Francisco Pérez Mackenna spent 18 to 22 August 2026 in Beijing and Shanghai at the invitation of Wang Yi, using the five-day trip to talk about artificial intelligence, the digital economy, scientific and technological innovation, talent training and closer industrial supply chains. The visit was billed as the first leg of a broader tour of China, Vietnam and Japan. The language is all smooth statecraft and corporate polish. The reality underneath is a familiar one: officials and executives arranging the next round of extraction, infrastructure and data control while ordinary people are left to absorb the costs.
Who Has the Power
Pérez Mackenna met Wang Yi, vice-premier He Lifeng, NDRC vice-minister Zhou Haibing and science minister Yin Hejun. A ‘Choose Chile’ session in Beijing brought together executives from some of China’s largest companies, with the business discussion spanning mining, agrifood, energy, infrastructure, telecoms and banking. Bilateral trade was US$67.1 billion in 2025. That’s the scale of the machine: ministries on one side, corporate executives on the other, and a trade relationship big enough to make the rest of society feel like background noise.
No technology treaty or headline agreement on artificial intelligence was announced during the visit. The published material said only that there were understandings and an intention to deepen cooperation. No movement was reported on submarine cables. The official choreography produced talk, not a signed AI deal. The apparatus still got what it wanted: another round of alignment, another promise to keep the channels open.
The only concrete document signed on 20 August came from a separate trip. Agriculture undersecretary Francesco Venezian signed a memorandum with China’s General Administration of Customs on phytosanitary rules for Chilean fresh fruit. Even here, the state’s role is plain. It doesn’t feed people. It brokers rules for export flows.
Who Pays the Price
Chile’s case for deeper digital cooperation rests on its abundant solar and wind generation in the north, cold water and stable geology in the south, an investment-grade sovereign rating and the region’s most reliable electricity grid. The country has marketed itself as the ‘data hub of the Americas’ for several years. Huawei operates two data centres there and has announced a third, worth about US$100 million. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all committed capacity.
That sounds like progress if you’re sitting in a boardroom. On the ground, the main complication is water and consent. Data centre projects around Santiago have run into permitting resistance over water use, and Chile’s environmental assessment system is slow by design. Slow, in this case, means a system built to manage conflict without surrendering control. The projects keep coming. The water questions stay.
The visible effects, if the digital agenda advances, will be industrial rather than consumer, with construction jobs, electricity demand and pressure on water rights. Data centres employ few people once built. That’s the bargain: a burst of construction, then a locked-in infrastructure that serves capital and state planners far more than the people living beside it.
What They Call Development
The trip came a week after Chile’s mining ministry pressed its own case at home. Daniel Mas, who serves as both economy and mining minister under Kast, set a target of six million tonnes of annual copper production, telling a Clapes UC seminar on 13 August that the aim is to unlock investment and reach that level with higher productivity. Chile produced 5.415 million tonnes in 2025.
The pipeline is large. Cochilco’s 2025–2034 investment portfolio runs to about US$104.5 billion, the biggest in more than a decade, and the CBC counts US$87.7 billion of investment projects for 2026–2030 with 41% of that in mining. By mid-August, Mas said 16 mining projects worth around US$24 billion had entered environmental review since the government took office in March, more than 83% of everything submitted nationally.
That’s the hierarchy speaking in numbers. More projects. More review. More extraction. More pressure on land, water and labor. The people who live with the consequences don’t appear in the press releases, but they’re the ones who carry the weight when the copper, the data and the profits move upward.
China buys most of that copper. The trip also came as Chile managed tariff friction with the United States while deepening ties with its largest single trading partner. The peso closed at about 925 to the US dollar on 20 August, weaker on the day after the central bank reported second-quarter GDP fell 0.2% year on year.
The infrastructure race keeps rolling. Humboldt, the transpacific fibre link Chile has promoted as strategic infrastructure, is a Google joint venture with the Chilean state agency Desarrollo País and runs to Sydney, not Asia; it was approved in June and is due to be laid this year. Watch instead for the Chile–China Express cable, the China Mobile-backed link that would run from Hong Kong to Valparaíso and which the Kast government has left frozen in the defence and foreign ministries. The state calls it strategy. The bosses call it connectivity. Everyone else gets the bill.