The possible signing of a bilateral treaty between Uruguay and China, which could harm Mercosur, is unlikely to happen. This is the assessment of geographer and professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj), Elias Jabbour. On Thursday (2), he participated in a lecture at the 13th Biennial of the National Union of Students (UNE), which is being held in Rio de Janeiro this year.
“I don’t believe China will go through with this, because it could harm relations with Brazil. I don’t think China will go through with this,” said the professor, considered one of the greatest experts on the Asian country, after the lecture given to university students from several Brazilian states.
Jabbour, who has dedicated himself to studying the Asian country for 30 years, presented his latest book, written in partnership with Alberto Gabrieli, China: Socialism of the 21st Century. He highlighted the changes the Chinese market has undergone in recent decades, transforming itself from an agricultural country into a technological powerhouse.
“China is all change”
“China is all change. There is very fast GDP growth, so everything changes quickly. In the last ten years, 150 million people were moved from the countryside to the 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 forming. In China, they managed to do this in an ultra-planned way. It was a country that exported trinkets and today it competes with the United States for the technological frontier in semiconductor infrastructure,” he said. According to Jabbour, China’s success can be explained by the way the country positioned itself in the world in recent decades. While Brazil was swallowed up by globalization, when it suddenly opened its borders to international capital, China joined the process in an offensive way, setting its demands. “It had a workforce, more than 1 billion inhabitants, a potential consumer market and used this to its advantage. To invest in China, companies had to partner with a Chinese company and transfer technology. They worked with the idea of joint ventures with foreign capital, with the strategy of seeking technology and the best management methods. It was a major national project, one of whose pillars was active participation in globalization. Unlike Brazil, which had a passive participation, without a strategy to deal with a changing world. When we opened our economy, our industry was destroyed,” said Jabbour.
Relationship with Brazil
The professor considered that there were no losses in Brazil’s recent bilateral relationship with China, despite several diplomatic setbacks that occurred during the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who used derogatory words and terms more than once in reference to the Chinese.
“I don’t think there was a break in this relationship. What deepened was our dependence on China for primary products. The Chinese work with a different historical time frame than we do. For them, Bolsonaro goes and Brazil stays. They have a much more sophisticated view of Brazil than we do. So, for the Chinese, what is in their interest is a strong, industrialized Brazil, with a material base that puts it in a position to occupy a space in this multipolar world. That is in their interest,” said Jabbour.
Source: Canal Rural