People walk past a Chinese supermarket in Chinatown in Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 10, 2025. (Xinhua/Meng Dingbo)
There are concepts one studies for years and only truly understands once one inhabits them. A community with a shared future for humanity is one of them. I first encountered it in the literature, then in the classroom, and finally in something harder to systematize: the logic with which China organizes its presence in the world, which from the inside acquires a coherence that external analyses rarely capture in full.
I have been in China for eight months, pursuing a master's degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies. What this experience has changed is not my theoretical frameworks but the precision with which I apply them to certain processes. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one of them.
The BRI was announced in 2013 and has since consolidated itself as one of the most influential public goods of the twenty-first century: a network of physical and digital infrastructure, logistical corridors, economic cooperation agreements and financing instruments that today involves more than 150 countries. Its architecture reproduces and updates the logic of the ancient Silk Road -- connectivity as a condition for development -- but in a radically different geopolitical context, one in which the global distribution of power is undergoing deep transformation.
The BRI is the operative expression of a vision of international order that China has been articulating with growing sophistication: one in which interdependence is not a source of vulnerability but of stability, and in which the development of Global South economies is a condition -- not an obstacle -- for global prosperity. The initiative has also been evolving. What began with a strong emphasis on physical infrastructure -- ports, railways, highways, energy plants -- has gradually shifted toward a more selective second phase, with greater attention to sustainability, the digital economy and the energy transition. That maturation is not a minor detail: it reflects a capacity for self-assessment and adjustment that, from a foreign policy analysis perspective, is indicative of an initiative with long-term ambitions rather than short-term impact.
Studying this in China provides a particular kind of access to how that vision is thought from within. I am not referring to the official discourse, which is accessible from anywhere, but to something more quotidian: the way Chinese academics analyze the initiative, the debates taking place within research centers about its limitations and evolution, and the way students from other Global South countries who share a classroom with me read it through their own national contexts. That multiplicity of perspectives is, in itself, instructive.
One of the things that struck me most upon arriving was the temporal scale with which politics is thought here. Long-term planning is not just a feature of China's domestic development model: it also permeates its conception of international cooperation. BRI projects are not designed as isolated interventions but as components of corridors that make sense over a horizon of decades.
For Latin America, the BRI arrived later than to Central Asia or Africa, but it is embedded in a bilateral relationship that has been growing consistently. China is today the main trading partner of several South American countries and the second largest for the region as a whole. This reconfiguration of trade flows is not the result of a recent policy shift: it is the sedimentation of a structural process that regional debate processes with a lag, partly because the categories through which Latin America reads its external relations were built in a different historical moment and in relation to different interlocutors.
The infrastructure projects developed under the BRI framework in the region -- ports, renewable energy plants, investments in mining and agribusiness -- share a common feature: they generally address deficits that the region has carried for decades -- logistical connectivity, energy capacity, value addition in natural resources. This is precisely the visionary nature of the BRI: instead of extracting the advantageous resources from developing countries, it builds up and addresses their disadvantages. This is what South-South Cooperation should look like: cooperation is not about short-term gains, but about pursuing long-term development and mutual benefit and win-win outcomes.
What is also visible from here is that Latin America occupies, in the new logistical map of the Pacific, a position whose value it has yet to fully internalize. The reorientation of trade routes toward the Indo-Pacific, the growing weight of Latin American strategic resources in the global energy transition -- lithium, copper, green hydrogen -- and the development of port infrastructure on the South Pacific coast are creating conditions that the region should read as a structural opportunity, not merely a commercial conjuncture.
The vision of a community with a shared future for humanity has a dimension that strikes me as especially significant for a region with Latin America's history: it proposes a framework for international relations in which development is not a zero-sum game. That does not dissolve the structural asymmetries that exist in any relationship between economies of different size and negotiating capacity. But it does establish a different grammar, one that opens possibilities that other frameworks foreclose.
The concept implies, in its most developed formulation, that global problems -- from climate change to food insecurity or the digital divide -- require responses that no single actor can build unilaterally. That premise, which at the philosophical level may seem self-evident, has concrete consequences for the architecture of agreements: it orients toward cooperation instruments that prioritize the building of local capacities, technology transfer and the development of productive chains rather than purely extractive relationships.
What these months have confirmed is that this grammar only works when both parties master it. Latin America has the conditions to participate in this relationship on favorable terms: strategic resources whose relevance to the global energy transition will only grow, a geographic position that is acquiring new value in the Pacific trade map, and a generation of professionals who are, increasingly, being trained with the tools to understand this process from the inside.
The relevant question, then, is not whether to engage but with what preparation to do so. And in that, academic training -- including training done in China -- has a role that we are still learning to leverage. Studying international politics in this context is not only an academic decision: it is also a way of being present, with greater analytical depth, in the processes that will define the global order of the coming decades. From that perspective, these eight months are not just a postgraduate experience. They are, also, a way of understanding how to improve the cooperation of developing countries.
Editor's Note: This article is written by Agustina Beláustegui from Argentina, who is now studying at Renmin University of China. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Belt and Road Portal or Renmin University of China..
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