The possible signing of a bilateral treaty between Uruguay and China, which could harm Mercosul, should not happen. The evaluation is by the geographer and professor of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj), Elias Jabbour. He participated, on Thursday (2), lecture at the 13th Biennial of the National Union of Students (UNE), which this year takes place in Rio de Janeiro.

"I don't believe that China will carry this out, because it can damage relations with Brazil. I don't think China will take this to the end," said the professor, considered one of the leading experts on the Asian country, after speaking to university students from several Brazilian states.

Jabbour, who has been 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 that the Chinese market has undergone in recent decades, turning from an agricultural country into a technological powerhouse.

"China is just change"

"China is just change. It has very fast GDP growth, so everything changes quickly. In the last ten years, he's taken 150 million people out of the field and put 150 million people in the cities. They were able to build institutional, political and financial frameworks that empowered the country to plan this type of movement. In Brazil our urbanization process was very traumatic, with favelização. In China, they were able 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 is explained in how the country has placed itself in the world in recent decades. While Brazil was engulfed by globalization, by suddenly opening its borders to the international capital, China joined the process offensively, placing its demands.

"It had manpower, more than 1 billion inhabitants, a potential consumer market and used it to their 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 methods of administration. It was a great national project, which had as one of the pillars the active insertion in globalization. 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," Jabbour said.

Relationship with Brazil

The professor considered that there was no harm in Brazil's recent bilateral relationship with China, despite several diplomatic mishaps that occurred under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who used more than once words and pejorative terms in reference to the Chinese.

"I don't think there was a break in that relationship. What deepened was our dependence 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 view of Brazil than we ourselves have. So, for the Chinese, it is interesting a strong, industrialized Brazil, with a material basis that puts it in a position to occupy a space in this multipolar world. It interests them," Jabbour said.

Source: Canal Rural