China’s Expanding Footprint in Mexico

Welcome to 35 West. I'm Ryan Berg, director of the America's program at CSIS and hosted the 35 West podcast. We're a couple of professionals in the Mexican, but are we ready? I don't want to form trends in our entertainment. And that's what happened. We roll it all in the naft and negotiation. Welcome to 35 West. I'm Ryan Berg, director of the America's program at CSIS and co-host of the 35 West podcast. China's presence in Mexico has grown dramatically over the past two decades, while Chinese investment across Latin America has been commodity driven in Mexico, the story is different. Chinese firms are embedding themselves in manufacturing supply chains, wholesale trade, telecommunications, and real estate, just to name a few, with over 800 companies active in Mexico by 2025. China's growing investment in Mexico intersects with a range of critical issues, including economic security, governance and corruption, the USMCA 2026 revision, narco politics, and drug cartels, and broader national security concerns. Today we are grateful to be joined by Heidi Jain Smith, professor of economics at La Universidad de Ibedo, Manecana, in Mexico City. She's a leader in public finance, governance, and anti-corruption policy, with more than 20 years of experience across academia, government and multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, IDB, OAS, and OECD. Her expertise includes fiscal decentralization, sub-national debt management, and institutional reform. It is a strong record of delivering evidence-based solutions for governments and organizations through the Americas. Thank you for joining us today, Heidi. Thank you for the invitation. Heidi, you've been researching China's growing influence in Mexico and how complex this issue has become. How did you first get interested in this research topic? And could you sketch a scene-setter for our listeners? Why does Mexico matter so much for Chinese investment? And what makes its case unique in the region? Yeah, I've been studying Latin America in my whole life growing up with my youth in Argentina and Chile. I didn't exchange program in China in college, and so I've always been very engaged in both understanding Latin America, but also China. And more recently, I was watching the presidential election here in Mexico City, and I was looking at different channels, and two things struck me as very important. One, that there was more women as commentators in the election channels, and then I was switching off to kind of decompress what was happening during the election results. And I turned to a Chinese propaganda channel. And this was an open TV. And it was Portoño, and the interviewers were describing the spring festival and the bean curd that they were eating and the bean blossom teas that they were rituals. And it was fascinating because here one channel describes the election results, and if Claudia Shima was within a win, and how this would change Mexican democracy and human rights, and what that meant for the future of USMCA. And here we are with the Chinese channel describing the spring festival. So, curiously enough, I thought, wow, there's something going on new in Mexico that has changed. And I think it's important to highlight a little bit of the history of the Chinese in Mexico, because I think this is relevant for what's happening today. And there was a really great paper that was produced, it was called National Identity and Preferences for Chinese Inclusion in Mexico by Jesse Avicero Covatanga and Martha Paredes. And what they suggest is there's been a historical racial injustice and racial discrimination against the Chinese in Mexico. This started really in the Parfidiatos, where there were a growing population of the Chinese in the late 1870s to early 20th century, from about 200 to about 2000 Chinese population that grew after the Chinese expulsion act of the US in 1882, which increased the population to about 20,000. And most of the Chinese that moved were in San Francisco in California and they moved to Chihuahua and Sanora, so Northern Mexico. So, it's a very interesting time, but after that the Mexican adopted a similar expulsion in 1931 and this number decreased to about 6,000 Chinese living in the United States. So, jumping forward, and moving to 2015, we can see the Chinese population and this is the other research and using official statistics of Inehi and they described that in 2015 there was about 9,000 Chinese nationals living in Mexico and 25% of them had Mexican citizenship. But this number is comparable to like other Asian countries, 5,500 Japanese and 5,500 South Koreans about the same. But this number has actually changed since the 2020 census, which has increased to about 10,500 Chinese immigrants living in Mexico. Now, this is a drop in the bucket for immigrants in Mexico. There's about 1.2 million, and we know that's mostly American citizens and mostly attorneys of Mexican nationals, children that were born in the United States that have returned. But if we look at the current trends since 2020, they highlight that from 2019 to 2023, temporary visas is up 157%. And it's now the third largest country looking for these temporary visas next to Colombians, Americans, and then the Chinese. So, in the last few years, every time I've been to more business districts, there's just much more of an Asian population that you're seeing in business hotels and restaurants around industry hubs. So, I think it's pertinent that I understand what's driving more Chinese investment into Mexico. Why are we seeing more temporary visas? What are they investing in? What's happening? Terrific, Heidi. Thank you. And Chinese investment in Mexico is accelerated dramatically over the past two decades, along with some of this migration that you will note. More than 800 firms now operate in the country with strong concentrations and sectors like manufacturing, auto parts, wholesale trade, real estate, and telecommunications. Unlike other parts of Latin America, Chinese investment in Mexico is defined by its role