1% of GDP and again most economists will tell you trade imbalances of this nature are not inherently harmful to the country that has the deficit. If you look at the green line you see the tremendous amount of exports that Latin America is sending to China, yes they're buying a few more things from China but still they're much better off by selling that tremendous amount of goods that they are to China than it would be without it and a small imbalance especially is not that significant. The biggest trade balance in all of Latin America between the country and China is Panama and Panama even has a trade deficit with China approaching 10% of their GDP but is this upsetting to them? No, it's not hurting them a bit. China excuse me Panama in Latin America is a little bit like Luxembourg in Europe. It lives by serving as a banking center and an insurance center and it doesn't have a whole lot of valuable goods like minerals or oil to export to other countries so they are doing very well and if they are buying some manufactured goods with their money that they make from banking and insurance from China they're not upset about it but what we also see there is a tremendous growth in trade. In fact if we went back to 1999 we would see there was only about $2 billion total trade between China and all the Latin American and Caribbean countries. Today it's over 300 billion. In other words it's increased 150 fold and that is a tremendous increase from 2 billion to 300 billion in just 18 years. So that shows you the importance. In fact China today is, and this is really kind of hard to believe, it is not only the second largest trading partner for all of Latin America and the Caribbean but it's again the United States for decades and even centuries was by far the biggest trading partner for every Latin American country going back even into the 19th century when for a while of course Britain would have been number one trading partner before that Spain but certainly for the vast majority of recent history United States with its huge economy was by far the biggest trading partner for all the Latin American countries but today China is actually the top trading partner of number one trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay and that's amazing that they have been able to take the number one spot in trade away from the United States. Now in part China sees trade as a win-win proposition, both sides benefit. It doesn't have this fixed sum idea that if one party gains from trade the other is losing which is current in some sectors in Washington today. So they have a more enlightened view of trade and it's helping them. It's helping them expand their markets and their access to Latin American goods. So let's take a look at a few other items within trade. So if we look for instance at soybeans and other oil producing plants we see the exports from Latin America and the Caribbean to China have skyrocketed just in the last 10 or 15 years. The exports of Latin American Caribbean to the rest of the world really have not grown much at all but the China market has really taken off. So in terms of soybeans and other rapeseed oil things of that nature, we know it as canola oil commercially these have skyrocketed Latin America's selling to China. If we look at crude petroleum oil we see again there's been significant growth China's the bottom red line there. Still Latin America and Caribbean exports to the rest of the world are still greater but they've been declining somewhat whereas with China they've been increasing. So this one shows the sales of soybean materials from the United States in the blue line originally on top in China in the red line. And here we can see that the United States was exporting way more soybean material to China excuse me than China was buying, excuse me, but in recent years with tariffs frankly placed by the current administration we see exports, excuse me, the red line is Brazil. I'm having a little bit harder time reading the cue cards here but Brazil has skyrocketed in their exports of soybeans to China while the United States share has plummeted. And this is a direct result of the tariffs, the tariff wars between the United States and China and it is definitely hurting US soybean producers but helping Brazilian soybean producers tremendously. And we look at frozen beef now again this is imports from Latin America and the Caribbean to China in the red line. You see it's again skyrocketing in the last five to 10 years. Some imports of beef from the rest of the world into China also been increasing but much more drastically from Latin America so that's been a winning export for the Latin American countries. Iron ore and things related to that we see again huge increase in the exports to China from Latin America and the Caribbean. The exports from Latin America to the rest of the world again pretty stagnant, not increasing significantly. Look at copper ore, we see here the rest of the world exports by Latin America have been increasing but much more drastically to China now exporting more copper ore and related materials to China alone than to the rest of the world from Latin America and the Caribbean. Now if we look at the next slide we can see that the main bulk of exports from Latin America to China are primary products, agricultural products, minerals, extractive products, things of that nature and manufactured goods are much lower and some people again consider that to be not favorable to Latin America and yes I'm sure the Latin American companies would like to export more manufactured goods to China but unfortunately Latin American manufacturing is simply not very efficient in world competitive terms and frankly again having taught Latin American politics for over 40 years I can tell you that one of the things most harmful to Latin American manufacturing and industry was a period of time in the late 1960s and 1970s when they put up very high tariff walls against outside manufactured goods and tried to protect their domestic industries with these high tariff walls and pursued economic nationalist policies. A few of those companies that were fostered in that way did survive and did become successful but the vast majority did not because they were not being forced to be world competitive therefore they were inefficient, wasteful, did not have proper economies of scale and frankly crippled Latin American