The sandstorm moving in from northern China has left a dusty landscape in Shanghai, unsuitable for people with respiratory problems. Or for a 77-year-old man who has just overcome pneumonia, as in the case of Lula da Silva. It was precisely this respiratory condition that caused the Brazilian president to suspend a planned trip to the Asian giant at the end of March. Lula resumed the Chinese agenda landing on Wednesday night in Shanghai.
The haze clouded the financial district of Pudong, east of the Huangpu River, which divides the economic capital of China in two, when Lula arrived on Thursday at the headquarters of the New Development Bank of the BRICS, an acronym for the five emerging economies (China , Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) that together account for about a quarter of the world economy.
There he was to cover the new director of the bank, Dilma Rousseff (75 years old), whose appointment has been interpreted as a political rehabilitation seven years after being dismissed as president of Brazil, after an impeachment process, due to various corruption scandals that ended up being archived by the Brazilian Prosecutor’s Office.
Shanghai was the first stop on Lula’s three-day tour of the country that is Brazil’s main trading partner. On Friday, in Beijing, his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping awaits him, with whom he hopes to close lucrative trade agreements. For this reason, the Brazilian president has traveled escorted by a large delegation of businessmen, state governors, congressmen and ministers.
The war in Ukraine is expected to be one of the topics of discussion that Lula will bring to the table during his meeting with Xi Jinping on Friday in Beijing. The Brazilian and the Chinese share a similar position that they have defined as “non-intervention”, at the same time that they have positioned themselves as possible mediators to achieve an end to the conflict. “The time when Brazil was absent from major world decisions is a thing of the past. We are back on the international scene after an inexplicable absence,” Lula insisted before his meeting with Xi.
To the second world power, world leaders know that you have to travel in good company. This is what the Frenchman Emmanuel Macron did last week during his walk through Beijing and Guangzhou, in the south. Also full was Foreign Minister Olaf Scholz’s plane when he became the first European president to set foot in the Chinese capital since the start of the pandemic in November. The Spanish Pedro Sánchez, on the other hand, decided that his trip this month to Beijing would be solo.
For now, the only internationally relevant leader who has set foot in Shanghai this year has been Lula da Silva, who has also become the first head of state to visit the headquarters of the BRICS bank. A nod to the trade bloc with five members that represent 24% of world GDP and whose bank, the NDB, with a capital of 100,000 million dollars and now directed by Rousseff, is presented in China as an alternative to the World Bank and the Fund International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“The NDB meets all the conditions to become the great bank of the Global South. It is the product of an association between the BRICS countries with a view to creating a world with less poverty, less inequality and more sustainability,” Lula said during the ceremony. inauguration of the former Brazilian president. “Dilma Rousseff brings her extensive experience and knowledge of public policies and the international scenario, thus strengthening the leadership role of the NDB to achieve a better world, without poverty or hunger,” she said.
“Becoming the chairperson of the NDB is undoubtedly a great opportunity to do more for the BRICS, emerging markets and developing countries,” Rousseff said during her speech. Curiously, it was in 2014, during Rousseff’s presidency in Brazil, when this bank came to light to finance infrastructure projects in the member countries of the group and in other nations, such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates or Uruguay, which joined as partners. .
Iran and Saudi Arabia have formally requested this year their inclusion in the BRICS bloc, also sold on occasions by Beijing, in their efforts to design an alternative order to that of US hegemony, as a future alternative model to the G-7 . A June 2022 summit of this group marked Vladimir Putin’s first appearance in an international forum with other heads of state since he launched the invasion of Ukraine. He did it in a group that, with the exception of Brazil, refrained from condemning the Russian attack in the first resolution of the UN General Assembly.
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