As the Peruvian government has pushed forward with pro-export economic policies and China has sought to tap into Peru’s natural resource wealth, the relationship between the two countries has grown. When Lima started privatizing mining companies in the early 1990s, Shougang was one of the first companies to invest in the market, and the two countries signed a bilateral free trade pact in 2009. The relationship shows no sign of abating. After an April 2013 meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Peru’s President Ollanta Humala said, “For us, China is today a major trading partner and we believe that, as the events are developing, Peru may be the primary center of Chinese investment in Latin America.” Xi Jinping was no less effusive, saying that upcoming meetings between the two leaders “will give a major boost to the strategic partnership between China and Peru.”

However, slowing Chinese manufacturing activity, combined with rising discontent among Peruvian indigenous groups, may threaten the China-Peru investment boom. Lima recently announced that the country’s economy grew at 5 percent in May, well below Peru’s average rate of growth over the last decade, a drop caused by cooling mineral exports to China, which is experiencing a slowdown of its own. Between April and June 2013, China’s year-on-year GDP growth dipped to 7.5 percent, down from 7.7 percent for the period between January and Marc, and in July, China’s manufacturing growth rate fell to an 11 month low due to weak export demand from the U.S. and Europe. The economy is expected to cool further by the year’s end, a trend that will have a ripple effect on Peru.

In addition to problems caused by the economic slowdown, a new phenomenon is now testing the China-Peru relationship: anti-mining projects led by rural residents and indigenous groups.

Alana Tummino, a Latin America researcher from the Americas Society, told me that “Many of Peru’s mines are located in poor areas often close to indigenous communities, and the number of social conflicts in Peru has risen drastically in the past few years involving mining concessions and investment.”

Slowing growth in Peru could force the government to reduce the budget for social spending and pressure President Humala to pay more attention to the protesters’ demands. In 2011, Lima created a new law adhering to the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, a legally binding international statue that gives indigenous communities a voice in approving extractive projects that affect their communities. And this May, after several years of heated demonstrations against mining projects, Peru’s government passed a new “Prior Consultation” law that gives certain indigenous groups the right to a non-binding vote of approval on any project that affects their communities. More symbolically President Humala also attended a ceremony in an isolated Amazon town where 33 people died in protests in 2009. Nevertheless, protests by indigenous groups still present a serious, disruptive risk to mining projects.