1638. “Brazil-China interactions in historical perspective: an uneven relationship” (Brasília, 5 dezembro 2025, 22 p.) Article to a special issue of the Macau Journal of Brazilian Studies. Publicado in Macau Journal of Brazilian Studies (Macau Association for Brazilian Studies, Macau, China, vol. 9, issue 1, April 2026; ISSN: 2523-661X; p. 1-17; link: https://aebm.mo/en/list-44/254 ; pdf: https://aebm.mo/en/uploads/ueditor/file/20260422/1776836687585222.pdf ). Relação de Originais n. 5129.
Brazil-China interactions in historical perspective: an uneven relationship
Paulo Roberto de Almeida, diplomat, professor.
Article to a special issue of Macau Journal of Brazilian Studies.
Publicado in Macau Journal of Brazilian Studies (Macau Association for Brazilian Studies, Macau, China, vol. 9, issue 1, April 2026; ISSN: 2523-661X; p. 1-17; link: https://aebm.mo/en/list-44/254 ; pdf: https://aebm.mo/en/uploads/ueditor/file/20260422/1776836687585222.pdf). Relação de Originais n. 5129.
Abstract: This historical and interpretative essay aims to evaluate bilateral relationship, in its various dimensions, with positive accomplishments for both countries, especially in the economic area (trade and investments), notwithstanding the asymmetry of their interactions in almost all the economic, political, diplomatic and geopolitical domains. The focus is concentrated in the differing perspectives of their relationship during the last half century, with a pragmatic vision exhibited from the Chinese side, and a more optimistic, and idealist posture, emanating from the Brazilian side during the mandates of the Workers Party, under Lula. The implications of the BRICS dimension level, but also at the bilateral context, are examined, as well as the entrenched nationalism of economic and diplomatic elites.
Key-words: Brazil; China; strategic partnership; asymmetric components of the relationship.
Historical Background
The history of the uneven relationship between Brazil and China has few points in common during most of 19th and 20th centuries, albeit exhibiting some parallel, while differing, paths during the trajectory of the Communist movements in both countries, arriving at a diverging but complementary new courses starting in the last years of the 20th century and flourishing economically during the two first and half decades of the 21st century. The following explanatory and interpretative essay will follow this uneven relationship between the two major countries of South America and of Asia-Pacific, respectively, with the objective of offering a broad view of this century-long interaction, adopting a Weberian-style approach, rather than a typical Political Science analysis.
Emerging independent Brazil was still building its centralized State at the beginning of the 19th century when the declining Chinese Empire was starting a period of fractional struggles and of frailty of the centrality of its governing architecture, just before the acceleration process of foreign challenges to its independence and State sovereignty. There were almost no contacts between the two governments and countries, besides some commercial exchanges that still reflected ancient navigation routes and links from the Vasco da Gama era of European expansion towards African and Asian efforts of conquest (almost impossible in the case of such a vast Empire and functional State as the Qing dynasty). China was trying to protect its Kingdom and empire possessions from Europe’s ‘Barbarians’, while, at the same time, the ruling class of slave owners in Brazil struggled against the British intrusions in the country’s internal affairs. Despite early recommendations of the ‘founding Fathers’ for a quick closure of the African human ‘imports’ and a delayed end to the slave system, ruling elites dismissed those proposals outright, because of the absolute necessity of maintaining both the slave traffic and the slavery-based economic regime, as they were the basis of the already dynamic centre of Brazil’s economy, whilst the South American country was becoming the biggest coffee exporter in the world for more than a century.
No bilateral diplomatic relations of any kind existed between the two ‘empires’, but in the middle of the second half of 19th century Brazilian diplomats and representatives of the slave owners of the coffee producing regions (São Paulo at the forefront of the essays) started to ruminate on the idea of establishing not only formal diplomatic links, but also trying to negotiate a bilateral treaty aimed at, besides ‘normal affairs’, attracting thousands of Chinese collies to work at the coffee producing farms. They were destined to replace the African slavery system, already in the last years of its fatal demise against the Abolitionists struggle and external pressures from developed industrial powers, Great Britain at the forefront of those ‘humanitarian’ efforts.
Imperial China refused, of course, this kind of ‘business’, already worried by the way that Chinese labourers were being mistreated in the United States, but formal diplomatic relations were established between the two empires – with the 1881 Tien-Tsin treaty, including some extraterritoriality provisions, similar to the existing capitulation system –, but without any dispatch of ‘agricultural immigrants’ to Brazil. A young diplomat, Henrique Lisboa, who was in the mission, published an interesting book about the country and its inhabitants, in the same year, 1888, as the slave system was abolished in the Brazilian Empire, a year before the abolition of the monarchical system in Brazil, and its replacement by the republican United States of Brazil, as designed by its first Constitution (1891).
At the end of Great War, during the peace negotiations in Paris, the two young Republics were sidelined by the great powers concerning the main dispositions adopted in the framework of the League of Nations to regulate the post-war international relations. But a new kind of political movement arose from the 1917 Russian revolution and the founding of a Third (Communist) International, in 1918, under the guidance of Lenin himself. Many socialist parties began to split everywhere: 1922 was the year when Brazilian and Chinese Communist parties were founded, respectively in Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai, under a Bolshevik style and framework, that is, as national parties within the Comintern membership.
Both were almost immediately considered illegal, or at least inimical within the two Bourgeois regimes. Communism was the bête noire for the national political systems in both countries: CPC and BCP – for half a century known as ‘Partido Comunista do Brasil’, became, after Stalin times, just ‘Brazilian Communist Party’ – were strictly contained in their propaganda and affiliation. Incompetent supervisors sent from Moscow by the Secretariat of the Third International induced the two parties to try violent assaults against the governments of each country, China in 1927, Brazil in 1935, with disastrous consequences for them, also in terms of political perception at the national governing upper classes. Anticommunism became an official State policy in Brazil up to the Eighties, with important consequences even after that, as a vilification factor under the hands of rightist parties up to nowadays. In China also, Kuomintang and the CCP struggled against each other for the conquest of exclusive power, amidst a civil war and two destructive Japanese invasions: in 1931 in Manchuria, and in 1937 against the whole country, with horrendous consequences. At the end of the Second World War, Brazil had already elevated to the category of Embassy its diplomatic representation in China, according to the new status of great power conceded to the Republic of China, in the framework of the United Nations.
