Bridging the Pacific

Chile among others can provide linkage to institutional architecture between Asia and Latin America involving APEC, CPTPP, DEPA and RCEP

Latin America's growing concern about the United States' hegemony is accompanied by a genuine and growing interest for wider international partnerships.

The Pacific offers the clearest strategic opening. As China hosts Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' Meeting in 2026, Latin American governments have a rare opportunity to widen their markets, diversify their economic relationships and strengthen their capacity to navigate an increasingly competitive and securitized international environment by anchoring themselves more deeply in Asia-Pacific institutions.

The timing matters. The revival of the Monroe Doctrine by the Donald Trump administration has given hemispheric primacy renewed prominence in US strategy. The 2025 US National Security Strategy introduced a "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting US primacy in the Western Hemisphere and calling for constraints on the influence of extra-hemispheric competitors. Ports, critical minerals, telecommunications, energy infrastructure and supply chains are consequently being drawn ever more deeply into great-power competition.

Latin America therefore needs more institutional options. Stronger integration across the Pacific provides one. The economic foundations are already substantial. Latin America possesses enormous reserves of copper, iron ore and lithium, alongside energy resources, agricultural commodities and globally competitive food exports. Asian economies combine vast consumer markets with manufacturing capacity, investment capital, infrastructure expertise, digital technologies and sustained demand for resources and food. The economic structures of Asian and Latin American countries fit together remarkably well. That complementarity has already become one of the most powerful forces driving trans-Pacific commerce.

Chile provides a natural starting point. It was the first Latin American country to conclude a bilateral free-trade agreement with China, with the agreement entering into force in 2006. The relationship subsequently generated several other "firsts", including Chile becoming the first Latin American economy to upgrade its FTA with China. Chile has therefore occupied a pioneering position in China's economic engagement with Latin America for two decades.

The next step should be institutional. China can find strong reasons to support Chile's application to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which Chile formally submitted in 2024. Chilean accession would give the RCEP its first Latin American member. It would also place Chile simultaneously within the RCEP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and APEC, with strategic significance. Chile could become an institutional hinge connecting East Asia with Latin America, while the RCEP would acquire a genuinely trans-Pacific reach.

The bridge should extend in both directions. China applied to join the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement in 2021. Following the Republic of Korea's accession in 2024, DEPA members should advance China's accession as rapidly as negotiations and compliance assessments allow. Created by Chile, Singapore and New Zealand, DEPA offers an especially useful framework for governing e-commerce, paperless trade, digital transactions and other emerging areas of the digital economy. China's participation would greatly increase its economic weight. It would also deepen the institutional links connecting Latin American and Asian economies through common digital rules.

The significance of these two accessions goes well beyond the two countries. Chile joining the RCEP and China joining DEPA would establish a powerful principle: Asia-Pacific institutions can expand across the ocean in both directions. Latin American and Asian economies could become progressively embedded in overlapping rules governing trade, investment, data, digital transactions, customs procedures and innovation.

That process should eventually support a larger ambition: greater convergence between the RCEP and the CPTPP. Seven economies already participate in both arrangements. Their overlapping membership creates practical opportunities to improve compatibility in rules of origin, customs procedures, supply-chain management and digital standards. China has appropriately placed stronger synergy between the RCEP and the CPTPP on the agenda of its 2026 APEC host year, linking such efforts to renewed progress toward APEC's long-standing objective of a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific.

The realization of an FTAAP could transform Latin America's place in the Pacific economy. Chile, Peru and Mexico have already participated in APEC and the CPTPP. A broader Asia-Pacific trade architecture would reinforce their Pacific identity while adding another durable layer to their existing economic relationships across the Americas, Europe and other regions. Over time, the institutional geography of Latin America would become increasingly multidirectional and multi-aligned.

South America's Atlantic economies are also moving. Brazil had long approached the prospect of a Mercosur-China trade agreement cautiously. Its calculations have evolved as Mercosur's external trade strategy has become more active and its bloc-to-bloc agreement with the European Union has advanced. In late July, President  Xi Jinping and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva agreed on the importance of accelerating preparations for Mercosur-China trade negotiations. Progress toward such an agreement could connect South America's largest economic bloc much more closely with the dynamic markets of Asia.

Latin American governments have another reason to move soon: their room for maneuver cannot be taken for granted. The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement offers a revealing precedent. Article 32.10 makes it procedurally and politically difficult for a member to contemplate an FTA with a designated "non-market country". Similar poison-pill-style provisions could someday become instruments for Washington to discourage countries elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere from building closer economic relations with China and other Asian economies.

Once such restrictions enter trade agreements, policy autonomy becomes more difficult to recover. Latin America should therefore cross the Pacific while the institutional door remains open. This is where the idea of an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future can acquire concrete economic meaning. RCEP enlargement, DEPA expansion, greater RCEP-CPTPP compatibility and movement toward an FTAAP can translate community-building into rules, norms, agreements and commercial relationships used every day by governments, companies and consumers.

As such, the objective should be a denser trans-Pacific institutional architecture. It would give Latin American economies access to more markets, more investment, more rules-based partnerships and greater freedom to determine their own external economic relationships.

Indeed, as Latin American economies become more deeply embedded in trans-Pacific agreements, supply chains and regulatory networks, efforts by any single power to determine the terms and boundaries of their international economic relationships would be increasingly costly and difficult.

The Pacific is therefore more than a trade route. It is a horizon of agency.

The author is the director of the Institute for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the School of Global and Area Studies, and an associate professor at the School of International Studies at Renmin University of China.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.