Argentina's Foreign Policy Towards China During The Global Cold War(1949-1972):Political Debates,Subnational Actors,and Social Representations

The French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle(1998)recommended that scholars of International Relationships should analyze the 'deep forces' behind one country international strategy.In this sense,diplomatic actions result from different factors,like domestic politics and international pressure,that shape the international networks.Looking into the complex system of decisions in the Latin American states,and the subnational agents that play a significant role in the foreign agenda,this dissertation focuses on the networks between Argentina and the People's Republic of China(PRC)before the normalization of diplomatic ties in 1972.Through official documents,interviews,and memoirs,we seek to identify periods,strategies,economic and cultural exchanges between both countries.Given the informal nature of the networks,it is necessary to employ a transdisciplinary approach.Our theoretical framework is based on the constructivist theory,that suggests that power forces and significant actors serve as social grounds for one country's decisions.Also,we employ several notions from Pierre Bourdieu's field theory,that identifies agents and institutions in competition to influence state policies.In combination,these approaches reveal a rich history of cultural and economic links that led to diplomatic normalization in the early 1970s.Through three decades,Argentina and China faced a series of profound social and political changes.During World War ?,Argentina remained neutral until two weeks before Germany surrendered to the Allies and entered into the post-war period as a middle-income country.Commanded by Juan Domingo Peron,the central figure of the military government installed in 1943,a multiclass movement determined the country's history during the second half of the twentieth century.On mid-1945,Argentina's government signed the first agreement with China and inaugurated its embassy in Shanghai.Paradoxically,it was the result of a previous negotiations,started with the American mission sent by the US president Franklin D.Roosevelt.A group of economists,generals,and politicians,led by ambassador Avra Warren,arrived in Buenos Aires on April 20,1945.Their objective was to agree the participation of Argentina in the San Francisco Conferences,where the United Nations(UN)was chartered.Buenos Aires' neutrality during the war had been seen as tacit cooperation with the Axis,and therefore the country entered into the post-War International system with profound restrictions.The American delegation suggested that Argentina should recognize China and the URSS,searching for allies among the permanent members of the UN Security Council.In contrast with South America' s relatively stability during World War II,the Asian Pacific was a major war front.After the Japanese occupation of China and the conflicts between the two parties following the end of the war in the Pacific,chairman Mao Zedong gave a speech in the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the Forbidden City,founding the People's Republic of China(PRC)on October 1st,1949.Two months before the Argentine minister of Foreign Affairs had recommended their representatives to come back to the country due to the political situation in the Middle Country.After closing the diplomatic mission in Shanghai,Argentina lost the formal links with mainland China in August 1949.As result of the global context,Argentina and the PRC were part of different blocs in the post-war era.In this way,Latin America's international relations were deeply affected by USA foreign policy in the next decades(Rapoport,1989;Oviedo,2010;Brands,2012).No country in the region challenged the 'continental agreement' that implied no to establish formal relations with Beijing,until Cuba signed the first agreement in 1960.However,during the period,China and Argentina(among other countries)engaged in extensive cultural exchanges as well as bilateral trade-including but not limited to agricultural products-and even informal political discussions.The intellectual exchanges featured numerous scholars as well as businesspeople and various civil society institutions.These informal networks,that received state support,opened a debate inside Argentine political parties and Armed Forces.Inevitably,every relationship had political implications.Cultural and economic exchanges were the result of joint factors:ideology(e.g.,the increasing social movements and left parties in Latin America),economy(after the Sino-Soviet split,China looked to Canada,Australia,and Argentina to buy food and agricultural products),and the international landscape(the Chinese people's diplomacy focused on developing relations with Third World countries,after the Korean War in 1953).Trade between China and Argentina started during the Peronist government(1946-1955),and it shows a structure of private,semi-public,and public participation Chinese scholars used to identify Argentina as the first Latin American country that sustained trade with the PRC(Wu,1998;Zhu,2012).In September 1953,a delegation from the Argentine Institute of Exports(IAPI,a central state agency of the Peronist government)signed an agreement to provide 20.000 tons of wheat through the General Consulate in Hong Kong.The deal was seen as a refractory act against the American policy towards East Asia by the conservative sectors in the Argentine political landscape(Llairo and Siepe,1997).The first network was interrupted by the military coup two years later.The underlying opposition between democratic government and military dictatorships complicated long term policies.Armed Forces,fiercely anti-communist,restricted every economic trend with socialist countries.Therefore,the next effort to sustain exports to PRC started in June 1961 when the developmentalist president Arturo Frondizi looked to the East to improve the international commerce of the countryPrevious researchers(Mitcham,2005;Oviedo,2010)pointed out that the links between 1949-1971 were merely at the economic level.However,even trade had clear political ramifications.Peron claimed that Argentina had adopted a Third Position between communism and capitalism,President Arturo Frondizi(1958-1962)arguably attempted "to muliliterate the Argentinean economy," and Arturo Illia pursued a"strategic balance" between global powers(Simonoff,2007).In every case,Armed Forces,the conservative actors,and foreign pressure limited the horizons for autonomic strategies.The political instability of Argentina during the period had profound effects in the international orientation taken by the government,mainly towards East Asia.During military governments,networks between Argentina and the PRC decreased at its minimum levels.Before Alejandro Agustin Lanusse's military regime,applying pragmatic policies,started dialogues with Chinese representatives in Bucharest on mid-1971In another hand,the Intellectual exchanges were a strategic factor for the Chinese People's Diplomacy.The first Argentinean writer who traveled to post-revolutionary China was Raul Gonzalez Tunon.In 1953,he made an extensive journey through Russia and PRC,partly financed by the Argentine Communist Party.In the next year,South American pacifists Norberto Frontini and Maria Rosa Olivera met Chinese representatives in the World Peace Council's Conference in Vienna.The Chinese Council invited Frontini,Oliver,the painter Juan Carlos Castagnino and the poet Juan L.Ortiz for World Peace to the Middle Country.When they returned,Frontini,Oliver,and Castagnino founded the Chinese Cultural Association in Argentina.This group edited a magazine,Cultura China,which issued two numbers between 1954 and 1955.As its name suggests,the journal was dedicated to general aspects of the Middle Country,like music,art,literature and traditional theatre.Although the association had a short life,it helped as a platform for PRC s delegations and other intellectuals who traveled from Argentina.In this way,they started an active cultural exchange that lasted until 1966,when the military coup suspended every relation with the Eastern Bloc.Attending the cultural and economic networks between China and Latin America,some issues of the Cold War,as a concept,should be re-evaluated.It is usually agreed that the Cold War,understood as a confrontational stalemate between two global superpowers,constituted the comprehensive framework for virtually all international relationships during the period.An underground battle between United States and Soviet Union entailed a division of the world in two hemispheres:the free-market republics of the West,and the communist state-planned economies of the East.However,we argue that specific bilateral relationships reveal a more intricate complexity.The Cold War as a conceptual framework is undeniably useful to inscribe domestic conflicts on the global palimpsest,but it can also prevent us from reading the particularity and causal potential of local,and regional actors.Specific dynamics show that,rather than one,there were several networks among institutions,and practices during the Cold War.As Anders Stephenson(1997)has argued,different definitions of Cold War will lead to diverse periodization.Our study shows that links between Argentina and PRC were deeply related to Argentina' s type of government,and the way they understood the international landscapes(deeply affected by the ideological confrontation mainly during the Korean War and the Cuban Revolution).In this sense,the Cold War left room for relative autonomies and agencies,where local organizations met national strategies in international contexts.In this sense,our study shows that beyond the fundamental dispute among global powers,there was a rich history together between China and Latin America.