The hard path to mutual recognition
At the height of Cold War, Soviet Union and Maoist China were the two perceived most menacing dangers in the case of Brazil, after a century-long normal diplomatic relations between the three empires during the entire 19th century up to the beginning of the 20th. Czarist Russia preserved diplomatic relations with the Portuguese Kingdom, dispatched a diplomatic envoy to Rio de Janeiro when the court was transferred to Brazil, after the Napoleonic seizure of Portugal, and normal relations were maintained during most of the 19th century, and at the beginning of Brazilian Republic. But governments of Brazil cut short the diplomatic recognition of the Bolshevik regime and maintained a decades-long absence of any formal contacts during the first phase of the ‘Soviet Challenge do Brazil’ (Hilton, 1991). As regards China, despite mutual recognition, links and bilateral affairs were fragile, but Brazil maintained diplomatic envoys, mostly chargé d’affaires, before and after the turmoil of the Second World War. A young Brazilian diplomat, José Oswaldo de Meira Penna, served at the Brazilian legation in Nanjing, both before and after the Japanese occupation of the country, and published, in 1944, an interesting book: Shanghai: aspectos históricos da China moderna (1944), prefaced by the Brazilian minister of Foreign Affairs himself; Meira Penna was the last Brazilian representative in China just before the fall of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, and the dislocation of the Republic of China to Taiwan.
Cold war years were almost completely deprived of diplomatic relationship between Brazil and the two most important Communist countries in the post-war world: the two Brazilian Communist parties, the pro-Soviet (1922) and the pro-China (created in 1961, under the original name) were both illegal in Brazil’ political scenario. Notwithstanding, president Janio Quadros reestablished diplomatic relations with Soviet Union and some other European communist countries in 1961; at the same time, he sent a diplomatic and commercial mission to China, leaded by the Vice-president himself, João Goulart: he was received by Mao Tsetung, toured some provinces and signed a draft trade agreement, in order to restart normal bilateral affairs. A commercial and technical mission from the PRC was in Brazil in March 1964, preparing a trade fair, when the Armed Forces staged a coup, under the banner of ‘banning Communism from Brazil’. All nine Chinese officers, technician and journalists were arrested, tortured, and kept for an entire year in prison, before being expelled in a dishonoured manner by the new guardians of State; it was one of the most horrendous acts of savage repression directed against supposed ‘enemies of the State’, that remained as an unsolved case in the bilateral relations until recently.
Years of political and diplomatic hostility followed during the Sixties and Seventies, heightened by the pro-Chinese Communist Party attempt to install a ‘peasant guerrilla basis’ in the Amazonian jungle, countered by a brutal repression led by the Army against PCdoB militants (some of whom trained in a Chinese military academy during the 1960s). In 1971, still under the worst years of the military dictatorship, a Brazilian delegation at UNGA voted against the assumption of PRC in lieu and place of Republic of China as the legitimate representative of the Chinese people, and as a permanent member at the UNSC, maintaining the diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in the context of the Cold War. Meanwhile, despite the official paranoia, professional diplomats, working at the Brazilian Consulate in Hong Kong, prepared the hard job of convincing the generals to reconsider the negative posture.
Three years later, the presidency of the fourth Army president, Ernesto Geisel, and his Foreign Relation minister Azeredo da Silveira, in a decisive reversal of that policy, decided to recognize PRC as the sole representative of the Chinese people, and Taiwan as a province within PRC; preliminary approaches were made by Chinese high officials, and the whole process was submitted to the scrutiny of the National Security staff and military commanders in Brazil. The joint communiqué (August 15, 1974) proclaimed that the Government of Brazil ‘recognizes that PRC government is the sole legal Government of China’, and ‘took note’ of PRC’s ‘reaffirmation that Taiwan is an unalienable part’ of its territory. Notwithstanding the careful course of action taken by the Brazilian government, three years later the ministry of the Army attempted a ‘coup inside the coup’, to topple Geisel, under accusations of tolerance with the ‘communists’ working in the State, but also in its external relations (China, quick recognitions of the newly independent States emerging from the late Portugal’s colonialism). Ambassadors were exchanged and almost normal business started to develop between the two countries, but with few true initiatives in bilateral cooperation during the final years of the Brazilian military regime: still in 1985, commercial turnover was just a little higher than US$ 1,2 billion; only in the 21st century trade flows start to climb to upper levels, putting China in first place, and the Brazil’s first economic partner for more than a century, the U.S., in a progressively distant second place.
Ten years after the recognition, the last General-President, João Figueiredo, went on an official visit to China, in June 1984 (together with a travel to Japan): he met the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, with whom he strengthened the bilateral economic relationship, already within a sensible evolution of Brazil’s external policy; professional diplomacy was, by then, almost freely directed by the diplomatic staff, aiming at the resumption of the pre-1964 Brazilian ‘Independent Foreign Policy’, at least turning down the residual, almost disappearing, the official State policy of ‘anticommunism’ established after the failed 1935 Communist tentative takeover. At that time, at the end of the 1980s, coffee producers in Brazil were still hoping that some hundred million of the Chinese people could replace their old tea habit for a daily cup of a strong Brazilian coffee, a mirage that never entered in the mores of the Asian giant.