manufacturing for decades to come and I think that's another lesson that those of us who have studied Latin American politics realized that in the 1980s and 1990s the Latin American governments realized that these high tariff barriers were a mistake, they lowered them, they liberalized their economies in general and yes there have been ups and downs but more ups than downs Latin America has really progressed a lot since the 1990s and even the last decade Latin America saw some of the higher rates of growth in the world not as high as in China but still much more successful once they abandoned their economic nationalism their high tariff walls and realized that their companies needed to be competitive on a world basis however if we look at the next slide we can still see that we'll move to the next one if we can here trying to went one too far, there we go. Again this is economic labor productivity how much output do you get for each input hour of labor and what we're seeing here is that China's productivity is steadily increasing and some of the Peru has seen some pretty decent growth in productivity but a lot of the other countries have not and that is why their manufacturing is not world competitive. Okay now we'll move to the next one here now we'll move to foreign investment and this shows you the levels of mergers and acquisitions over the last several years China buying existing companies, mines, installations things of that nature. We see that a lot of it is in infrastructure and also energy production and it has seen its ups and downs much greater in some years than in others but that just is often fueled by major takeovers of companies in a given year. Now again is this a good or a bad thing? Sometimes people are afraid when foreign companies buy up domestic companies they feel we're losing control and in certain strategic areas it may be something that you wish to avoid but in general it actually is bringing capital money into your country that wouldn't otherwise be there and that actually is a good thing overall and helps boost the economy so unless it's in something that's vitally important in a strategic sense even mergers and acquisitions are beneficial to the receiving country. If we now go and look though at our next slide here we can see that again on the left hand side China's mergers and acquisitions in Latin America and the Caribbean a lot of it is in electricity production some of it's in manufacturing but agriculture, food but also extraction that's mining is a large sector so a little bit more in extraction and electricity production that's where China's been buying companies in Latin America compared with other countries. Greenfield investment I seem to have unfortunately unfortunately my own problem I omitted that particular slide but suffice it to say that's new investment that's building a new factory, a new plant or digging a new mine that actually went way up to $12 billion in 2019 and again it is largely in primary sector investments but also in infrastructure so just to give you a couple of examples Costco shipping, huge Chinese shipping company last year committed a $3 billion investment in Peru's terminal port at Chansey, Peru huge project will serve as a cargo logistics hub for the entire region and it did buy part of that stake from a Peruvian company but most of the investment will come from China itself from Costco shipping so that is considered primarily a Greenfield or new investment. Xinjiang TBA Group is partnering with Bolivia's state lithium company in a joint venture to extract lithium and you know that's used in high tech apparatuses like cell phones, computers and the like from the salt flats area of Bolivia and will also build lithium processing factories. It's going to be a joint venture with the Chinese partner holding 49% stake in the venture with the, excuse me, Bolivian state lithium company holding 51% but it's going to require 2.3 billion investment from China in mines and in processing facilities. Another example, Huawei, the cell phone and telecommunications giant in China announced its intention to build a second electronics factory in San Paolo state of Brazil that will be an $800 million investment over three years. Those are just a few examples to give you some specific examples of the kind of thing we're talking about and obviously again, this is an investment which is very beneficial to the recipient country. This is capital coming in, creating jobs, creating infrastructure, adding to economic development that wouldn't be there without the foreign investment. Just ask South Carolina how they feel about the BMW plants that have been built in and around Spartanburg or ask the state of Kentucky how they feel about the VW plants that have been built there. These are foreign investors coming in, building new factories, creating thousands of jobs and in this case, it's the Latin American countries benefiting from the investments coming in from China. All right, so let's move to our next slide then. This again has to do with finance and lending. So this is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank but other Chinese agencies and we don't have time to go through all of this obviously today but you see many, many port facilities, road projects, railroad projects, yes dams and at times there are local concerns about some of these projects. Many times dams, hydroelectric dams are great for producing electricity and doing it cheaply and cleanly. However, damming up rivers can disrupt the ecosystem. Yes, for plants and animals but also for the indigenous people who often live in the regions where these dams are being built and they often have concerns and prefer not to see these projects and that is a legitimate concern. That is the responsibility of the Latin American government to listen to the demands of its own people and not to put projects where their own people don't want them to be but ultimately that is a decision for the Latin American governments and in this case China is helping by providing the capital to carry out these projects if the local government, whether it be Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, whoever it may be, decide that they want the project and they want it in a particular place. So that is their sovereign right and their sovereign responsibility. I don't know if you can see on the screen or not we'll see a better picture