The People’s Republic of China carried on a modest trade with Latin America in the 1960s. However, even the exchange of Cuban sugar for Chinese rice ended when Fidel Castro chose to side with Moscow in the Sino-Soviet Dispute. In the post-Mao era, China’s new leaders sought to engage with Latin America without ideological preconditions. Only Cuba still viewed relations between countries with a regard for political purity. For example, Fidel Castro denounced Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping for visiting Washington, D.C., in 1979. Such objections did not inconvenience China and other countries of Latin America. In the 1980s PRC officials visited right-wing military dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, and returned a decade later when democratic governments replaced the generals. By the 1990s, the growth of Chinese commerce in the region was outpacing that of the United States. Latin American politicians seemed eager to embrace opportunities to offset US economic hegemony by trading with the PRC. What were the causes and consequences of these increasing commercial ties? To answer these questions, the author has investigated the Chinese-Latin American relationship in the digitized database known as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).