Brazil’s democratic New Republic meets a reemerging China
The ‘New Republic’, as the return to a democratic political regime was almost immediately called, meant that Brazil resumed some old acquaintances of the pre-1964 military coup, such as Cuba, after 21 years of diplomatic rupture (all Brazilian passports, during the whole dictatorship, were stamped: ‘not valid for Cuba’). Also, following the allowance of new parties, in 1979, at the end of the bipartisan political system imposed in 1965, President José Sarney (elected as vice-president, but replacing Tancredo Neves, dead before his inauguration) endorsed the legalization of the two Communist parties, the old, Soviet-linked PCB, and the new, ‘resurrected’, pro-Mao PCdoB. Being communist affiliated ceased to be a ‘public danger’, as it was the case from 1922 to 1945, and after 1947, when only two years of diplomatic recognition of Soviet Union was suddenly curtailed by the Conservative (ex-minister of War during the Vargas dictatorship) President (Marshall) Eurico Gaspar Dutra.
President Sarney, after receiving Prime-minister Zao Ziang in Brazil the preceding year, made an official visit to China in July 1988, with whom he decided to establish new cultural and economic cooperation agreements between both countries, among them, transportation, energy and remote sensing. In 1993, was the time of an official visit by President Jiang Zemin to Brazil’s Itamar Franco. One of the first State visits by the former minister of Foreign Affairs and then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in 1995, was made at the invitation of the same China’s president, Jiang Zemin: the CBERS project (China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite) was already in development in the spatial area, one of the fruits of Sarney’s initial push. For the first time, the concept of ‘strategic partnership’ was mentioned explicitly, but the trade figure barely attained US$ 1,5 billion, a very lower amount, despite the always promised potential.
In 2002, Brazilian candidate Lula da Silva won the presidential election, after four previous attempts: his victory was the debut of a fundamental change in both the external policy and the diplomacy of Brazil, as it represented the implementation of a new conceptual and operational lines of conduct for Brazil’s international relations, with the introduction of party connections in, up to then, an enclosed and tightly controlled policies by the diplomatic personnel. Emblematic of this shift to a new diplomatic fashion, was Lula’s decision, already in campaign, to accept an invitation by the Chinese Communist Party to visit China. This, as interpreted by the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), would signal the launching of a differing mode to conduct important new international connections for Brazil, according to socialist beliefs, both Party oriented and chosen personally by Lula (according to his old linkages to Cuba, during the dictatorship), still to be developed during his many mandates ahead.
Lula was received in Beijing almost as a head of State, even if the protocol-based PCC diplomacy restricted the character of his visit to a party level, between both parties; he was received by Wey Jiangxing, at that time one of the main directors of the Permanent Political Bureau of the CCP, with whom he discussed State policies, planning and the globalization process. In an article published by the PT’s bulletin just during the visit, Lula (or someone for him) wrote that the Chinese explained to them that they were practising a ‘market socialism’ system, but he personally took the ‘impression’ that they ‘were learning to make money with the capitalists, to expend it as socialists’. He also declared, in the same article and truly coinciding with his socialist beliefs, that, ‘even as the Chinese seems to accept a market economy, they certainly do not admit a society dominated by the market. The Chinese State has been participating in the actual stage of globalization but does not relinquish the guidance of planning, of the definition of priorities. That is, it does not allow that the market take the decision on behalf of the society.’
A new world opens to Brazil-China relationship, and Brazilian diplomacy
This first direct contact with Chinese leaders, at that point only at a party rank, was destined to powerfully influence future Brazilian diplomacy, both at a bilateral and international levels. It was only natural, then, that one of his first important foreign excursions, after assuming the presidency, was his decision to go in a State visit to China, in May 2004, accompanied by many ministers, governors, elected representatives and hundreds of entrepreneurs. That was the 30th anniversary of the 1974 diplomatic recognition of China, whose President, at the time, was Hu Jintao. Again, the ‘strategic partnership’, inaugurated by Fernando Henrique Cardoso during the 1990s, was at the centre of the discussions, both for bilateral initiatives and multilateral cooperation. Four principles were pointed as relevant: 1) mutual confidence, based on a dialogue on an equal footing; 2) increase of the economic and commercial exchanges, for reciprocal benefits; 3) promotion of international cooperation, with a focus in the coordination of negotiations; 4) interaction between both civil societies, to strengthen mutual knowledge.
Most important, at this visit there was an agreement to institutionalise a High-Level Sino-Brazilian Commission for Concertation and Cooperation, to be presided by the Brazilian Vice-President and by the Chinese Vice-Premier. An Entrepreneurial Brazil-China Council was also established on the occasion. Brazilian diplomacy reaffirmed its commitment with the ‘one China principle’ and agreed with the Chinese posture that Tibet and Taiwan are ‘inseparable parts of China’. Already at that occasion, the concept of a ‘international multipolar system’, together with the ‘democratization of the international relations’ were advanced as ‘fundamental factors’ to tackle menaces and challenges, globally and regionally, always through the peaceful solution of controversies, the respect of sovereign equality and the International Law.
As China had recently been accepted at the WTO (2001), both countries endorsed the importance of the new round of multilateral trade negotiations. At that time, after a ministerial meeting of Trade ministers in late 2003, Brazil was leading a short-lived G20 commercial group, even if their positions in agricultural trade were somewhat different. A Chinese request, not inserted in the joint communiqué, was that Brazil formally agree to accept China as a market economy, which Lula informally agreed to (probably unaware of the Gatt meaning of this concept), only to face, on his return, the open opposition of the whole entrepreneurial associations in Brazil; Chinese officials continued to raise this concern at many future meetings, to no avail from the Brazilian economic diplomacy. The communiqué contained, instead, a direct reference to the ‘need to improve the dialogue between Mercosur and China’, as well as to ‘undertake sound consultations about the free trade and other issues of mutual interest’, a possibility never put forward since then.
