Ukraine and climate top agenda of Brazilian president’s visit to China
Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva arrived in China on Wednesday as President Xi Jinping seeks to build momentum for talks to halt fighting in Ukraine more than a year after Russia’s invasion.
Lula’s trip to Shanghai and Beijing comes as Xi embarks on a round of diplomacy in the weeks after visiting Moscow, where he strengthened political ties with President Vladimir Putin even while touting Beijing’s vague blueprint for peace that included a call for a ceasefire in Ukraine. The Chinese leader last week hosted French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to discuss the effort.
Xi has sought to burnish his credentials as a peacemaker after helping to broker a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which agreed to normalise diplomatic relations in March. He has managed to cultivate that image while still threatening Taiwan, including by holding extensive military drills over the weekend after President Tsai Ing-wen met US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The Brazilian leader has also sought a larger role in global efforts to end the war in Ukraine, a dynamic that is likely to make it an important theme of his bilateral meeting with Xi on Friday. Lula supports most of China’s plan to end the conflict, including the ceasefire, foreign affairs minister Mauro Vieira said in Brasilia ahead of the trip.
“It is urgent that we end deaths, destruction and activities encouraging inflationary pressure in all countries,” Vieira said.
Still, Brazil’s president has reservations about China’s proposal to allow Russia to keep control of occupied Ukrainian territories, even as he remains sceptical of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Putin can’t keep Ukrainian territory,” Lula said on April 6. “Perhaps we’re not discussing Crimea, but what he has recently invaded needs to be reconsidered. But Zelensky can’t have everything he wishes either.”
DISMISSED
China’s initiative has been dismissed outright by the US and some allies, who are wary of any process that would allow Russia to maintain its gains on the battlefield. Yet for Xi, the push for a ceasefire in Ukraine is also aimed at countering US attempts to portray China as a threat to the international order.
During Macron’s visit, the French leader charted a different approach to the US’s tougher stance on Beijing. And the visit of Lula similarly helps consolidate China’s efforts to serve as a representative of developing economies that can provide an alternative to the US.
“It’s not just any visit — it’s Lula,” said Karin Vazquez, a nonresident fellow with the Center for China and Globalisation, who is based in Shanghai. “He’s very respected as a global leader, and from the Chinese perspective indicates the relevance of Brazil and other emerging countries in the making of Xi’s ‘New Era’.”
Lula, who had to delay the trip in March due to a mild case of pneumonia, in 2022 said Zelensky was “as responsible as Putin for the war”.
More recently, he told a local TV channel Brazil was “ready to make any effort to guarantee peace in the world”.
Lula will start his visit in Shanghai, where he is expected to visit an innovation centre owned by Huawei, the technology company the US alleges poses a threat to its security.
The Brazilian leader then heads to Beijing, where he will also hold meetings with Premier Li Qiang and Zhao Leji, who chairs the National People’s Congress. The talks will focus heavily on the environment — including satellite monitoring of destruction in the Amazon rainforest — as well as agriculture and commodities. Brazil’s environmental and agriculture ministers, Marina Silva and Carlos Favaro, will join Lula on the trip.
It is Lula’s third visit abroad since he took office at the start of 2023, after trips to Argentina in January and the US in February. The visit to Washington occurred without the sort of business mission that travelled to China in March as part of Lula’s previously scheduled trip, and it ended without any substantial new bilateral accords.
Brazil and China, by contrast, already reached agreements in March, when Favaro and more than 100 Brazilian agribusiness executives travelled to Beijing in the hopes of boosting trade relations between the two countries. China agreed to reopen its market to Brazilian beef after it was suspended for a month amid investigations into a case of mad cow disease, and four Brazilian meat plants were granted permissions to ship to China.
During that visit, Favaro said there was still space to increase meat trade because the Brazilian share of the Chinese market is not large. More announcements are expected this week after plans to finalise several new deals were postponed because of Lula’s absence in March.
China’s two-way trade in goods with Brazil nearly doubled from 2017 to $171.5bn in 2022, Chinese customs data shows. China has been Brazil’s biggest trading partner for the past 14 years, while the South American country is China’s top supplier of soya beans, chicken and sugar, according to figures provided by the ministry of commerce.
The trade relationship has drawn scrutiny from environmentalists who fear that expansion of soya bean and livestock production has helped drive deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and Brazil’s Cerrado savannah region.
Lula has pledged to protect the Amazon and will look to enlist China’s support for that effort.