One of China’s oldest and most reliable business partners in Latin America, the nation of Chile, just elected a hardline conservative who supports a military overthrow of the Venezuelan socialist regime, a core Chinese ally, as its president.
While the Communist Party has welcomed President-elect José Antonio Kast cordially, it has much to lose during his tenure, assuming his governs based on the principles on which he campaigned.
Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and second-largest lithium producer – a mineral heavyweight whose fate could decide that of the entire “green” energy industry.
Kast entered December’s presidential election as a two-time veteran of the race for the nation’s top office, last losing to incumbent President Gabriel Boric in 2021. He defeated his rival, Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara, in an unprecedented landslide this time, taking every Chilean state. He ran on a campaign focused on strengthening Chile’s borders, limiting immigration, expanding “popular capitalism,” and fighting crime.
The race focused little on foreign policy, but Kast has made no secret of his affinity for other right-wing leader in the hemisphere, effusively congratulating President Donald Trump on his victory last year and making his first international stop as president-elect to Buenos Aires. Argentine President Javier Milei, the world’s first explicitly libertarian president, embraced him warmly, a notable contrast to his awkward relationship with Boric.
In the Argentine capital on December 16, Kast took a swipe at one of China’s most strategic relationships in Latin America: the Venezuelan socialist regime led by dictator Nicolás Maduro, a major supplier of oil to Beijing. Asked if he would support a military intervention to oust Maduro, Kast answered affirmatively.
“Clearly we cannot intervene in that because we are a small country,” Kast observed, “but if someone is going to do it, have it be clear to them that they would solve for us and for all of Latin America, for all of South America, a giant problem.”
He claimed other South American presidents agreed with him that the “situation being lived through in Venezuela is unacceptable.”
Kast has declared in past presidential races that he would expel the diplomatic representation of Venezuela, and fellow Chinese ally Cuba, citing their many human rights abuses and nefarious activity across the continent. The point became moot after, due to Boric’s insistence in condemning the Venezuelan regime, the embassy in Santiago shut down in 2024, but the principle of condemning China’s criminal leftist allies remains present. Kast is, however, on the record opposing the immediate shutdown of the Chinese embassy in Santiago, citing the country’s economic dependency on Beijing – perhaps why the Chinese Foreign Ministry welcomed his victory with a friendly, if not enthusiastic, congratulations.
“Chile is the first South American country to establish diplomatic relations with New China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told reporters during his regular briefing on December 15, addressing Kast’s win. “Over the past 55 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the bilateral relationship has maintained a sound momentum of development with fruitful cooperation outcomes in various fields.”
“China stands ready to work with the new government of Chile to further step up mutually beneficial and friendly cooperation on all fronts, continue to take China-Chile comprehensive strategic partnership to new heights and bring more benefits to the two peoples,” he added.
Behind the polite greeting is a deep economic relationship nurtured by both left-wing and supposed “center-right” presidencies in Chile. Genocidal dictator Xi Jinping has referred to Chile as a “pioneer of the Belt and Road,” referring to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global debt-trap scheme to influence countries’ politics through unfavorable loans. Chile signed a free trade agreement with China in 2005 and sends most of its exports there. About 84 percent of its exports to China in 2021 were minerals, highlighting how critical China’s purchases are to the country. Xi visited the country in 2016.
All evidence suggests that China is seeking to expand its footprint in the minerals industry – particularly those critical for “green” technology such as electric vehicles (EVs) – even beyond its current dominance. The South China Morning Post reported on December 17 that China was “accelerating efforts to secure its copper supply chain, designating the metal as critical across strategic industries such as electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and defence amid rising geopolitical tensions.” While much of that work is domestic, increasing copper material production at the provincial level, China simply does not have the sufficient domestic copper resources to go it alone.
Chile has for decades been a prioritized, obvious target for China’s mineral ambitions. Since 2006, Chinese government-owned corporations have been attempting to purchase a critical mine known as the Gabriela Mistral, or “Gaby,” copper mine. The Chilean government suspended that sale in 2008 after the Chilean Congress heard testimony that the deal would have been highly unfavorable to Chile, but China kept courting Chilean government officials, anyway.
The Communist Party was especially successful with “center-right” former President Sebastián Piñera, who was president from 2010 to 2014 and again from 2018 to 2022. Piñera joined the BRI in 2018. That same year, Chinese Tianqi Lithium Corp spent $4 billion in 2018 to purchase a 24 percent stake in the Chilean Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) company, owner of the world’s largest lithium reservoir. Piñera also approved a deal for the Chinese EV giant BYD to extract lithium from Chilean mines.
Piñera visited Beijing in 2019 and encouraged Chinese investment in his country.
“We want to transform Chile into a true business center for Chinese companies. So that you can, from Chile, also reach all of Latin America,” Piñera said at the time.
Current President Boric, whose party alliance in the 2021 election included the Communist Party, was also largely favorable to China. He traveled there in 2023, advancing China’s false claims of possession of the nation of Taiwan and offering that his government officials “highly value the spirit of collaboration and shared growth in the spirit of building a new world order based on peace and harmony among peoples.”
Boric’s leftism presented a problem for China with minerals, however: he chose to nationalize the lithium industry to give the government a stake in any potential deals with corporations, domestic or foreign.
“Any private party, whether foreign or local, that wants to exploit lithium in Chile will have to partner with the state,” Boric declared in April 2023, months before traveling to China. This creates an entirely new layer of bureaucracy for any Chinese company seeking to exploit Chilean national resources.
Boric has also publicly suggested that his country is too economically dependent on China.
“Today, in another sense, 40 percent of our exports are to China. Today China is our main trading partner, we have good relations with China and it is one of the main investors in Latin America and South America, and increasingly so,” Boric said in remarks in July 2023. “But we also know that in the current geopolitical context it is necessary to diversify our sources of income and the destinations of our products.”
Chilean political analysts have identified the minerals industry as a significant geopolitical challenge for Kast, left to choose between the “free market” thinking that led Piñera to embrace China and Boric’s government intervention that hampered China’s attempts to control Chile’s minerals.
“An alignment that is too rigid to Washington could reduce Chile’s margin of autonomy in the context of a growing rivalry between the United States and China,” the outlet UChile observed on December 15. Regarding lithium, the outlet noted, “the Kast government will face pressure to facilitate a greater American participation in the lithium supply chain,” something that could threaten to marginalize, and as such outrage, Beijing.
As mentioned above, Kast declined to support shutting down the Chinese embassy in Santiago for economic reasons during his 2021 run. In a contentious interview that year, Kast called the topic “complicated,” asking “how do we do it from one day to the next, given that we have a very large commercial exchange with them and it’s a reality?”
Of note, and concern, for China is that Kast, rather than agree to shut down the embassy, suggested Chile should simply reduce its trade volume with China.
“Perhaps what we have to do is to vary our economic matrix and not be dependent on China anymore,” he suggested, “because if we close the borders with China today, the prejudice for thousands of Chileans would be enormous.”
During this selection, Kast’s 204-page policy proposal document also suggested diversifying the Chilean economy away from copper, expanding into other minerals, which would result in opening Chile up to more international markets. The policy suggested “exploiting other minerals, such as uranium, cobalt, selenium, indium, and others, which would allow us not to only depend on copper and molybdenum and better face markets.”
A conservative president in Chile does not necessarily ensure an anti-China government in Chile, but Kast is in no way a guarantee for Beijing of continued enthusiasm for cooperation with the Communist Party. Beginning his term in 2026, surrounded by several fellow conservative parties in power in South America and with the potential for closer relations with Washington, Kast may be emboldened to whittle away at China’s influence in his country.