Also, almost simultaneously to the new developments being introduced in connection with the Brazilian external policy and its diplomacy, towards an explicit ‘South-South leaning’, and in the context of an appealing proposal from a financial institution economist, a new acronym, BRIC, started to gain growing attention and acceptance in the media. But what was just a market opportunity for portfolio investments by institutional funds in four dynamic emerging economies was politically diverted to serve as a new platform for diplomatic and political coordination among them: Brazil, Russia, China and India. The very active Brazilian diplomacy was already engaged, since the very beginning of Lula first mandate, in the IBSA initiative, a consultation group for three democratic developing countries, India, Brazil and South Africa.
Between 2004 and 2005, as a result from conversations at the margins of annual UN General Assemblies, the four minister of foreign affairs decided to materialise the BRIC concept; the formalisation of this new group was destined to, once more, profoundly change Brazil’s external policy and its diplomacy. This upgrade from an economic exercise, aiming just at financial, and separate, gains from possible investments by private venture capitalists, in four independent (between them) national economies, into a formal new group, endorsing diplomatic objectives at world level, has conceptual and factual learnings to be examined, because it is possibly the first time that long established States, exhibiting seasoned and strongly operated diplomatic staffs, decide to bow to an external suggestion, supported only by economic indicators, and go up and implement a new diplomatic venture popping out from a genius financial bottle, without (at first sight) any tangible great purpose, established from their own studies and policy planning reflections. Without prospecting the other three other countries objectives, for Brazil it was a personal decision by the President and his Foreign minister, seeing a political opportunity to link Brazil to three other important States, pointing to an ambitious new avenue of diplomatic realizations.
Extending from 2005 to 2006, a first version of the BRIC group was inaugurated at ministerial level, as a starting point to its summit meetings from 2009 onwards, developing successfully since then. It is important to emphasise that it was the first time, in the history of Brazilian diplomacy, since the beginning of the first Cold War, that Brazil, as a government, decided to link its decision-making process, at diplomatic level, to, not only one, but to two big powers, both exhibiting geopolitical ambitions and owning nuclear devices. Never since the signing of the Interamerican Assistance Treaty (1947), in Rio de Janeiro, already including the clause of collective security – which would serve as a conceptual basis for the 1949 Washington treaty founding NATO –, had Brazilian diplomacy conceded in this kind of alignment with any great power State. The decision to establish diplomatic linkages with three major partners, all of them nuclear powers and embedded in geopolitical scenarios very different from the political environment of the regional natural circumstance of Brazil, that is, South America, can be seen, in this sense, as a new challenge to its diplomacy, and even for the making of the agenda of its external policy.
During the first Cold War, economic and military primacy of the United States was indisputable, not only in the Western Hemisphere, but in the world. Brazil was submitted, with many other Western countries, to a kind of temporary ‘Americanisation’ of its domestic and external policies, in exchange for financial and military support and coordination at multilateral diplomatic entities. But the alignment was subject to a strict evaluation of the national interests at various levels, mostly in economic development cooperation, always to avoid or prevent entanglements at geopolitical level. The Brazilian government declined to the American suggestion to engage its Armed Forces in the Korean War, even if it was an action covered by a UN Security Council resolution, and also repelled another request to help the United States ‘fight against Communism in Vietnam’, even if it was a direct presidential new suggestion (by Lyndon Johnson), just after U.S. engagement with the Brazilian military in ousting the ‘Communist’ Brazilian President João Goulart, in 1964.
Conversely, Brazil was ready, in 1957, to integrate a peace-making mission created by another UNSC resolution after the Suez crisis, installing a ten-year-long encampment where is nowadays South Gaza, until the Six Days War between Israel and its Arab neighbours. In the same manner, the new military regime, consented to send troops to join the Interamerican Peace Force to quell the civil war in the Dominican Republic in 1965, but only after the OAS approved a multilateral resolution to that effect. In those cases, as well as in other peace-making missions, Brazil always insisted in peaceful resolution of conflicts, only accepting to deploy an armed contingent after a multilateral decision taken in due form.
Under the light of those arguments, and taking into account the permanent posture of the Brazilian diplomacy to keep full decision-making autonomy in its external engagements, always avoiding any interference in the great powers’ frictions and geopolitical conflicts, it is somewhat strange to see Lula personal decision to accept the kind of involvement with two great nuclear powers as a framework for Brazil’s diplomacy outside its natural ‘Orteguian’ circumstance, which is the regional cooperation within South America. The political decision to accept BRIC, and its developments, was not taken by Brazilian professional diplomacy, but personally by Lula and a few of his aides, some from the PT, perhaps one or two from the diplomatic personnel. BRIC is not a natural outcome of an Itamaraty policy planning after a detailed technical and political evaluation of all its consequences in terms of diplomatic participation or engagement in some situations that can develop from critical reverberations outside of strict Brazilian national interests.
New kids in the block and the transformation of Brazil’s foreign economic policy
After three decades – since the second half of the military regime – of struggles against inflation and external debt, Brazil finally reached a well successful stabilization process, the Real Plan (between 1994-1999), which transformed both domestic macro and sectorial policies, and its external interaction with foreign partners. Though Mercosur was to enter in a difficult period of adjustments (an almost lack of progress in the implementation of the customs union promised by the 1991 Asunción Treaty), external trade and foreign direct investments were to start a positive trend upwards, expanded with an ocean-like influx of dollars, most flowing from China, as the bilateral trade figures experienced double-digit annual increases: at the end of the first decade, the Asian giant surpassed Brazil’s turnover with the U.S., the first economic partner since the beginning of the 20th century. From 2009 onward, this Chinese trade pre-eminence – doubled with other Asian countries’ growing weight in Brazilian geographic structure of its foreign trade – has not only being maintained, but is constantly increasing, in special in grains and meat.
