Chinese-owned businesses have expanded rapidly across the Dominican Republic in recent years, opening large stores in the country's main provinces that offer a wide range of products at competitive prices and have outpaced much of the local competition, according to an analysis by economist Tomás D. Guzmán Hernández published in Diario Libre.
The growth has stirred resentment among Dominican merchants, prompting investigations into whether the businesses are properly paying taxes and holding valid operating permits, even though they function within a legal system of free competition, Guzmán Hernández wrote. He said the expansion has also led the United States to watch more closely how China's cooperation and diplomatic relations develop in the region.
China's Rise Since the 1978 Opening
China's economy has grown at a dramatic pace since 1978, when Beijing launched its "reform and opening" strategy, becoming the world's second-largest economy, its leading exporter, and a major investor across Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia, according to the analysis. For much of that period, China's real gross domestic product grew at close to 10% a year, meaning the economy doubled roughly every seven or eight years and national income multiplied sixteen-fold, a pace unmatched among major economies in a single generation. The gains reached a fifth of the world's population, lifting several hundred million people out of poverty.
China's share of world trade has multiplied tenfold over the past three decades to around 9%, while its share of global GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, has risen from under 3% to close to 13%, Guzmán Hernández wrote. The country now accounts for almost a tenth of global demand for raw materials and more than a tenth of world exports of medium- and high-technology manufactured goods, and is the leading global supplier of consumer electronics such as mobile phones.
China and the United States Compared
China remains the world's second-largest economy in nominal terms, behind the United States, with the gap widening in current-dollar terms in recent years due to a strong dollar and a Chinese slowdown after the pandemic, according to the analysis, which cited International Monetary Fund and World Bank figures. Measured in purchasing power parity, the metric most economists use to compare the real size of economies, China overtook the United States as the world's largest economy in the middle of the last decade, driven by its industrial output and a population more than four times that of the United States.
Trade With Latin America and the Caribbean
Trade between China and Latin America and the Caribbean barely exceeded $14 billion in 2000 and multiplied 35-fold over the next two decades to near $500 billion, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). China is now the region's second-largest trading partner overall, behind the United States, and the top partner for South America, ahead of the European Union. Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia account for more than 89% of the region's exports to China, driven by soybeans, copper, iron ore, oil, lithium, beef and fruit. In the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has become China's leading trading partner since the two countries established diplomatic relations on May 1, 2018.
A Widening Trade Deficit
Trade between the Dominican Republic and China has grown steadily over the past decade but remains heavily unbalanced: Dominican imports from China have more than doubled, while exports to China remain modest, producing a growing trade deficit, the analysis said. The Dominican Republic's main exports to China are copper minerals and concentrates, ferronickel, unstemmed tobacco, medical instruments and zinc minerals. From China, the country imports machinery, smartphones, vehicles, construction materials and a wide range of consumer manufactured goods. By comparison, the United States remains the Dominican Republic's more balanced and largest overall trading partner, aided by the free-trade-zone regime and the DR-CAFTA agreement.
Megastores in Dominican Provinces
Chinese commercial activity in the country is no longer limited to the small corner stores, jewelry shops and fried-chicken outlets, known locally as "pica pollos," that once defined it. Today it mostly consists of large stores, some exceeding 20,000 square meters, combining hardware, appliances, furniture, clothing, toys and technology under one roof and competing simultaneously with multiple specialized Dominican businesses.
According to the Dominican tax agency, the DGII, 2,070 Chinese-capital companies registered in the country between 2016 and 2026, of which 1,300 remain active and 770 are inactive. Some 265 new companies registered in 2025 alone, and another 132 so far in 2026. Trade groups including the Santiago Association of Merchants and Industrialists (ACIS) have called the expansion a threat to local commerce and cited unfair competition, while other merchants say Chinese investment has kept historic businesses from shutting down and revived depressed commercial areas.
Economic and Social Effects
China has become an essential partner for much of Latin America, the top buyer of exports from Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and a significant financier of energy, port and transport infrastructure through lenders such as the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, Guzmán Hernández wrote. This has allowed several countries to diversify their export markets beyond the United States and Europe and has lowered the cost of consumer goods, technology and machinery.
He noted, however, that the trade pattern largely reproduces a traditional division of labor, with Latin America exporting low-value raw materials and importing medium- and high-technology manufactured goods, which limits local industrial development and keeps the region dependent on commodity prices. In the Dominican Republic's case, this has produced a structural and growing trade deficit.
The arrival of Chinese merchants and workers in intermediate cities such as Santiago, La Vega, San Francisco de Macorís, Bonao and Puerto Plata has transformed the urban landscape and labor dynamics in those areas, according to the analysis. It has created direct and indirect jobs, boosted commercial rents and reopened shuttered businesses, but has also revived tensions with small and medium-sized Dominican business owners, who say they face unequal conditions on financing, purchasing scale and, in some cases, tax and immigration compliance. Across the region, Chinese migration to Latin America, aided by established commercial and family networks, has produced increasingly visible communities with their own commercial, trade and cultural circuits, similar to earlier waves of Asian migration, Guzmán Hernández wrote.
He concluded that the challenge for Latin American countries, and the Dominican Republic in particular, is not to halt China's presence, which operates under free-competition rules, but to design public policies that balance the trade deficit, strengthen domestic export capacity, and guarantee fair fiscal and immigration conditions for local and foreign businesses alike.
