China’s Global Initiatives have emerged as a significant challenge to the Western-dominated international order, yet their theoretical implications for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) remain underexplored. Generally, existing scholarship frames China-Global South relations through dependency-inspired or geopolitical rivalry paradigms (Jureńczyk 2020), both of which reproduce a structural determinism that forecloses meaningful analysis of regional agency. This article intervenes in that debate by mobilizing the concept of multipolar autonomy, a framework derived from the Latin American International Relations (IR) tradition, to theorize how LAC governments engage China’s initiatives not as passive recipients but as actors pursuing sovereign insertion strategies within a multipolar order. Conceptually, multipolar autonomy refers to the proactive diversification of diplomatic, economic, and political relations by Global South States across multiple regions and partners, enabled by the fragmentation of the international order and driven by ideological opposition to hegemonic alignment (Maresca 2026a).

Moreover, this work argues that the conceptual vocabulary of dependency and hegemonic substitution is analytically insufficient to capture the heterogeneous, negotiated character of China-LAC interactions, and that multipolar autonomy offers a more accurate theoretical account of the region’s differentiated responses to Beijing’s global governance agenda. The central argument is that LAC governments engage China’s Global Initiatives not as dependent recipients of Beijing’s governance agenda, nor as passive objects of Washington-Beijing rivalry, but as actors exercising multipolar autonomy: selectively leveraging Chinese proposals to diversify their international insertion and reduce structural dependence on the Global North, driven by their own sovereign priorities and ideological orientations. The article proceeds as follows: it first situates China’s Global Initiatives within the context of hegemonic decline, then identifies the limitations of existing scholarship, and finally develops multipolar autonomy as an analytical framework for understanding the region’s differentiated engagement with Beijing’s global governance agenda.

The Structural Backdrop: Hegemonic Decline and the Rise of China’s Global Initiatives

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis marked a critical turning point in contemporary world politics, exposing the limits of Western predominance and accelerating the crisis of U.S.-led hegemony (Babic 2020; Morales Ruvalcaba 2025). Power scattering has not been a linear process, but its cumulative effects have been decisive. The two Trump administrations’ unilateral actions against the United Nations and its affiliated bodies, the closure of USAID, and the imposition of unilateral tariffs have delegitimized Washington’s perceived power worldwide. According to the Pew Research Center (2017), the start of the first Trump administration signaled a 74% average level of distrust in the US president across more than thirty countries polled. Actions such as withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the JCPOA are evidence of unipolar conduct that, in reality, reflects hollowed-out hegemony (Shidore 2025). In response, Global South countries located on the periphery of a world-system in which they were politically and economically dependent on core countries (Wallerstein 2004) began to find alternative resources to express their agency in the new multipolar world. To this end, China’s economic capacity has undoubtedly been a driver in reaching the Global South and leading developmental initiatives that were previously exclusive to the West, particularly in a region where US dominance was meant to be unquestionable: LAC.

In LAC, the 2000s represented a unique moment to gain autonomy in international relations. The idea of autonomy is a longstanding feature of the region, meaning the quest to assert national sovereignty and diversify foreign policy portfolios vis-à-vis the US. Countries like Brazil began to advance different forms of autonomy, among which is precisely diversification (Vigevani and Cepaluni 2011), to seek expanded and innovative partnerships with international actors. China has been an instrumental actor in helping LAC countries articulate those autonomous partnerships, deepening its presence even with countries with whom it does not maintain........

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