The annual meetings of BRICS heads of State became an important ritual in the agenda of Brazilian diplomacy, even if the stimuli came more from the Presidential palace than from the Foreign Affairs ministry, Itamaraty, whose diplomats waited for instructions to work accordingly and follow presidential guidelines. It is interesting to note that, perhaps due to the natural difficulties of the building up of a truly customs union in the Southern Cone, or to disagreements between its two major partners, Brazil and Argentina, while Mercosur stalled at the economic level, only advancing very slowly and only at the rhetorical level, BRICS agenda advanced in a reasonable manner at the political level, with few, if any, commercial agreements, besides normal Gatt dispositions regulating most favoured nations trade relations. Assessing the situation of the two ‘blocs’ in an imagined Itamaraty policy planning staff, one could conclude that BRICS became much more important during Lula years than Mercosur economic and political administration, despite the regional integration process being the most relevant strategic project of the Brazilian diplomacy, and even its external policy, since Sarney years and during Fernando Henrique Cardoso two mandates.
One of the most important BRICS encounters was the 2014 Fortaleza summit, when a New Development Bank and a Contingent Reserve Arrangement were approved to give financial support for investments and offer a relief mechanism in case of balance of payments crises. At each of those summits, Brazil and India – that had already constituted, with Japan and Germany, the G4 group in 1994 to influence plans for UN Chart reform and the enlargement of its Security Council – insisted with Russia and China to support their demands for their inclusion in the inner circle of the UN’s decision-makers, only to receive in the Declarations vague promises of a ‘more active role in international affairs’, an abused formula but to be completed, in the most recent years, with a more direct reference to ‘including in the case of reform of UN Charter and enlargement of its Security Council’.
Meanwhile, increased trade between Brazil and China and Chinese investments in infrastructure in Brazil confirmed a path of expanded bilateral affairs of all kinds linking both economies: two decades after China’s accession to WTO commercial turnover between the two countries amounted to the double of the cumulated figures that Brazil accomplished with its second and the third more important foreign trade partners, respectively U.S. and the EU. At the beginning of the century, PT’s leaders worried about a possible ‘dependence’ that could affect Brazil if the American proposal of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, in negotiations since 1995, could be achieved in the years later; consequently, Lula, together with the Argentinian and the Venezuelan presidents, respectively Nestor Kirchner and Hugo Chávez, conspired to implode the agreement, which was achieved in the Mar del Plata summit of the Americas, November 2005.
One of the side effects of this blocking was that the similar association agreement in negotiation between Mercosur and EU was left in a limbo for more than two decades, only to be reprieved by the two partners in 2019, to respond to the first version of Trump’s tariff war against all U.S. trade partners; the interregional trade agreement was still in travails six years later, yet with a promise of completion by 2026. Historically, European countries and, with force in the 20th century, the United States, were the main overall contributors to Brazil’s developmental process, basically in the economic domain, but also in its human capital formation. Since the beginning of the 21st century China has assumed the economic side of this evolutionary strategic partnership, still with less weight in the capacity building in terms of human capital: integration of universities from both countries is up to now very modest.
Which are the main components of the uneven relationship between Brazil and China?
The structural and institutional relations between Brazil and China, went through successive historical phases: the parallel, almost ignored, existence of the two empires, became more formal with the two republics that followed their demise. Between the two nations, one an ancient true cultural civilization, the other a former Portuguese colony (whose metropolitan kingdom interacted with the already advanced Asian giant) turned into an independent Nation State and in a self-confident, developing state. The two nations experienced different episodes of political distance, approximation, erratic economic intercourse, opportunistic recognition (from the Empire of Brazil), formal diplomatic relations in the young age of both Republics, followed by a new political remoteness after the Second World War, finally arriving at a new well-informed recognition, decided by both governments, one a less developed communist country, nevertheless a great power, the other a recognised developing state.
Throughout those different and differing circumstances, the relationship between the two States has always been unequal and dissimilar, despite all efforts from each leadership to expand and enlarge all kinds of intercourse, based on a pragmatic view from both sides. Notwithstanding this search for a mature and reciprocally beneficial cooperation between the two, the relationship remained unequal, unbalanced and asymmetrical, due to tangible diplomatic, economic, political and cultural differences between the two States, the two countries. Nowadays, at last, the relationship has blossomed in a promising way, in all aspects of reciprocal interests, despite unequivocally differing geopolitical and geoeconomic foundations and their respective national interests. According to the diplomatic rhetoric, both leaderships proclaim, after each meeting of the High-Level Binational Commission, the solidity of their ‘strategic partnership’. Nevertheless, the question arises: what is realistically strategic in this very robust relationship for the last half-century?
What emerges from its uneven character, arising from the two countries’ very distinctive roles in the new global order emerging since the beginning of the 21st century? Curiously, a pioneer book, written by a foreign scholar established in Brazil, had already examined the relationship between the two countries, published in Belgium after the Brazilian no-vote against China in 1971 and before the double recognition of 1974: it was Michel Schooyans’ Destin du Brésil (1973), a detailed study about Brazilian ‘military technocracy and its ideology’, according to its subtitle. In a last chapter, Schooyans numbered the ‘ressemblance et dissemblance’ between the two countries, stating that
… les deux pays se trouvent dans une situation ambiguë. (…) ils sont portés à contester l’antagonisme dominant [between USA and USSR] tel qu’il leur est proposé, et à affirmer leurs ambitions nationalistes. Il s’ensuit que les deux pays ne peuvent éviter de rechercher une nouvelle définition des rapports entre stratégie et politique, entre défense et développement. (p. 199)
Later on, Schooyans imagine that the two countries could offer ‘a voice for the poor’ of the world, opening a new course of action within the framework of the UNO:
Quelles sont dès lors les grandes étapes menant à la révolution mondiale, dont le Brésil et la Chine assumeraient le leadership? S’étant mis au diapason de tous les hommes qui vivent dans des conditions indignes de l’humanité, ces deux pays pourraient légitimement s’affirmer, ensemble, comme les porte-parole fidèles de tous les pauvres du monde, sans pour cela leur imposer leur modèle. Ils pourraient même leur faire partager leurs acquis extérieurs et leur proposer de les intérioriser à leur tour. (p. 215)
Let’s examine, thus, some examples of economic complementarity between the two countries, as well their distinctive political roles in the bilateral relationship and in the international context. First and most important structural component of this relationship, already described as uneven, is the historical and cultural background of each country, already stressed at the beginning of this Weberian-like analysis of their respective original conditions; on one side, there is a true civilization, for which the essential elements of its building-up dates from centuries of progressive developments towards a self-contained unique political and economic commonwealth; on the other side, there is a developing economy, emerging from three centuries of colonial exploitation, plus two centuries of gradual modernisation, with an industrialisation process somewhat guided by the State, under persistent protectionist practices since independence and all over economic sectorial policies. Second: an official anti-communist policy since 1918, and as a state policy from 1935 to recent times, persistent in some sectors of the Brazilian society, as revealed by the extreme-right push towards State power after a decade and half of leftist governments (PT, from 2003 to 2016). Schooyans, still in advance of his time, imagined that Brazil and China could even help Europe to ‘save its identity’ and its dependence from the United States (p. 219).