in supply chains to the U.S. market. Could you explain why Mexico has become a hub for supply chain oriented FDI rather than commodity driven projects as it has in so many other Latin American countries? Sure. And one interesting thing, financial times published maybe six months ago that just described the lack of knowledge of where FDI is and where it's going. They went to a specific industrial park and they were looking at where the Chinese were investing in that specific industrial park. But what I've done is I've used two different data sets and what I've tried to do is understand historically where this foreign drug investment is coming from. And my assumption just thinking before actually looking at the numbers was it's all in the border. It's all Chinese investments on the border. This is where the Chinese are looking towards to import their products to the United States. And this kind of was reflected in my experience as being a fellow of USCSD, which is the San Diego University of California San Diego campus. They invited me over and I had an opportunity to exchange with some South Koreans that we were visiting Tijuana from San Diego. So we were looking at the San Diego Tijuana investment district. And what was interesting is South Koreans were also looking at further investing in the Northern border for exports into the United States. So being closer to the United States to take advantage of the USMCA. So the USCMCA access is clear a free trade entry to the US market. So this is not just a China story, but I think it's a more global story of using Mexico to leverage into US markets. So a lot of focusing on manufacturing supply chains thinking about how to leverage the US. And this is very different than the Latin American story, which is much more resource extraction. Like for example, we know that Brazil is the Chinese use for extracting soy, iron ore, Argentinian chilies, a lithium and copper story of trying to export as well as Peru with mining and obviously the establishment of the port. But their interest in Mexico is much more historic. This is not just like today. This has happened, but business investments have been going on. And so the two datasets that I use, there's a Sino-China center at Unam, whose name is Enrique Duser-Peter. And he has been studying the Chinese Mexican story for a very long time. And then just national statistics. So the Ministry of Economy has the foreign direct investments. And so what I found was, again, my assumption was that the foreign direct investment was only going to be on the border. And actually what I found was the top recipients of foreign direct investment in Mexico from 2006 to 2024 was Mexico City, which makes sense. Yucatan, Novelion and Haleisco. Yucatan really pulled me for, I didn't think that that was going to be. So those are top tier. So Mexico City being over 100 million, which is a billion in investments over time. Yucatan 371 million, Novelion, 260 million and Haleisco 235. Secondary States, it's Kuala y la Sonora, Baja California. And then a moderate tier is Aguas Calientes, Chihuahua, Koliima. Guadalupe de Amalipas and flows from there. There's a clear drive for economic development by the Chinese investments from 2006 to 2024. In areas where there's a lot of economic development already happening. So the mix of city and then lovelion which is the most developed region in Halisco. The Bahia has always been an area in which there's a lot of economic development. I think the sectors that are most important are manufacturing auto parts, electronics, wholesale, real estate, and then industrial parks. The Bahia Northern section being important but Mexico City because of its economic development and economic security is much more prevalent. So the story of just being on the border and just being export industry, it's not the only story in Mexico. I think that's short hypothesis. Just think that it's export industry to go into the United States. There's also an investment interest in Mexico itself and I think that's relevant to highlight. But I think there's different industries that are working towards. Claudio Shimbam in her first months went into the Badiocino in Mexico City and tried to take out some of the cheap secondary market in the end. While it was newsworthy, I think that's not an effective way to deal with the Chinese investments in Mexico. I think that was just a show of hand than it was actually a clear strategy towards engaging the region and thinking about what these exports are doing. So let's think about specific strategies in terms of investments. And what I have done with my research is thought specifically about this export industry using Mexico springboard for exports to the United States. I've thought about it in terms of telecommunications and the role of telecommunications in the industry. And I've also thought about it as infrastructure investments. So how the country engages in infrastructure investments like the port of Tchaunque. And how Mexico might or not receive for direct investment and assistance from the Chinese government form investing in infrastructure because we are in a developed economy and developing economy that needs infrastructure investments. Let me ask you, what are the state or local level dynamics that are driving some of this Chinese investment? You've mentioned that it's not always about the border. It's not always about being able to export into the United States. And then let me ask you a secondary question as well, which is on your sources of data. There seems to be a different set of data points out there on how much Chinese investment is actually going into Mexico. This is one of the US government's points that it wants to raise with the Mexicans during the USMCA. Renegotiations or revision process next year. And there have been some very prominent reports that he jain in recent months, including one by Logan Wright and his team at the Rodeum Group that concluded that Chinese investment in Mexico could be six times higher than what the Mexican government is publishing about