in a moment but one of the most ambitious of all these projects is a bi-oceanic railroad that would go from the Atlantic coast of Brazil through Bolivia and end up with a terminal point on the Pacific Ocean in Peru. This has not existed up until now. You have the Amazon rainforest to deal with. You have Andes Mountains, one of the most rugged mountain chains in the world. It has not been able to be accomplished up till now but these governments along with the Chinese government and companies are now planning to build this railroad that will link the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean through the heart of South America lessening transport costs and times dramatically and aiding development in the region. Again, there may well be legitimate environmental and other concerns but these are things that have to be taken into account with any infrastructure project like this. So tremendous involvement by China in all these projects and it gives them influence, something very much we need to be aware of. Yeah, here on the left you can maybe see a little bit better that projected railroad linking Atlantic and Pacific there right toward the middle of the South American continent and then on the right we see a port facility built by China in Peru to help them expand their exports by sea. All right, now I'm gonna shift away from the economic and move to the more diplomatic realm. One of the biggest issues for China diplomatically is recognition of China as legitimate, People's Republic of China as legitimate representative of the Chinese people versus the claim of Taiwan to represent either all of China or at least the island of Taiwan. And for a while, you can see from this map, very few countries give diplomatic recognition to Taiwan including not the United States. That was ended in 1979. However, of the countries that do recognize Taiwan, several of them were in Latin America and Taiwan at that time in the 1990s and early 2000s frankly were offering economic development aid to countries more or less in exchange for diplomatic recognition. By the end of 2008, Taiwan actually had 15 Latin American countries that had extended diplomatic recognition to what they call the Republic of China as opposed to the People's Republic of China which is of course mainland China. However, three have since dropped them just in the last three years. Panama, Dominican Republic and El Salvador as you can see oddly, I say oddly because of the government of Nicaragua is a leftist government, they still recognize Taiwan, extending diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. But Panama, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador have all removed that just in the last three years. So China's making some progress there but we still have Paraguay and several of the Central American and Caribbean countries that still do recognize Taiwan. Let's move to our next slide here. Now we're moving into the high tech arena and we now have represented the cell phone usage which is the blue lines for all the various countries and you can see it's pretty high for pretty much all the Latin American countries almost on a par with a couple of exceptions with the OECD average. That's the most developed countries in the world where a number of them lag behind is in internet access. So again, this is largely a product of poverty versus prosperity with Haiti having relatively very small amount of internet capability but then through the various other countries you can see moving on up to again the more developed countries such as Chile, Argentina, so forth do have a lot of internet capacity and that's something that China is also offering to extend to a number of these countries. So this involves a number of countries, excuse me, companies. Huawei is one and Huawei among other things helped Mexico build the largest public Wi-Fi network in Latin America. By do you may have heard of the world's number two search engine behind Google now has Portuguese service serving Brazil. This was kicked off at the Brazilian platform residential palace, Alibaba, the retail site Aliexpress that's another Chinese version in this case of Amazon is the most popular online marketplace in Brazil and we could go on and on. So it is a number of not just Huawei but other Chinese companies. Tencent is another one which is making big investments and capturing market share in Latin America. Now I'm gonna turn finally in wrapping up here to the most recent issues that we've had with the coronavirus pandemic and this is of course posed tragic consequences for a lot of countries around the world including the United States. But a recent article indicated that the foreign minister of Mexico posted on social media the phrase gracias China followed by three exclamation points. This was posted on his Twitter account in April along with a photograph of the airplane that carried 100,000 masks, 50,000 test kits and five ventilators donated from China to Mexico. At the time Mexico had a severe shortage of ventilators and to see these being donated by China was something that they welcomed. And this is at a time when the United States was not providing this type of equipment to Mexico or anybody else because it was felt that we needed it for ourselves and I'm sure that was true. However, China was in a position to make these contributions and this helps them with their influence in this region. Also in terms of soft power, this is what we were talking about. There are now 41 Confucius Institutes which have been established in Latin American and Caribbean countries over the last decade and these Confucius Institutes are there for the purpose of teaching Chinese language, teaching about Chinese culture to interested citizens from these various countries. Now again, in an era of heightened suspicion, Confucius Institutes in the United States have indeed come under suspicion as to whether there is some nefarious purpose behind them and that is something that needs to be looked at and certainly can be discussed and debated. But for present purposes, the main point is that Latin American countries in general have welcomed them to the tune of 41 different ones and these are encouraging cultural and social ties among students, professors, and ordinary lay people in the Latin American countries equating them through professional exchanges, internships, and cultural opportunities for