Under this political framework, the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1974 – which arouse recrimination from the extreme-right sector, both civil and military – was guided mainly, in the case of technocratic authoritarian military regime, by commercial concerns, whereas, in the case of the PRC, it was a carefully taken diplomatic decision, focusing on a new avenue of possibilities with a Third World country, leader of the developing countries, and exhibiting a real complementarity with the Chinese economy. That was precisely the case for the following decades, despite a very slow departure as regards the trade intercourse. If Brazil expected, in the 70s, to start selling huge amounts of Brazilian coffee as a new breakfast drink for the Chinese people, as it was the case for the American people since the Civil War in the 19th century, the deception was quickly recognised.
But, after China’s accession to WTO, in 2001, reciprocal trade flows start to climb a prosperous course, with an increase in volume and value never surpassed by any other bilateral exchanges. During the following two and half decades, especially after the crisis of 2008-2009, there was an exponential China’s progression in respect to foreign trade of Brazil. ‘Between 1997 and 2000, the average represented only 1.8% of Brazilian exports and 1.9% of our imports. In 2023, its participation achieved a 30.7% and 22.1% respectively’. Starting in 2009, China’s leadership confirmed its pace, arriving at the condition, nowadays, as the sole responsible for more than a quarter of the whole of Brazilian foreign trade. Nowadays, bilateral turnover is twice superior to the second and third amounts combined, with the two next commercial partners, respectively the U.S.A. and the European Union; probably, it will also rapidly overcome that combined sum including a third partner, Argentina.
The same IEDI Letter call the attention for the asymmetries existing in the reciprocal trade: almost all Brazilian exports are made up of commodities, above 90% of the total (and 60% of the Brazilian total exports of those primary goods); as for the other way, 98% of Brazilian imports from China are integrated by manufactured products, most with high technological complexity. According to an index of economic complexity, developed by the economists Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University) and César Hidalgo (MIT), China, between 1995 and 2021, was the country that advanced the most, coming from the 46th position in a world scale of this index to the 21st place. At the same time, Brazil, whose position was at the 25th place in the first year, declined to a shameful 70th position in 2021 (probably declining further after that).
This period corresponds precisely to Brazil’s refusal of the FTAA, the American project for a Hemispheric Trade Agreement, proposed by Clinton in 1994 and imploded in 2005 by the combined action of Brazil’s Lula, Argentine’s Kirchner and Venezuela’s Chávez. For comparison, Mexico, that was integrated into Nafta since 1994, climbed from the 29th position at that index to the 22nd place in the world list. Composition of the bilateral trade between Brazil and China, and its implicit technological complexity are, thus, the first indicator of an uneven economic relationship between the Asian giant and the biggest South American country, that is destined to be maintained and increase for the foreseeable future.
Since those FTAA times, many things changed in the relationship between Latin America and the United States, for one side, with European Union for the other side, and, with another partner, that started to become much more important in many areas, including trade and investments: China. The same year when FTAA became a ‘dead’ undertaking, 2005, European Union, coincidentally, ‘lost’ enthusiasm for the negotiating process with Mercosur for an association agreement comprising trade liberalisation, and the process also stalled for many years, only to be reactivated at ‘Trumpian’ times, when the perspective of being crushed under an American hammer and a Chinese anvil, brought the EU to the negotiating table again; still, difficulties remained for the signing of a bi-regional agreement, due to industrial concerns from Brazil and Argentina and agricultural protectionism on the other side, and the draft agreed in June 2019 was still pending signing at the end of 2025.
In the meantime, some Latin American countries that were negotiating the FTAA at Hemispheric level decided to sign bilateral free trade agreements with the United States, following the example of Mexico the previous decade; Chile, Peru and Colombia finalised in few months ahead their bilateral pacts, of course under the American model: not only trade liberalisation, but also investments, intellectual property, services and financial opening. Also happening at the same period, China started to make inroads in the external trade and sow the seeds of other economic interactions with many Latin American countries: in less than ten years, the Asian giant took the place of the United States as the main trade partner in their commercial geography; Brazil, of course, but also many others, and not only in the Pacific coast. In 2011, putting aside long and difficult negotiations in the context of Aladi – the Latin American Integration Association – or directly between Mercosur and the Andean Community of Nations, four of the most economic liberal countries in the continent, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Mexico, decided to formally establish the Pacific Alliance as a new regional integration mechanism; in fact, the move was less directed to kick off new trade agreements between the four countries, or to negotiate industrial cooperation among them, but to devise new opportunities with Apec and other Asian partners, eyeing new investments from the Eastern Pacific and other advantages with the new centre of the world economy.