investment levels. So what accounts for the differences in numbers? Why is it so difficult to calculate this? I don't think it's difficult to calculate. I just think that business development takes time and policy is now. Whereas the official statistics of NAHI, which is the National Statistics team, does an annual survey. I think that we're real time seeing taking advantage of the current uncertainties between US-Mexico-Canada relationship and the potential for the re-negotiations. So you have much more integration of more Chinese investments. And one of the strategies, and I'd like to talk a little bit about the paper I wrote, one of the strategies that a prominent book that was written by another business professor, his name is Richard Carney, and he's at the University of Hong Kong. And he studied Southeast Asia. And one of the strategies that Chinese do is something called "walk it." And "lock in" in economics is encouraging use of one strategy over others so that you are dominant on that product. So we can think of "lock in" like Apple or Mac or PC or the keyboard that we use today. So it might not be the best or most efficient, but it's the one that was adopted first. And so one of the investment decisions the Chinese are doing is sending as many people into Mexico as possible to create "lock it" specifically around the digital environment. And so the secondary hypothesis of why digital is much more important and what we're seeing in other areas of Mexico in its investments is the digital silk road. And so what Carney does is he analyzes the investments of Southeast Asia looking at what types of states are receiving what kinds of aid. So he looks at supply and demand curves and he's looking at what kind of countries so the demand side. So he's thinking of this in terms of authoritarian regimes and quasi authoritarian regimes and whether capital is being invested in these quasi authoritarian regimes. And what he does find is a positive statistical relationship. And he analyzes millions of different countries and investments of the Chinese across Southeast Asia. And he finds a positive investment towards two areas. One is just infrastructure investments. In countries are teetering towards authoritarianism much more prominent than democracies or pro-democratic institutions. And where he finds a positive statistical relationship with specifically the digital silk road, the investment decisions of the Chinese in authoritarian regimes. So to engage in investments. So this is a strategic commodities investments. They're looking for adoption of digital technologies and those digital technologies obviously are leading and prominent. So the research that I wanted to share with you today is a little bit about investment decisions by the Chinese looking at it at the sub-national level in Mexico. So looking at state level data and seeing whether car needs supply and demand inside research applies to the Mexican case at the sub-national level. Meaning is FDI being driven by the location and surrounding the supply of governance or is it the demand of needing more resources at the local level. My data sources are foreign direct investment and I use the for the national statistics. Then I cross it with in Seek which is a national survey on perceptions of corruption and the incidents of corruption. So cross state governments and it's a represented survey that the and may he does every two years and they've been doing this since there was a pilot project 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019. So it's a pretty solid robust data set that you could use and I have control variables of evaluating economic development, education and other controls. And what I find is a clear relationship between the demand side hypothesis which means that the higher client holistic factions, higher political patronage areas and more public sector dominance, more likely there was Chinese foreign direct investment. And the correlation was fairly strong. The results show a consistent statistical significance, a factor of actual corruption incidents at the municipal level controlling for specifications of a 1% change in reported corruption corresponds with $10.9 US dollars increase in investment. In contrast, corruption perception variables whether it's at the state and municipal level exhibit no significance in any of my models. So the findings that the Chinese investments respond more to this actionable indicators of local political capture than reputation, cues or formal economic size. The relationship is robust to a range of fiscal and social control such as budget solvency, long-term budget ratios, unemployment and investment mortality rates. The result fleet to sporting this demand side theory of Chinese overseas investments, particularly in thinking about subnational governments to offer the informal networks and low institutional resistance are more likely to attract investment decisions. However, the research shows that such investments are not exclusively limited to weak governance areas. Several industrial export oriented states were strong. Institution also received substantial FDI. And the dual patterns suggest that the Chinese investment in Mexico shaped by this hybrid logic that clientelistic actions, access in some cases and there are the commercial viabilities and others. So this hit our origin of the trade integration. It will need to be seen in the USMCA modelism effort to thinking about we in the region think about Chinese investments in the USMCA. Thanks very much, Heidi, for explaining the framework that you use Richard Carney's framework to analyze Chinese FDI. I want to ask you since you're on the ground in Mexico, how Mexicans generally talk about Chinese investment, how they see Chinese investment, and how they talk about it sort of in their day to day conversation. My impression is that oftentimes this public discourse is framed around a lens of corruption, which could be influenced by what you call a deeply rooted and historical anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico. I'm