Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: Pandemic Diplomacy in Latin America and the Caribbean

Empirical analysis of China’s health diplomacy toward Latin America and the Caribbean in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that even though the region remains peripheral among China’s foreign priorities its health diplomacy functions as a diffusion tool for increasing its soft power in the region, particularly against the background of the evolving China–United States rivalry. The source and development of Chinese soft power in the Global South should be understood as the diffusion effect of the combination and interdependence of its material hard power and its ideational soft power.