BEIJING, Oct. 28 (Xinhua) -- China and Mexico on Friday vowed to strengthen military cooperation and elevate mutual ties to a new high.
The pledge was made during a meeting between Vice Chairman of China's Central Military Commission Fan Changlong, and visiting Minister of National Defense Salvador Cienfuegos and Minister of the Navy Vidal Francisco Soberon from Mexico.
Hailing China and Mexico's close communication and coordination in international and regional affairs, Fan expressed China's willingness to develop military cooperation and relations to a higher level, to enrich their comprehensive strategic partnership.
Cienfuegos and Soberon acknowledged China's impressive development achievements, and voiced hope that the two sides will jointly advance the new type of military relationship via closer communication and stronger cooperation.
Later Friday, Defense Minister Chang Wanquan held talks with the two Mexican senior military officials.
"China and Mexico have maintained good communication between their defense ministries and the two militaries," said Chang, stressing that China is willing to work with Mexico for a military relationship compatible with the two countries comprehensive strategic partnership.
Chang also briefed the Mexican visitors on the sixth plenary session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which was held from Monday to Thursday.
Cienfuegos and Soberon said Mexico was willing to learn from China's experience in governing the country and the military, and boost mutual cooperation in military operation, logistics, personnel training and peace-keeping.
Men of the Ejército Mexicano or Mexican Army.(Photo : Ejército Mexicano) China and Mexico have pledged to strengthen military cooperation and elevate mutual ties to a new level.
The pledge was made during a meeting between Vice Chairman of China's Central Military Commission Fan Changlong, and visiting Minister of National Defense Salvador Cienfuegos and Minister of the Navy Vidal Francisco Soberon from Mexico on Oct. 28.
Fan spoke of China's willingness to develop military cooperation and relations with Mexico to a higher level and to enrich their comprehensive strategic partnership.
Cienfuegos and Soberon acknowledged China's impressive development achievements. They also hope both nations will jointly advance the new type of military relationship via closer communication and stronger cooperation.
Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan later held talks with the two Mexican senior military officials.
"China and Mexico have maintained good communication between their defense ministries and the two militaries," said Chang.
He pointed out that China is willing to work with Mexico for a military relationship compatible with the two countries comprehensive strategic partnership.
Chang also briefed the Mexican visitors on the 6th plenary session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which was held from Oct. 24 to 27
Cienfuegos and Soberon said Mexico was willing to learn from China's experience in governing the country and the military, and boost mutual cooperation in military operation, logistics, personnel training and peace-keeping.
As the Trump administration contemplates border wall prototypes and dissolving the decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), China is taking a decidedly different approach to relations with Mexico. In recent months, Beijing has launched an unprecedented charm offensive south of the Rio Grande. In addition to a series of new investments, and renewed talk of a bilateral trade pact, China invited Mexico as one of five nations to consider a “BRICS plus” arrangement, which would add new members of the global South to the now five-country grouping.
If the past decade was “a period of strategic opportunity” for China’s own development, based on a favorable external environment and the country’s growing economic competitiveness, the current one would also seem an auspicious moment for Beijing.
The range of policies emanating from Washington, in particular, has set an especially low bar for China in Latin America and other regions. In the case of Mexico, the U.S. president’s inflammatory rhetoric, the wall debate, and the recent move against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which largely affects those of Mexican descent, are hastening Mexico’s diversification of its political and economic partnerships.
According to Maria Cristina Hernandez Zermeño, Director General for Asia and Oceania and Multinational Organizations at the Mexican Economy Ministry, who spoke at an October 2017 forum on Mexico-Japan relations, “Mexico is now orienting its economic efforts to diversify its ties with other economic poles.” The Director General explained that although U.S.-Mexico ties remain strong, the Asian region—especially China, Japan, and Korea—will be a key partner for Mexico in the coming years . Jorge Lomónaco, Mexico’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, made similar remarks during the Mexican Senate’s “Priorities in the 2017 Multilateral Agenda” forum, noting that Mexico is looking “for new strategic partners…to push forward those initiatives that reflect nationalinterests and priorities…”
As Mexico rethinks its international partnerships, Beijing is looking to fill likely voids. In the past few months alone, Chinese leaders have approached Mexico with a series of diplomatic offerings. In addition to extending Mexico an invitation to September’s BRICS Summit, China also alluded to Mexico’s key role in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), even though BRI maps don’t yet formally include the Latin American region. Mexico, as Chinese President Xi Jinping explained in September, is an “important pivot of the natural extension of Belt and Road construction in Latin America.”