wondering if you have other perceptions based on your conversations with people at a local level, how they're seeing Chinese investment, what factors play a role in shaping the views on the legitimacy of these investments. I think the most important thing to highlight is I don't think the Chinese are corrupt themselves, and that's not what my research is showing. What my research is showing is that there's a high likelihood that when there's perceived incidents of corrupt acts at the subnational level, state municipal level, that you have more foreign direct investment into those states. And that means that Chinese capitalism is just much more efficient. And they know that they can take advantage of the weak institutional framework that incline elastic networks that can exist in Mexico. So the role, actually, of USMCA, NAFTA, the original NAFTA in 1994, was actually to create sound institutional framework for US investment going to Mexico. So we had more control of the legal system and to have ensure that we had some structure. Remember that when we create trade agreements, trade agreements are legally enforced acts of binding agreements. And it's create security and insured for trade and investment decisions, which is more broadly. And so you have more less political factors. So one of the biggest problems we had in the 1990s is a lot of investments we weren't sure that would be protected in Mexico for investing. So the creation of NAFTA was to create this framework for insuring that US foreign direct investment was insured. And so I think that perception on the ground in Mexico is an increased presence of the Chinese, including Chinese in non-linear immigrants, but also investments. But I think it's just a perception of there's more people here, not necessarily of what's going to happen with that investment. I'd like to highlight one thing that's really important is that actually it was the American firms that actually encouraged the Chinese to build distributor parts and for cars and in the 1990s. Some of these investment decisions were brought in by the US firms to be more efficient. And so this is not just out of the blue that all of a sudden the Chinese are investing in Mexico, but it's been a historical trend. And because of that historical trend, it's important to think about these long-term effects. Now I do think that, and I think Shannon O'Neill, the Council of Foreign Relations, is also highlighted this, is that there is increased dumping and selling of commodities of Chinese commodities in Mexico. And I think this highlighted a little bit in the Rodan research as well, where there's 17 different electric vehicles firms that are selling in Mexico City. And then you also, when you arrive to the airport in Mexico City, how is very much present in alternative phone companies that you can use and services for your electronics? So Chinese digital technologies are being exported into Mexico and probably at a much faster rate than American firms. And so this digital standards adoption and this idea of why walking is so important is because the Chinese are really interested in creating the digital infrastructure and the financing for that infrastructure, which is telecommunications equipment, surveillance systems, and then smart cities platforms. What we once used in Washington is smart cities is being exploited by the Chinese when we're thinking about when we thought about smart cities we were looking at infrastructure investments of water use and for example, highways and roadways using lights so that you didn't have to stop as so frequently when you're traveling or ensuring that water production or garbage and sanitation systems were controlled and also within the like metro and metro systems. And I think there's a clear necessity for thinking about the digital silk road if the Chinese firms are being used. Now Mexico City just recently applied a London style CTC cameras for its vigilance. And so think who's producing those CTC cameras and how they're being evaluated. And if you want it to be similar types of I know that the London system, for example, they were British were looking at G5 and G4, G5 and which networks could be used in what systems and they ultimately decided that they didn't want Chinese investments in the UK. So it's a similar scenario, Mexico's not only buying electric cars which are much cheaper and even though their radius maybe is not as far for electric vehicles. A lot of taxis and Uber drivers are currently using Chinese BYD or other firms and they can do their job cheaper and faster. So this is just one area which you can see in these investments. I'm sure that HickBision and other Chinese companies are eager to bid on Mexico City's camera technology. So we will have to see how that plays out and if perhaps we'll have you back I'd eat to talk to our listeners about any final decision that the CDMX government makes. You mentioned in your previous response the USMCA, the role of the trade agreement. So I want to go to a couple questions on that specifically but perhaps we start by asking you how Chinese firms and Chinese investment in Mexico is testing some of the boundaries of USMCA in terms of rules of origin, state of an enterprise, labor, digital trade. You hear a lot of conversation about this in Washington these days and frankly the role that China's role in Mexico will play in the overall revision or renegotiation process in 2026. Right so I think the relevance of rules of origin is mostly important and specifically the objectives under USMCA is to ensure that North America content is produced of autos, electronics and other manufacturing products are made within the regional areas. And you can see this in broader economic literature. Daddy Roderick just wrote a book about the necessity to re-regionalize and this is for not just security but it's also sustainability. We see that after the most pandemic supply and she needs to be closer more local but also the roles of origin thinking about how the Chinese firms are setting these boundaries. We're thinking about the