The possible signing of a bilateral treaty between Uruguay and China, which could harm Mercosur, should not happen. The assessment is by the geographer and professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Elias Jabbour. He participated, this Thursday (2), in a lecture at the 13th Biennial of the National Union of Students (UNE), which this year takes place in Rio de Janeiro.
“I do not believe that China will carry out this, because it could harm relations with Brazil. I don’t think China will see this through to the end,” said the professor, considered one of the leading experts on the Asian country, after the lecture addressed to university students from several Brazilian states.
Jabbour, who has dedicated himself to the study of the Asian country for 30 years, presented his latest book, written in partnership with Alberto Gabrieli, China: o Socialismo do Século XXI. He highlighted the changes that the Chinese market has undergone in recent decades, transforming itself from an agricultural country into a technological powerhouse.
“China is all about change. It has very fast GDP growth, so everything changes quickly. In the last ten years, it took 150 million people out of the countryside and into cities. They managed to build institutional, political and financial frameworks that enabled the country to plan this type of movement. In Brazil, our urbanization process was very traumatic, with slums. In China, they managed to do this in an ultra-planned way. It was a country that exported trinkets and today disputes with the United States the technological frontier in semiconductor infrastructure”, he said.
According to Jabbour, Chinese success can be explained by the way the country has positioned itself in the world in recent decades. While Brazil was swallowed up by globalization, by suddenly opening its borders to international capital, China joined the process in an offensive way, making its demands.
“It had a workforce, more than 1 billion inhabitants, a potential consumer market, and it used that to its advantage. To invest in China, companies had to partner with a Chinese company, transfer technology. They worked with the idea of joint ventures with foreign capital, with the strategy of seeking technology, the best management methods. It was a great national project, which had active participation in globalization as one of its pillars. Unlike Brazil, which had a passive insertion, without a strategy to deal with a changing world. When we opened up our economy, our industry was destroyed,” said Jabbour.
The professor considered that there were no losses in Brazil’s recent bilateral relationship with China, despite several diplomatic mishaps that occurred in the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who used pejorative words and terms in reference to the Chinese more than once.
“I don’t think there was a break in that relationship. What deepened was our reliance on China for primary products. The Chinese work with a different historical time than ours. For them, Bolsonaro goes and Brazil stays. They have a much more sophisticated vision of Brazil than we do. So, for the Chinese, what matters is a strong, industrialized Brazil, with a material base that puts it in a position to occupy a space in this multipolar world. That matters to them,” said Jabbour.