China also recently proposed advancing the current China-Mexico Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to “a new situation with all-round cooperation.” In Chinese political speak, this shift would position the China-Mexico relationship alongside China’s ties to Germany, a historically robust relationship that might also be strengthening amid frustrations over Trump administration policy.
The numerous deals inked by China and Mexico in the past two years also point to warming relations. While in Hangzhou in September, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed an agreement with Alibaba Group Holding, Ltd. to feature Mexican products on the company’s e-commerce platform. Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who has become a de facto economic envoy for China, also promised to train Mexican entrepreneurs and improve Mexican logistics.
In addition to the Alibaba deal, Chinese national oil company CNOOC made headlines when it won rights to develop two deep-water blocs in Mexico’s Perdido Fold Belt in late 2016.
And Mexico’s Giant Motors, which is partially owned by billionaire Carlos Slim’s Grupo Financiero Inbursa, signed a deal in early 2017 with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile (JAC Motors) to jointly invest approximately $200 million to build JAC model SUVs in Hidalgo, Mexico. China Southern Airlines will also strengthen ties with a first-ever flight to Mexico, which connects the southern metropolis of Guangzhou to Mexico City through Vancouver. Connections are otherwise limited to AeroMexico’s Mexico City to Shanghai route and Cathay Pacific freight service.
Prospects for enhanced China-Mexico ties are also presumably bolstered by recent developments in the trade relationship. Mexico’s extensive trade deficit with China has been a sticking point for Mexican policymakers for decades, but the trade dynamic is improving somewhat, according to reports from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce . Bilateral trade in goods increased by $1.78 billion, or 5 percent, between the first half of 2016 and the same period in 2017, reaching a total of $37.3 billion. In addition, due to growth in Chinese imports from Mexico, the South American nation’s $30 billion trade deficit with China reportedly shrunk over the past two years.
Mexico is additionally seeing minor improvements in access to the Chinese market. One trade-based initiative, the Henan-Guadalajara “Air Bridge ,” which has been in the works since 2015, will facilitate the transport of Mexican beef, pork, melon, and papaya, in addition to other agricultural products to Henan, an interior Chinese province and key entry point for foreign meat and produce.
This all amounts to concrete steps in cross-Pacific relationship-building. Still, Mexico’s China experts aren’t holding their breath.
Some are skeptical of China’s recent overtures, or of Mexico’s capacity to act on them. Mexico’s former ambassador to China, Jorge Guajardo, has been openly critical of Mexico’s sudden interest in a relationship with Beijing. In a 2017 opinion piece in Mexico’s Reforma newspaper, he argued that due to a lack of economic complementarity between the two countries, every second Mexico commits to developing partnerships with China “ is a second wasted .” Mexican China specialist Enrique Dussel Peters has also criticized those in Mexico who argue for a hasty shift in policy, stating in a March El Tiempo article that “Mexico is not institutionally ready for a medium or long-term relationship with China.”
Mexican officials have also downplayed growing China relations, suggesting that ties to China are mainly useful in their country’s dealings with the United States. During this year’s Mexico Business Forum, Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal indicated that Mexico would “use [the president’s China visit] geopolitically as strategic leverage” with the United States during NAFTA renegotiation. And former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda characterized Mexico’s growing interest in China as an “expression of ‘machismo’” directed northward.
Indeed, despite renewed interest from China, and this relative low point in U.S.-Mexico affairs, the U.S. relationship is still focal point of Mexican foreign policy. Extensive trade-based, production-related, and people-to-people ties between Mexico and the United States bind the two economies—for better or worse. Mexican exports to the United States totaled over $302 billion in 2016, compared to $5.4 billion in Mexican exports to China, according to the Mexican Ministry of Economy. The sheer number of people of Mexican origin residing in the United States—over 33 million in 2013, according to the Pew Research Center—also generates valuable economic linkages.
By Caroline Houck Staff Correspondent Read bio
February 15, 2018
Inspired by the U.S.’s own programs to train and befriend foreign officers at American military institutions, Beijing is wooing the militaries of the U.S.’s neighbors.