final assembly. So where is the final assembly? And this is a little bit of what has happened in the last few months with the federal government in Mexico setting up new export controls of products. So for example tennis shoes was the big topic of late to which part of if the soul is assembled in China and then brought to Mexico and sold does that mean it's a Mexican product or is it a Chinese product that's renamed and the implications for this is the backdoor into the US markets. So and this is not just a Chinese phenomenon this is also South Korea and other industries producers of how they're selling and producing products. So the second kind of important area in chapter within USMCA is a state-owned enterprise and state-owned enterprises have limited preferential treatment and ensure competition is neutrality. State-owned enterprise and typically within the Mexican or just a lot of American context are any kind of natural monopoly natural monopoly at least being electric companies like energy specifically is what I'm thinking electricity but we can also think of other state-owned enterprises like banking and financial and sometimes what the Chinese do with their state-owned enterprises is they can either leverage financing through them or they can also bundle infrastructure investments. So I'm thinking right now the Chinese development bank or the XM export import bank where you can deploy resources. So really we don't have clear guidance on how state-owned enterprises should be governed. There was a centralization and decentralization reforms of state-owned enterprises from the 1990s to today and we know they have to be private public sector partnerships that govern state-owned enterprises but I think this is a curious area and has very huge implications for how investment decisions of not just rules of origin but also how to manage and the different types of capital structures we want to maintain and continue being Western approach versus an Eastern approach. Obviously labor standards and guarantees of labor this is going to be much more problem and relevant for future USMCA in terms of guaranteeing labor rights collective bargaining and union protections. The Mexico government and the previous Alamo government were very strong working with the Biden administration thinking about labor standards and this has set US Mexico apart for a long time is that there was much stronger role for unions especially education unions in historical and political economy approach of Mexico and I think what sets when NAFTA was created was the kind of deregulation of some of these not the labor standards but the negotiations of different labor groups which there's a high concentration of labor standards and avoiding strong unions. So how to have this strong productivity with industry, specifically industry and manufacturing industries without derailing the role that unions have played in long term I think it's going to be really important for a Trump administration re-negotiations of USMCA and I think there's implications of non-compliance disputes and a potential for a perception of labor dumping and I think this is something that needs to be thought through and I encourage others to do this. This isn't what my research is about but I think this is a really important area. Another part of USMCA that is the digital trade and it's not just about protection of data flows and IP rights and cyber security but I think we need to think about how how it has installed in ZTE networks and as I was mentioning earlier the safe cities and cities and how technology is guiding city governance and this needs to be thought up not just of there might be regulatory asymmetry and being some cities might have more controls over others. Mexico City for example as we mentioned isn't engaging in the CTC cameras but there might be other towns that have less technology. technology and who's using that technology and who's controlling the technology is equally important. So there might be security loopholes inside the block of US Mexico of Canada. And then finally, important is obviously property rights and legal enforcement and some things. I think we can, as I mentioned earlier, the NAFTA was to create a homogeneous legal framework for US-Mexico-Canada relations so we can ensure that strengthen the rule of law and contract enforcement and encouraging transparency. Transparency in the Mexico system has clawed back and is part of the federal government. And so there's because of the elimination of autonomous agencies. But even with the autonomous agency, there's still a government agency called Good Governance. The anti-corruption and Good Governance. The office is located in Sujintis. And it's an important agency that ensures that there's transparent government. But what we don't see much in Mexico is external controls. So autonomous agencies, autonomous organizations, so things like credit-reading agencies are going to be much more important, not just for state and local governments, but also credit-reading agencies for project finance. So external and auditing systems, auditing that's non-governmental, Anderson's and the auditing agencies out there that would have a lot more ability to have external controls. Internal controls within the Mexican system, the Mexican auditing supreme auditing system follows the international auditing organization. But I think it's important to have independent that's outside of government to ensure that those are rules are in place. Even before we get into contract enforcement and questions, finally, there might be exploitation of permits, land use, and customs approaches. This is clearly where actually perceptions of corruption exist is because you might have national standards, but the state and local standards might not be at the same level. For example, just private public partnerships at the national level, even if there's some guidance, each state government has to create their own secondary laws for public-private partnerships. And what we see is I could see in the future a potential for more