(De)carbonizing energy? Strategic para-coloniality and counter-hegemonic space-making in China’s expansion into Latin America

This article examines China’s expanding presence in Latin America’s energy sectors through three contrasting cases: Brazil’s Pré-Sal offshore oil, Peru’s Las Bambas copper mine, and Ecuador’s Coca Codo Sinclair hydropower plant. It introduces the concepts of strategic para-coloniality and spatial counter-hegemony to analyze how Chinese state-led interventions simultaneously challenge Western dominance while operating through extractive logics forged under European colonialism and consolidated through (and against) U.S. hegemony. Drawing on a spatiality–materiality–relationality framework and a diverse-deviant case study approach, the article shows that Chinese energy projects add new layers of renewable energy and critical-mineral flows for electricity without displacing the global economy’s fossil and extractive foundations. Rather than signaling a decolonial or post-fossil transition, China’s rise reconfigures the power–energy nexus by redirecting material flows, consolidating strategic geographies, and reproducing unequal relations under new South–South imaginaries. The article contributes to debates on energy transitions, critical geopolitics, and decolonial political economy while moving beyond binary China–West framings.