Officials’ barbs come at a precarious time for Latin American country
Bryan Harris and Andres Schipani in São Paulo
Financial Times, APRIL 21 2020
The Chinese embassy in Brasília has adopted an unorthodox approach to social media diplomacy: its envoys have been publicising their meetings not with Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, but with some of his political rivals, including the health minister he recently sacked.
Since last month, the embassy has been waging a social media war with Mr Bolsonaro after some of his closest aides, including his influential son Eduardo Bolsonaro, publicly blamed China for the global spread of coronavirus.
The spat has triggered concerns about Brazil’s economic relationship with China, its largest trading partner, as the Latin American country enters a recession, and as it seeks to procure critical medical supplies for the fight against Covid-19.
Last week, anti-China banners with the face of President Xi Jinping reading “China Lied, People Died” and “China Virus” popped up in Brasília. “It has already damaged relations,” said a senior diplomat.“The Chinese have already voiced concerns and signalled that if [tensions] continue the damage could be more tangible. These messages have already been sent.”
The stand off between the envoys and Mr Bolsonaro’s inner circle began last month when Eduardo Bolsonaro — a federal lawmaker and top foreign policy adviser — said in a tweet that the spread of the virus was “China’s fault”. The Chinese embassy in Brasília countered swiftly, saying that “your words are extremely irresponsible and sound familiar”, in reference to similar assertions about the virus’s origin made by US president Donald Trump, a close ally of the Bolsonaro administration.
It added that Eduardo Bolsonaro may have caught a “mental virus that is infecting” Brazil-China relations while he and his father were visiting Mr Trump in Florida last month. Yang Wanming, China’s ambassador to Brazil, then intervened, sharing an embassy post that accused the younger Bolsonaro of being “without international vision or common sense”.
In a note, Ernesto Araújo, Brazilian foreign minister, expressed the government’s dissatisfaction with Mr Yang’s behaviour. A source close to the Bolsonaro family called the ambassador’s reaction “virulent [and] over the top”.
Abraham Weintraub, Brazil’s education minister and a close Bolsonaro ally, replied by suggesting China might gain from the coronavirus in a “plan for world domination”. In the tweet, which was later removed, the minister referenced a Brazilian cartoon character with a speech impediment, replacing all the letter Rs with Ls in an attempt to mock Chinese phonetics.
The move was decried by the embassy as racist. “That is not the view of the political establishment nor that of the business elite,” said a senior Brazilian diplomat.
Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, said: “The decision to attack China right now is remarkably risky considering that Brazil may soon come to depend on Chinese medical equipment during the height of the pandemic. Yet it plays well with Bolsonaro’s most radical supporters, many of whom believe that the pandemic is a communist plot to weaken the west.”
Concerns about medical supplies were laid bare earlier this month by Brazil’s now-sacked health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who said the country would need to rely on domestically produced ventilators after orders from China fell through. “Practically all our purchases of equipment in China are not being approved,” he said. Days earlier, a shipment of ventilators from an unnamed Chinese vendor destined for Brazil’s north-east was stopped in Miami after the supplier apparently received a higher bid.
The president recently sacked health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta after they clashed over how to handle the coronavirus outbreak.
Brazil’s relationship with China has been strained in the recent past by repeated anti-China comments from the president. “The worst of all is that this could plant a seed of distrust,” said a Brazilian trade official. “The Chinese are very symbolic. They are extremely sensitive to this type of demonstration, especially as a nationalist sentiment grows in China as a result of the epidemic.
This can create a negative image of Brazil as a supplier of products to China.” With a combined population of more than 1.6bn people, the trade relationship between Brazil and China is among the world’s most important, particularly at a time of tensions between Beijing and Washington.
In the past year, Mr Bolsonaro and President Xi Jinping exchanged official visits. China has been a key source of investment into Brazilian infrastructure, while Brazil remains an important supplier of soyabeans, iron ore and meat to the world’s second-largest economy. For every $1 of exports to the US, Brazil exports roughly $3 to China.
While Brazil’s exports to the US fell more than 15 per cent in the first quarter of the year, exports to China grew almost 5 per cent in the same period versus the previous year. “China’s harsh response [on social media] shows that it may have an interest in escalating the conflict, which may allow China to renegotiate the terms of the relationship,” said Prof Stuenkel. “When Bolsonaro is calling Xi Jinping to ask for forgiveness for his wayward son, he can hardly say no to a Chinese request to review the price of soy it is buying from Brazil.”
© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2020
