Is China the Next Mexico?

China’s political and economic transformations should be compared with that of Mexico, suggests Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China, in an essay for Zócalo Public Square. In the 1990s, during the negotiations for the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, analysts cheered Mexico’s economic expertise and openness to free trade by the ruling party with its lock on power. “Lost in all the rosy pronouncements about Mexico’s economy was any serious analysis of how people’s rising living standards and expectations would affect their nation’s political evolution,” Guajardo writes, adding that China’s “trend lines are remarkably similar to what Mexico went through leading up to its transformation in 2000 to a multiparty democracy.” Guajardo compares the China’s Communist Party with Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, including state-owned enterprises, nationalistic gestures, press controls, and crackdowns on dissent as well as slowed growth and increasing debt. – YaleGlobal