Half of the globe apart, still good neighbors: Xi Jinping's affinity with Latin America

Cultural exchanges are a crucial pillar of interaction for China and Latin America, two great civilizations. Xi has repeatedly stressed that people-to-people amity is vital to sound state-to-state relations.

In fact, while still a local official, Xi was engaged in cooperation between China and Latin America.

In 1996, Xi, then deputy secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Fujian Provincial Committee, visited Brazil for the first time. He flew to Fortaleza, the state capital of Ceara in northeastern Brazil, and signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a sister province/state relationship between East China's Fujian province and Ceara.

"I remember spending New Year's Day 1996 on the road ... There is some serendipity between me and the city," Xi recalled when attending the BRICS summit in Fortaleza in 2014.

China has established approximately 180 sister-city partnerships with 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, which illustrates their ever-flourishing cultural and people-to-people exchanges. In May last year, Fortaleza established a sisterly relationship with Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian where Xi used to serve as deputy mayor. The sister cities are known as the "BRICS Twin Cities" because both have hosted BRICS summits.

In recent years, the platforms for people-to-people and cultural exchanges between China and Latin America have become increasingly diverse, from the China-Latin America Cultural Exchange Year and the Latin American and Caribbean Art Season to the "Bridge of the Future" China-Latin American Young Leaders Training Campus.

"The rich cultures and arts of China and Latin America bloom like splendid flowers on each other's vast land, pushing the mutual learning between the Chinese and Latin American civilizations to a new high," Xi said when attending the closing ceremony of the China-Latin America Cultural Exchange Year in 2016 in Peru.