This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Evangelist of the U.S. Army

of War College, whose new paper about Mexico and China is revelatory to me. Not only the

long-standing relationship between Mexico City and Beijing, reaching back to when Mao

in the closing years of his life, was welcoming to what appeared at the time to be the U.S.

But it included Mexico. We now learn more than 50 years later. However, today all important

extraction services, oil and gas, Mexico's gems, Pemax, and mining, especially the new

discoveries of lithium, which is critical to the future of our electric vehicles. Professor,

there's a tale of two opportunities here. Oil and gas, Mexico says not yet, not so much.

On the other hand, the only non-state lithium mine, or in Mexico, you report, is China. So is

there an opinion in Mexico City that reluctance about energy, but the willingness about a new,

what they call a white gold? Well, John, in the extractive sector is like other parts

of the Mexico-China relationship. There are different competing and often, you know, cross-cutting

tendencies. And so in oil, for example, under the prior administration of Enrique Peñaneta,

when the oil sector in Mexico was substantially open to outside investment, the Chinese were

one seeking to rush in. They initially had offered a big loan to Pemax, about a $2.4

billion loan, to basically open up the sector to their companies. Not unlike what happened

in Brazil in 2009, when the Chinese offered a $10 billion loan to then the president,

Lulitz Silva. But although that was turned down, when there was a big oil auction in Mexico in 2016,

one of the major Chinese national oil companies, Sinook, came in. It was seen as having really overbid

to get a piece of that oil in the Perdido basin. Although subsequently, that oil block has not

turned out for Sinook as lucrative as they had thought. But, you know, the process continues in oil,

a Chinese company out of Cijong just signed a very large liquid national gas purchase agreement

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