The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) expanding engagement and presence in Latin America and the Caribbean has captured the attention of political and business leaders and the people of the region, as well as the United States. Although the PRC’s engagement and use of “soft power” has political, cultural, security and other dimensions, the attention that the PRC commands in the region is arguably driven primarily by the pace of China’s rise, and the lure of benefiting from China through engagement and business. For Latin America and the Caribbean, the PRC’s rise has been most directly felt through the PRC’s increasing importance as a partner in trade, loans, and investment for the region over the past two decades. Since the acceptance of the PRC into the World Trade Organization in 2001, PRC-Latin America trade has expanded 17-fold, from $18.5 billion in 2002, to $312 billion in 2020.1
China's southern Hainan province has opened an online supermarket providing idle land plots, a significant institutional innovation that aims to invigorate land resources and makes remote transactions and monitoring of land stakes possible for both developers and suppliers, according to local government authorities.