exploitation when secondary laws of private public partnerships are not created by local law. So even with the new legal framework that has been created by the Shambam administration, there still needs to be a continuation of strengthening legal structures and ensuring that local partners are abiding by the rules-based system. So even if there is an electoral process for electing mayors and judges, there is still laws on the books and those laws on the books need to be followed. So there needs to be a continued practice of ensuring that these permits and land use customs, the abilities that the local level are created and enforced. And those kind of enforcement rule of order and enforcement needs to continue because there might be, if we don't in the US, if we don't continue to strengthen these relationships, you can see a weakening of credibility of the USMCA and that might fuel disputes and mistrust. And I think that if we want credible partners within our regional area of Canada, the United States and Mexico, we need to ensure that those rules of order maintaining continue. Thanks, Heidi. I would just note for listeners that the issue of transshipment is absolutely critical. We've seen in the agreements that the Trump administration has signed so far, very strict rules on transshipment. For example, I look at the Vietnam agreement and see that the tariff rate for goods that are suspected of transshipment upwards of 40%. Now, how we define transshipment, how we define backdoors for Chinese investment is of course very, very important and the devil is often in the details, but I would point our listeners in the direction of the previous agreements that the administration has struck having very high barriers for transshipment indicating that transshipment will be a very strong focus of theirs in the USMCA re-negotiation. Heidi, your mention of future research and potential areas to deepen some of this work leads me to my final question to close out this podcast, which is essentially where you think some of this research should go. You've done a lot of research in this area. You've used Karni's framework to come upon some very interesting conclusions. What areas related to China's presence in Mexico still require deeper investigation from your point of view? Where should future research efforts be focused? Yeah, so this is exactly where I want to move with my research is the game about the subnational variation. So why states like O'Leon, where supply chain hubs are different than plug-line bear crews that have more infrastructure investments and digital projects from the Chinese and how these local politics might shape the Chinese investment outcomes. Also the better understanding of transparency and governance, I need to better understand contracts financing terms specifically and then potential dispute resolution. I think this is very critical the way in which the Chinese dispute resolution is much different than a contract arbitration in the United States for example. The Chinese are much more one-to-one based a face whereas we in America or Western values are much more what's on paper and I think this potentially could create some national deals that are opaque and it's critical to understand the governance approach. How does a Western approach deal with a more trust-based system that's not on paper? So this is a dramatically different approach of how we deal with these things. I think in terms of digital standards and diffusion, tracking hallways, ZTEs, infrastructure and safe city systems. So I think continued research on e-governance and how smart cities work and accessing what can Mexico do to de-risk if the U.S. pushes for an alternative. So how does if U.S. MCA cracks and doesn't continue in the future? What can Mexico do to protect themselves? Right? In terms of having its data being used. Interesting enough, I think the data rules of Mexico has copied the European Union much more closely than the United States in terms of managing its data because of the national voting system when the Mexican government created the national voting system. They had national cards of voters and so there was much more of a protectionist. There was a national data system that is set towards the United States. We have multiple data sets that aren't necessarily always intertwined. The Mexican system had to confront with the issue of identity and identity have to much quicker. And so what happens and how those de-risking effects can happen? I think it's also really important to do supply chain mapping maybe. The arm level tracing of how Chinese inputs into Mexican exports with these guidance and the rules and how these edges of investments are happening and then the underlying security risks of Chinese presence. I know the Rodan group has hypotheses of, you know, maybe this is controlling U.N. and the artificial positioning of the U.N. is 8 to 1 to the U.S. dollar and there's a suggestion that the Chinese are offshoring U.N. and buying dollars using the fentanyl market so it's not really about the fentanyl market. It's really about the dollar market. I don't know if that's true or not but I'd like to better understand maybe there's a market politics involved. How dollars are being bought by the Chinese? I don't know maybe maybe this. I don't know. Some primary interviews would be really helpful to understand that. And explicitly, you know, explore where the Chinese firms are indirectly helping with and illicit trade networks. There's kind of this assumption in Washington that there is illicit trade networks and I'm not sure if that's true. I think that it might be but without clear data we can use official statistics to understand but we also should do some primary interviews to see who's talking to whom and how that's happening. Heidi Jane Smith, professor of economics at La Universidad, Ibeiro-Macona in Mexico City. Thanks so much for joining us on 35 West. We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Great, thank you so much. For you, thank you for joining. Stay tuned for the next episode of 35 West.