During his recent November 22-23 visit to Chile, his third to Latin America in the three years since taking China's top office, President Xi Jinping indicated the volume of trade between China and Latin America has increased 20-fold in the past decade, reaching US$236.5 billion in 2015.

China is also now the second largest trading partner and third largest investment source in Latin America, while Latin America is China's 7th largest trading partner.

But it's also based on historical precedents hardly known by the press and thus never mentioned in what is reported about the growing Sino-Latin American ties today on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

In Chile, Xi also addressed the first China-Latin America Media Summit, where he indicated China wishes to embrace the Latin American and Caribbean media in a new initiative to take coverage of China-Latin American ties to the next fitting level - one of cooperation in communication for mutual benefit of all sides.

The Santiago Summit discussed the various practical ways that the two sides can overcome identified weaknesses and strengthen the basis and platforms for future cooperation. Both sides also agreed to take fresh and new approaches to coverage by identifying topics that will enable the peoples on all sides to better know and understand each other.

One area that was not mentioned, but which deserves, if not requires, some more attention is how and when the two regions first met - specifically, when China first encountered Latin America.

Before Columbus

Documents and maps on hand indicate that the Chinese passed through Latin America and the Caribbean (LA&C) much earlier than the Europeans. They show that the Chinese arrived in The Americas in 1421, seven decades before Christopher Columbus.

Liu Gang, a Chinese corporate lawyer, has for 15 years been showing around a 1763 map copied from an earlier one dated 1421. The inscription by the author who owned it said it was "a sketch of the world made during the sixteenth year of the reign of Yong of the Ming Dynasty (1418)."

Liu's map is the first of its time to show the earth as round. Its main features of the continents are detailed with near-accurate precision. He thus confidently told the Chinese press in 2005: "This map proves that Zheng He (1371-1433), commander of the Ming fleet, discovered America, the North Pole and the South Pole, and sailed around the world before 1418."

Liu's claims did not fall on deaf ears.

In 2005, Liu was bolstered in his claim after he read a book entitled "1421 - The Year China Discovered the World" by Gavin Menzies, and from its contents he confirmed his conviction that his map is the real deal.

In his book, launched two years earlier in 2003, Menzies, a former British Royal Navy submarine captain and an astrologer with a world of experience crossing the said oceans by the stars, provides stunning evidence that Chinese navigators indeed landed in The Americas in 1421, while circumnavigating the world.

Like Liu, Menzies also has an earlier map of the world; his from Venice and dated 1424, showing geographical data, including islands, territories and profiles of the eastern American coasts.

Based on the maps and his long years of research, Menzies' thesis is that Zheng He's fleet crossed into the Atlantic Ocean from the Horn of Africa and split in two: one sent to The Antilles and the other crossed the Magellan Strait to explore the western coast of The Americas.

600 Years Later…

In 2006, 500 years after Columbus died, the maps and documents in Liu and Menzies' hands revealed the distinct possibility that it was not the Italian explorer, or his European successors, who led the expeditions that drew the earliest maps of the world.

The Chinese back then were interested in exploring new lands. Zheng He had been ordered by the imperial rulers to "travel to the end of the earth and back." They came, they saw, they landed, drew maps - and they moved on. The later Europeans, however, forcibly destroyed the advanced civilizations they met and converted native people and cultures into their own images and likeness.

For five centuries, the Europeans transformed the "new world" into fountains of fortune to feed and build their empires. Through the genocide of millions of native people, they made way for slavery and indenture involving Africans and Indians, followed by colonialism and neo-colonialism.

But 500 years after their first encounter, China and The Americas have again re-connected, and in a very big way.

What is to be done?

The media in China, Latin America and The Caribbean can use the next five years leading to the 600th anniversary of China's first encounter with The Americas (in 2021) to help the rest of the world learn more about what it has not known for close to six centuries.

Menzies and Liu have developed a joint Media Plan of Action that has already drawn the attention of thousands of Chinese, European and Latin American counterpart naval historians, cartographers and astrologers, researchers and archivists.

China, Latin America and the Caribbean must start this necessary campaign, between now and 2021, to ensure, for the benefit of the whole world, the telling of the whole truth of 1421.

Earl Bousquet is editor-at-large of The Diplomatic Courier and president of the Saint Lucia-China Friendship Association. He is also a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://china.org.cn/opinion/earlbousquet.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.