Another enterprise within the same spirit of new dynamic linkages outside the Hemisphere was, ten years after the frustrated American adventure of the FTAA, the launching of the first ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum, in Beijing, to discuss the same vast array of subjects, not only economic cooperation and trade issues, but also regional and multilateral political consultations and cultural and social matters. Ten years later, in May 2025, President Xi Jinping spoke at the opening ceremony of the fourth ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC Forum, announcing the launch of five programs to advance shared development and revitalization with Latin American countries: China will invite officials from CELAC countries to ‘facilitate exchanges on national governance best practices’ – as if China began to reproduce one of the best-known specialities of the OECD work agenda in favour of its member countries –, the other being within a government programme, intended to ‘work with LAC countries to implement the [Chinese] Global Development Initiative’, that is BRI, and also a call from Xi for a ‘joint implementation of the Global Civilization Initiative’, that …
should uphold the vision of equality, mutual learning, dialogue, and inclusiveness between civilizations, champion humanity's common values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, and enhance China-LAC civilizational exchanges and mutual learning, including through a conference on China-LAC inter-civilizational dialogue.
Some presidents of CELAC countries were personally present at this 4th meeting: Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, at that moment the CELAC rotating chair, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, and Dilma Rousseff, president of the New Development Bank and former Brazilian president; they all addressed the event, and received a careful attention from Chinese authorities. Still, there was more on the program of the 4th Forum CELAC-China, one especially sensitive: ‘joint implementation of the Global Security Initiative’, that is, a more closer cooperation ‘in disaster governance, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, anti-corruption, narcotics control and combating transnational organized crime so as to safeguard security and stability in the region’. Such initiative should have political, diplomatic and geopolitical implications, taking into account the old linkages, and also new pressures, from the United States, on all those areas, already revealed by intense presence of the Hemispheric Big Brother in most of Latin American countries, and his obsession with matters that touch a secular domination over police and military institutions in the whole continent.
Then, besides those advancements at a regional level, there are, at the bilateral Brazil- China level, some other issues that touches the Brazilian capacity to receive, and absorb, some Chinese contributions that involves infrastructure and industrial development, arising from the special nature of the economic planning (and its effective functioning) as it regards the respective industrial systems of the two countries. Brazil was, for many years and decades, an industrialising country that relied the most upon state planning as a political device to accelerate the pace of economic development, at least from the 1930s up to the 1980s; it accelerated the appeal to ‘national development plans’ during the military regime, as already studied by this author (Almeida, 2008), but relinquished this methodology for the last decades. Lula’s governments and his Party, appreciative of the ‘national State planning’ of the military era, tried to resuscitate the practice recently, but with scant results. The PRC’s technocrats adopted, since the early beginnings of the new State, the socialist practice of drafting quinquennial plans for the careful planning of the priority areas chosen as relevant for economic and social development. In a recent paper about the preparation of a 15th quinquennial for the period 2026-2030, IPEA expert Renato Bauman (2025), author of many studies examining the economic relationship between China and Brazil, devises the possible areas of bilateral cooperation between the two countries, in connection with the near implementation of the 15th Quinquennial Plan. He writes:
Based on the growing Brazilian imports of Chinese capital goods, a possible effect [of the 15th Plan] would be the access to more sophisticated machinery, besides the intensification of the links with Chinese entities and research centres. (…)
Taking into account [Brazilian] comparative advantages in clean energy generation and biodiversity it is reasonable to think about opportunities either in the commerce of specific products or in investments in units with high energy demand. If the priority of the 14th Plan in adopting a proactive financing in favour of ‘green activities’ in other developing countries is maintained, this is an area where is likely the intensification of the interactions between the two countries [Brazil and China]. There could be, furthermore, investment attraction in reforesting activities, in low carbon agriculture, in biotechnology, among others.
One of the commentators to this note, circulated among other IPEA officials, a lawyer and an economist, expressed his mistrust concerning Brazil’s dedication in connection with the Plan:
‘In practice, at my knowledge, Brazil has no domestic plan to take profit from the new opportunities that China will offer us in those next five years. I see many [Brazilian] authorities’ missions visiting China recently and I read reports about how impressed they returned from what they saw, though I do not see strategic movements aiming at the enlargement of the economic and technological integration [with China].’ (Baumann, 2025, comments)
Probably the most important indicator of the unequal relationship between the two original Bric members (2006-2011) concerns the geopolitical aspects of their respective roles in the world context, the unequal weight of this ‘invention’ becoming even more unbalanced with the transformation of the four countries bloc into a five composition (Brics, with the ‘Chinese aggregation’ of South Africa in 2011) and its expansion into Brics+ more recently. It is rarely remembered that the original concept (2001) of Lehman Brothers’ Jim O’Neill never supposed a diplomatic group of four geopolitical actors, only separate and separated emerging dynamic economies, but offering good opportunities for lucrative portfolio returns for institutional financial funds, arising from the fact that, at that epoch (beginning of the 2000s), the four showed, for many different and differing reasons, relative high rates of economic growth (which was maintained in the case of India and China for later years, but not exactly for Russia and Brasil, with more modest paces). The ‘merger’ of the four, and their transformation from good financial market opportunities into a new ‘diplomatic bloc’ was a complete arbitrary decision adopted as a side effect of the good media appeal of an attractive concept, bricks, as the basic components of an architectonic ‘new house’.
It is not the case to discuss here the evolution and the diplomatic implications of the groups Bric-Brics-Brics+ – object of a previous analysis by this author (2022) –, but to stress the very contrasting responsibilities of Brazil and China, deriving from their unique places in the world distribution of power among big, medium and small countries, and of some ‘empires’ in the case of superpowers. The true ‘empires’, besides solid armaments, are also provided with a permanent seat at the UNSC and have veto power. That is obviously not the case of Brazil, but the South American country has always feed the illusion of acceding to the inner circle of the decision-makers, albeit the fact that PT’s governments (2003-2016, again 2023-2026) never departed from the clear anti-American sentiment of its militants. That was one of the reasons for which Lula’s diplomacy fought since the beginning to interact more closely with two of the non-Western members of the UNSC. Brazil and India have not received clear backing from Russia or China for revising the UN Charter or expanding the UNSC to include more permanent members. There is no sign that any forward move in this direction could be appearing in the foreseeable future.