China has started to woo America’s nearest allies by funding “lavish” trips for Latin American military officers to live and study across the Pacific. Beijing is courting officers from the region, offering to cover the cost of military education and travel, Adm. Kurt Tidd, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers Thursday.
“They are very lavishly funding to bring senior military officers from a variety of key countries around our region to China for very lavishly expensed, all-expense-paid trips for them, for their families to be able to live very high lifestyles in the country,” Tidd said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Beijing was inspired by the U.S.’s own longstanding similar effort: the International Military and Education & Training, or IMET, program. That program has brought young foreign military officers to the States to take classes at U.S. military facilities since 1976. It’s not without its flaws, but U.S. commanders say it’s a critical tool that not only builds professional militaries in partner nations and increases interoperability, but facilitates lifelong relationships that can be leveraged in peacetime or in the midst of a crisis.
“I’ve long felt that the IMET program is probably our single greatest long-term investment value for the dollar that we put into it,” Tidd said. “It is an investment that sometimes may take two decades or more to pay off, but when it pays off, it pays off with relationships with strategic partners that are absolutely critical.”
IMET is funded through the State Department, which would see a 23 percent cut in its funding if President Donald Trump’s 2019 budget proposal were enacted. But members of Congress on both sides of the aisle recognize the program’s success:
“I know in Africa, the IMET program is singularly one of the truly great programs we have,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who chaired the hearing in Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s absence. “Once we get them in with us, they’re there for life, and we see evidence of this all the time.”
As does, China, Tidd said.
“China watches that very closely,” he said. “They’ve recognized the value of that strategic investment and they basically have taken a leaf out of our book.”
“The larger strategic challenge posed by China in this region is not yet a military one,” Tidd said in his prepared remarks. “It is an economic one, and a new approach may be required to compete effectively against China’s coordinated efforts in the Americas. Some of the most critical elements needed in this effort are not ones that USSOUTHCOM can bring to bear.”
Combating the Opioid Epidemic
Tidd, whose geographic command stretches from Mexico’s southern border through all of South America, was also asked repeatedly about the opioid epidemic America is facing. Thus far it has cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion, and killed more than 115 Americans daily in 2016, the most recent year for which data is available. Nearly all of the heroin used in the U.S. enters the country through Mexico, according to the State Department’s assistant secretary responsible for international narcotic law enforcement. Most prescription opioids on the black market are sourced domestically, and fentanyl is produced in China.
Tidd said he has “pretty good situational awareness” of most of the narcotics trafficking through Latin America and the Caribbean but is only able to interdict about 25 percent of them. The Coast Guard helps, but a few targeted military investments could help get at the rest.
“I think there’s some platforms out there that would be enormously helpful to us,” he said. “[The] littoral combat ship would fit perfectly into the mission space … It’s a package, it’s a vessel that’s capable of operating in the eastern Pacific with rotary wing, with interceptor boats as a package, coupled with maritime patrol aircraft.”
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-14 18:52:20|Editor: Li Xia
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- Mexico should strengthen its ties with China and court more Chinese investment to spur development, experts said on Thursday.
"China is in the process of transforming its economy," said Luis Rubio, president of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, "that's where new opportunities lie for Mexico."
He made the remarks during a presentation on China-Mexico relations at the China-Mexico Studies Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Rubio said that Mexico needs to prepare by planning ahead and learning more about China to make the most of stronger ties with the Asian country.
"I think we should take a moment to reflect on how the Chinese see us, and recognize the enormous ignorance that exists in political and economic circles," he said.
Eugenio Anguiano Roch, twice ambassador to China (in the 1970s and again in the 80s), also believed his country should strengthen relations with China in diverse areas, from trade to productive capacity, to make their comprehensive strategic partnership "more extensive and beneficial."
Mexico should also take advantage of China's willingness to work with Latin American countries as part of its Belt and Road Initiative to boost global infrastructure and international trade, he said.
China "will take the right path, not just to becoming the leading economic powerhouse, but also for the benefit (of) the rest of the world," said Anguiano.
Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole need to pursue greater cooperation with China "in a comprehensive way," he added.
Economist Jorge Eduardo Navarrete, who has served as ambassador to numerous countries, including China, described cooperation between the two countries as "indispensable."
"Mexico can take advantage of China's interest (in the region) and, departing from there, establish mechanisms that meet the needs ... of both nations equally," said Navarrete.
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