Missing the China factor: evidence from Brazil and Mexico

China’s rapid economic growth created new challenges and opportunities for Latin America over the 2000s. Much ink has been spilt analysing how countries in the region surfed the Chinese wave of commodity-based prosperity. However, there is fertile and quite unexplored territory to analyse how these regional powers in the Global South, from a comparative perspective, have interacted with China as they tried to improve their international position over the 2000s. We analyse in this article how Brazil and Mexico dealt with China’s presence and strategic goals in Latin America and assess the outcomes they extracted from this relationship. We draw evidence from and offer comparisons across different presidencies in each country (Lula and Rousseff in Brazil, and Fox, Calderón, and Peña Nieto in Mexico) over the 2000s, which allows us to grasp the variation in ideology, governance style, and electoral legitimacy. We ground our theoretical framework in the concept of international insertion, a Southern-based framework that opens space to understand and explain how countries in the South behave in international politics from a different point of view. We claim that the efforts made by the national governments in both countries to improve their positions achieved limited or transitory results, if considering China as a strategic factor.