Interview: China, LAC promote community with shared future through Belt and Road cooperation, says economist

Argentine guests pose for photos in front of the first new-energy light rail train made by CRRC Tangshan Co., Ltd. for Argentina in Tangshan, north China's Hebei Province, on June 6, 2023. (Xinhua/Gao Bo)

"China's relationship with Latin America has been fruitful in many aspects: material, technological, commercial and global good-neighborliness," with the Belt and Road Initiative being a project of vast significance and relevance toward that goal, Argentine economist Fernando Fazzolari said.

BUENOS AIRES, July 17 (Xinhua) -- It has been a decade since China proposed the building of a community with a shared future between China and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and ties between the two sides have deepened significantly, making concrete advancements through the Belt and Road cooperation, Argentine economist Fernando Fazzolari has said.

Today, the world develops at a fast pace and what China and Latin America have achieved in the past 10 years would have taken a century in earlier times, which makes the initiative of building a shared future between China and the LAC "highly promising," Fazzolari, a member of the Argentine-Chinese Chamber of Production, Industry and Commerce, told Xinhua on the 10th anniversary of the initiative.

"China's relationship with Latin America has been fruitful in many aspects: material, technological, commercial and global good-neighborliness," with the Belt and Road Initiative being a project of vast significance and relevance toward that goal, Fazzolari said.

The high-level Belt and Road cooperation has gone beyond economic projects or infrastructure works in the region, and fostered stronger cultural and political ties, he said.

Over the past decade, enormous progress has been made in getting to know China, which is geographically far away from Latin America, he added.

"The work carried out in these 10 years has brought us very close to different aspects of contemporary China. There are institutes, exchanges, meetings of officials, from both the central government and different provinces, and agreements have been established between sister provinces, among other things," he said.

Fazzolari believes Latin American countries should make effort to overcome economic dependence on global speculative capital and manage to return to growth driven by production and technology.

To that end, the region needs industrial and technological trading partners, rather than indebtedness and subjection to the dominant currency environment, he said.

Latin American countries must overcome dependence on the Western financial profit model and promote national development to strengthen their win-win cooperation with China, Fazzolari added.