Another ambiguity of the current (Lula’s government) Brazilian diplomacy is the personal support of the president for the idea of a ‘new multipolar global order’, already suggested many times by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, as well as by Xi Jinping himself. But this is only a reflection of Lula’s personalistic diplomacy, not strictly a formal diplomatic posture by the professional staff of Itamaraty (even if its bureaucrats could easily align with a request by the president for a formal adherence to the idea). Academic analysts, and informed journalists have already expressed concerns about this utopic undertaking, including because Lula’s perception as regards the Gaza conflict, for instance, is at odds with his posture vis-à-vis Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine (Almeida, 2024). Just to emphasise the new alignment with Russia, it is remarkable that the two last declarations by BRICS’ ministers of Foreign Affairs – meetings in April and October 2025 – cover all kinds of subjects, of the bloc and from the multilateral agenda, but have not a single word about the most important war in Europe since 1945, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, not even an indirect reference; in a recent vote (December 2025), in Geneva’s UN Human Rights Council, about the kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russian forces, the Brazilian delegation abstained.
Most important than this theoretical assumption – in favour or against the vague idea of a ‘new global order’, not exactly multipolar, but probably bipolar, as during the first Cold War – is the concrete posture, by the Brazilian professional diplomacy, around the possible political solutions for the cruel war being conducted, since February 2022, against Ukraine by Russia, considering that, just before the invasion, China’s president proclaimed ‘an alliance without limits’ with the former ‘social-imperialist’ so-called partner of the USSR’s times, against which Maoist China fought some border conflicts and opposite conceptions about world communist movement. For some three decades, starting with Kissinger and Nixon visits to Chou En-Lai and Mao, Communist China had a ‘tacit alliance’ with the Imperialist Devil, against the common enemy, a choice that ended perhaps before the American bombing of Chinese embassy in Beograd (1909), during the Western reaction against Milosevic’s repression of the Kosovar rebellion. Independently of the highs and lows of the US-China relationship, the geopolitical implications for Brazil of its new political alliance with China and Russia, inside or outside the Brics group, are tantamount for its more broad diplomatic stance regarding not only many important issues in the multilateral agenda – Human Rights Council, for instance – or, concretely, in connection with Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, for example. Even before the era of the UNO Chart and the consolidation of the post WWII International Law structure, one of the most durable doctrinal assumptions of the Brazilian diplomacy, since the Great War, was the resolute opposition to any territorial usurpation by armed force, which was tested, for example, at the time of German-Soviet invasion of Poland, in 1939, and the invasion and annexation of the three Baltic States by USSR in 1940. That doctrine prevailed until Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, when Dilma Rousseff’s (PT) government choose not to take position in face of a clear violation of the UNO Charter, as well as of a true principle of Brazilian diplomatic doctrine.
There are also domestic political peculiarities in connection with the building up of diplomatic stance in matters of special sensitivities for the economic elites. It is not difficult to see that the ministry of Foreign Affairs itself receives some inputs (and pressures) from the civil society, mainly business milieu; that was the reason for the non-completion of China’s demands for Brazil’s recognising the new member as a market economy status within WTO, at the beginning of the 2000s. Itamaraty also opposed, at least twice, the acceptance by Brazil to formally be included in the Belt and Road Initiative, as many other South American partners have already agreed to integrate. There is a perception, among professional diplomats, that Brazil cannot be used for any other foreign objectives that do not emerge from the country itself, not only because of nationalistic feelings but also for a perception that a big country such as Brazil can only be moved, in the diplomatic domain, by its own assessment of a concrete initiative arising from the internal machinery of a policy planning process. The same reactions, inversely, arouse when the U.S. (Trump 1) pressured Brazil against the adoption of Huawei equipment or regulatory definition of 5G, and the choice for a neutral approach of those matters, according to national industrial needs, even when the Bolsonaro’s government had a very hard stance against China (incurring in disrespectful squabbling against the then Beijing’s ambassador in Brasília).
Nationalistic perceptions are prevalent among diplomats and military, including by the fact that the lobby by big national construction companies, which have an entrenched market reserve for their works in Brazil and South America, are powerful enough to dissuade such ‘economic liberalisation’ (implicit in the case of ‘market economy’ for China), and also for the evidence that almost all of military procurement in Brazil is predominantly from NATO countries. As reported recently by a policy analyst at Safe Spaces, a policy consulting firm based in Taiwan and Washington, elite members in Brazil have the persuasion that China could be ‘entrenching itself in the Brazilian industrial base and consumer economy, with implications for Chinese influence across the continent’, and that would be deemed unacceptable for those milieux.
None of those sensibilities, valid for the overall historic postures of Brazilian diplomacy (but not always easily accepted or endorsed by some practical developments of the presidential external policy), could be an obstacle for new and innovative avenues towards the aggrandisement and diversification of Brazil’s various relationships with China, in the strictly bilateral domain, with one caveat: the relationship have been and will always be uneven, due to the natural unbalances – economic, political, military, geopolitical – between the two countries. Equality of treatment among sovereign countries is at the core of the Brazilian notion and of the diplomatic thinking about international relations, being the central axis of contemporary multilateralism. Nevertheless, the reality of international affairs is much more prosaic, along Orwellian lines: ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’.
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Paulo Roberto de Almeida
[Brasília, 5129, December 8, 2025]
Publicado in Macau Journal of Brazilian Studies (Macau Association for Brazilian Studies, Macau, China, vol. 9, issue 1, April 2026; ISSN: 2523-661X; p. 1-17; link: https://aebm.mo/en/list-44/254 ; pdf: https://aebm.mo/en/uploads/ueditor/file/20260422/1776836687585222.pdf ). Relação de Publicado n. 1638.
