China to Rubio: Hands Off Chancay. Peru Joins Trump’s Security Shield Anyway.

The Briefing

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio questioned China-linked investments tied to the Chancay port in an opinion column published Tuesday, September 8, in El Comercio and other regional outlets; China’s embassy in Lima answered within hours.
• Peru-China trade hit $38.1 billion between January and July 2026, up 35.4% year over year, according to the Peruvian-Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
• President Keiko Fujimori confirmed Peru’s entry into the Shield of the Americas during Rubio’s September 10 visit to Lima, while Cosco Shipping’s fight over rate oversight at Chancay remains unresolved before the Constitutional Court.

An opinion column was enough to reopen an old fight. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly questioned Beijing-linked projects on Peruvian soil just two days before landing in Lima, and China’s embassy fired back before he even touched down. Behind the exchange sits something more concrete: control over the Chancay megaport, the project that best symbolizes Beijing’s economic weight in South America, arriving just as Lima signs a security pact with Washington without letting go of its top trading partner.

The column that lit the fuse

Everything started on Tuesday, September 8, when Rubio published a column in El Comercio and in outlets across Colombia and Ecuador, the other stops on his regional tour. In it, the top U.S. diplomat argued that initiatives tied to Xi Jinping’s government sidestep Peruvian regulations and, in his own words, “threaten transparency and data security.” Without naming it directly, the line pointed to the legal fight between Cosco Shipping — the Chinese state shipping line that owns Chancay — and the Peruvian government, which is resisting the company’s push to escape rate oversight from regulator Ositrán.

Beijing fires back, no filter

China’s reply came over social media, and it didn’t hold back. The Lima embassy said its roughly $30 billion investment portfolio operates transparently and within Peruvian law, and accused Washington of a double standard on transparency. The core message was blunt: the Western Hemisphere “is nobody’s backyard.” The mission also noted that China doesn’t require visas for Peruvian tourists, contrasting that with what it described as tougher U.S. immigration screening.

Behind the diplomatic standoff sits a trade relationship that keeps expanding. Between January and July, bilateral trade reached $38.1 billion, up 35.4% from a year earlier. Peruvian exports to China climbed 37.5% and now make up 38.3% of everything Peru sells the world, driven largely by copper and gold. In the first half of the year, that growth ran even hotter — 38.7%, according to the same exporters’ group — while Peru’s sales to the United States advanced at a noticeably slower clip.

A port stuck in court

Neither Rubio’s column nor China’s rebuttal settles the real question: who sets Chancay’s rates. Cosco Shipping lost on appeal July 1, when a Lima constitutional chamber upheld Ositrán’s authority over the terminal. The company then took the fight to the Constitutional Court through a formal appeal, which was admitted in early August. Until that court rules as the final word, Peru’s regulator keeps its oversight powers over the port, built with roughly $1.3 billion in investment.

Peru’s balancing act between Washington and Beijing

By Thursday, September 10, already in Lima, Rubio met Fujimori at the presidential palace, closing out a three-day tour that also took him through Colombia and Ecuador. There, Fujimori formalized Peru’s entry into the anti-organized-crime coalition Trump launched from Florida in March, one Lima had already signaled interest in joining weeks earlier. Fujimori, who took office July 28, framed the pivot toward Washington as the start of “a new era in relations between Peru and the United States,” while insisting the country would keep its trade ties with Asia, Europe and the rest of the world. At the close of the meeting, Foreign Minister Carlos Espá presented Rubio with the Order of the Sun, one of Peru’s oldest honors. A few blocks away, in the historic center’s Plaza San Martín, dozens of protesters organized by left-wing groups rejected the Shield of the Americas alliance, calling it a threat to national sovereignty.

What’s still unresolved

Neither the Chancay dispute nor the port’s rate-setting future was settled by the visit. Also left hanging is another sensitive front for Washington: Lima’s power grid, where Chinese state-owned firms now control nearly the entire distribution market after the sale of Enel’s assets to China Southern Power Grid. What is clear is that Lima is attempting something unusual in the region: deepening its security alliance with the United States without giving up its biggest trading partner, which remains, by a wide margin, China.