Latin Americans to build new bridges, more understanding of China. Actually, several of the Latin American countries did have fairly extensive Chinese immigration but this was many years and decades ago but Peru, for example, again, mainly Pacific coast countries did have Chinese immigrants and so there are Chinese influences, Chinatowns, for instance, in some of these Latin American countries. I went to Chinatown in Cuba when I was in Cuba in 2012 and there you have a Chinatown in Havana. I did not, it was unusual in that while it was clearly Chinatown with the architecture and the red lanterns and the Chinese restaurants and shops and had all the accoutrements of a Chinatown, I just didn't see any Chinese people. And when I asked about that or I did not see people who appeared to be Chinese, when I asked our local professors about that, they simply said that over time they simply became integrated and melded into the general population and so the Chinese ancestry is still there, it just simply is not visible anymore and we would find that in some of the other Latin American countries as well, especially those with Pacific coast regions. But now what we're seeing in the period of the COVID-9 pandemic China is even extending medical diplomacy and this is not unknown in the region. Cuba has practiced that for quite some time but at the present time, this is another new challenge and I bring this up because again, this is happening at a time China is extending cooperation to Latin American countries, medical aid of various kinds, trying to help them cope with this very difficult situation. The same time the Trump administration has halted funding to the World Health Organization and also made budget cuts to the Pan American Health Organization, a multilateral public health agency designed to prevent and contain communicable disease outbreaks in the Americas and so again, we see a contrasting approach. China extending itself, trying to build bridges, bridges that they feel they can gain from I'm sure and they are gaining influence as a result as we've seen throughout the presentation but that is a choice that our country needs to make and what our stance towards public health and towards multilateral international organizations is going to be. If we go to the next slide, we'll see that US influence, I may have missed one, but we'll go with this for the moment, see that in many areas there is not a great deal of confidence that President Donald Trump will do the right thing. In most countries, it is significantly less than 50% and we can see in Mexico, only 8% of the population, least according to these polls, only 8% said they were confident that President Trump would do the right thing in a given situation. Also, only in 20% in Argentina and Brazil, the other two countries in Latin America that were covered in this particular survey and if we look on the right hand side, we also can see that worldwide confidence while America is still viewed positively by a majority, it has gone down some and leadership of President Trump in general has gone down very significantly. So this is a challenge. When you're doing things that appeal to a certain sector of the American population on patriotic grounds, such as America First, may also at the same time serve to alienate other countries and therefore we have to consider how important is that? Do we need their support? Do we need their confidence? Do we need their approval or can we go it alone on our own, are we better off doing that? That again is a question that we as a people have to decide. So that brings me to the conclusion, at least in one cartoonist version. This is kind of the relationship we are left with. So while President Trump is building a wall between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean, Xi Jinping of China is coming in with lots of money flying out of his pockets and a big old shopping cart to do business with our neighbors to the south. Whether this is an accurate depiction or not, obviously is open to discussion and debate. But in conclusion today, I would just like to remind you that my old mentor in the field of international relations, Hans J. Morgenthau, that I had a great pleasure of studying with at the University of Chicago many decades ago, always stressed that nations are going to act in their perceived self-interest. So at the present time, the United States is trying to remonstrate with various nations that they should be suspicious of China, that China has nefarious motives, their goals are not beneficial to the countries that they should not be cooperating with Huawei or other Chinese companies and interests. This is what our Vice President Mike Pence and our Secretary of State Pompeo are urging upon other nations. But I think what Professor Morgenthau would remind us is that ultimately you can remonstrate and you can preach, but ultimately these nations are going to do what they believe is in their self-interest. Even a country like Brazil, whose president today, Jair Bolsonaro, is very similar to President Trump in a lot of his views, but yet Brazil knows that it is beneficial to them to export goods to China and to receive Chinese investments and even financial aid in the form of loans at times. And so even Brazil is continuing to conduct business as usual with China. So it's very easy to attempt to remonstrate and preach to nations what they ought to do based on what we feel is in our interests with a rivalry and a potential political diplomatic struggle with China. That may be in our interests, but what we have to understand is other nations are going to do what they feel is in their best interests. And if China is making what appear to be favorable deals, especially economically in all the areas that we have mentioned, and these deals are growing in scope and magnitude and importance every year, that is something we are going to have to actually deal with and not believe that we can stop it simply by preaching the evils of China's malintentions to these nations. So if we go forward on a more realistic basis, then we can compete with China on yes, what should be and must be an even playing field, but compete with them for influence that frankly we are now losing in Latin America and they unfortunately are gaining. Thank you Dr. Farrell for that interesting topic. And please join us next week when the topic will be Red Sea Security.