How Brazil’s Election Could Reshape Relations with China

Lula and Xi in May, 2025 -- Lula Oficial, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Tings Chak

On 25 October, Brazilians will return to the polls to choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in an attempted coup. The first round gave Flávio 47.03 per cent of valid votes against Lula’s 45.16 per cent, revealing the enduring strength of the far right four years after its electoral defeat. The runoff takes place as Donald Trump seeks to restore US domination over Latin America, with Brazil emerging as a consequential battleground in Washington’s campaign to contain China’s growing relations with the region.

Over the past two decades, Brazil and China have built a political partnership that has expanded the space for independent action among countries of the Global South. Under Lula and Xi Jinping, this relationship has deepened through cooperation in industrial development, infrastructure, science, and technology. The election will determine whether this project advances or Brazil’s international orientation is subordinated to Washington’s renewed Monroe Doctrine as part of the continent’s rightward shift.

Since Lula’s return to the presidency in 2023, the two governments have connected Chinese cooperation with Brazil’s development programmes, including Nova Indústria Brasil, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), and the Ecological Transformation Plan. Lula’s May 2025 visit to Beijing produced 36 agreements covering infrastructure, finance, artificial intelligence, public health, and industrial cooperation. Behind these agreements is a long-standing challenge: overcoming Brazil’s dependent position in the international division of labour, where commodity exports continue to outweigh advanced industrial and technological development.

This cooperation has also reached Brazilian popular movements. Through the International Association for Popular Cooperation (Baobab), Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and other organisations have worked with Chinese institutions on agricultural mechanisation, bioinputs, and digital technologies for family farming. These initiatives include the Digital Family Farming and Agroecology Laboratoryand IARAA, an artificial intelligence project for agroecology and agrarian reform developed by Brazilian popular movements using Chinese open-source models. In a countryside marked by extreme concentrations of land, machinery, and capital, such cooperation offers new tools to peasant organisations fighting for agrarian reform and the production of healthy food.

Brazil’s relationship with China also reveals the different class interests at work in the country, with contradictions particularly visible in the countryside. Massive exports of soybeans, meat, and minerals have continued under both Bolsonaro and Lula, but their governments have pursued very different political relationships with Beijing. While Jair Bolsonaro attacked China and aligned himself with Washington, Lula has sought to deepen strategic cooperation, including in industrial development, technology, and agrarian reform. Flávio Bolsonaro now promises an ‘economically pragmatic‘ relationship with China while cultivating close ties with Trump. For sectors of Brazil’s ruling classes that profit from commodity exports, continuing to sell to China while embracing Washington’s political agenda presents little contradiction. For Brazil’s efforts to rebuild its industry and develop technological sovereignty, the consequences are far greater.

The Return of the Monroe Doctrine

Washington’s ambitions were made explicit in its December 2025 National Security Strategy, which announced a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, seeking to restore US pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere and deny outside powers control over strategic resources and infrastructure. Five days later, China published its third Latin America policy paper, reaffirming sovereignty, non-interference, regional integration, technological cooperation, and support for the region as a Zone of Peace. The two documents reveal fundamentally different approaches to the political future of the continent.

Brazil’s position is decisive. As Latin America’s largest economy, a founding BRICS member, and a leading participant in Mercosur, it possesses industrial, scientific, and political capacities that could strengthen independent development across Latin America and beyond.

The emergence of a new technological era makes this struggle particularly consequential. Brazil is among the few countries of the Global South capable of pursuing digital and technological sovereignty that could benefit its neighbours and parts of Africa. Its roughly 23 per cent share of global rare earth reserves is an important starting point, but control over minerals alone is insufficient. The greater challenge is developing the capacity to process them, manufacture advanced components, and build the digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence systems, and technologies that will shape future production.

Flávio has made his orientation clear. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the United States in March 2026, he offered Brazil as the ‘solution’ to Washington’s dependence on China for critical minerals, explicitly linking rare earths to artificial intelligence and US military superiority. Chinese economic reporting has also described proposals from his team to exclude China from rare-earth supply chains. Rather than using Brazil’s resources to develop its own industrial and technological capacities, this agenda would place them at the service of US technological and military power.

The same political orientation extends to digital sovereignty. In July 2026, Flávio’s campaign submitted proposals to US trade authorities that included preventing Brazil’s Pix payment system from connecting to non-Western international payment networks and loosening commitments within Mercosur. These proposals converge with a wider US campaign involving tariffs, digital regulation, strategic minerals, and attempts to influence Brazil’s electoral process. Meanwhile, Washington’s January 2026 bombing on Venezuela and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores demonstrated how far it is prepared to go to impose its will on the continent.

The BRICS and the Struggle for an Independent Foreign Policy

Brazil, particularly under Lula, has helped build institutions through which countries of the Global South can reduce their dependence on Western-dominated structures. At the July 2025 BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, the group advanced cooperation on development finance, local-currency transactions, and international institutional reform. The New Development Bank, headed by former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, is an important expression of this effort.

The BRICS cannot automatically overcome economic dependency or guarantee sovereignty for working people. Yet its expansion offers greater room for independent development, provided that participating governments have the political commitment to use these possibilities.

Brazil’s history reveals how difficult that independence has been to defend. In 1961, vice-president João Goulart became the first high-ranking representative of a Latin American government to visit the People’s Republic of China, meeting Mao Zedong when revolutionary China remained diplomatically isolated and subjected to US sanctions. Three years later, Goulart was overthrown in a US-backed civil-military coup that inaugurated a twenty-one-year dictatorship. The early history of China–Brazil friendship was inseparable from struggles over national sovereignty, agrarian reform, and the forces determined to suppress them.

The international material conditions for South–South cooperation are considerably more favourable today, but political direction remains decisive. Jair Bolsonaro hosted the 2019 BRICS summit in Brasília while pursuing close alignment with Washington. A government can weaken institutions from within by abandoning the commitments that give them political substance.

The far right’s resurgence also reflects the enduring power of Brazil’s own ruling classes. Bolsonarismo has a domestic base among sections of agribusiness, finance, the security apparatus, militias, conservative religious networks, and major media. These forces, whose electoral and institutional advances have continued, were strengthened by the 2016 parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff and the judicial persecution of Lula. They possess their own organisations, material interests, and sources of power, which do not disappear when an election is lost. Their economic dependence on Chinese markets has not prevented their support for Washington’s political agenda.

Beyond the Election

Beijing has followed the Brazilian election closely, reflecting the importance of the political relationship built between Lula and Xi over years of cooperation. In July, Xi reaffirmed China’s support for Brazil against external interference during a conversation with Lula, which also covered cooperation in artificial intelligence, satellites, mineral processing, and relations between China and Mercosur. In September, Foreign Minister Wang Yi received Lula’s adviser and former foreign minister Celso Amorim in Beijing, reaffirming the bilateral strategic partnership.

China’s principle of non-interference means that the choice of Brazil’s government belongs to the Brazilian people, but Beijing’s diplomatic restraint should not be confused with an absence of political interests or an assumption that all governments would pursue the same relationship. Chinese analysts have described the possible outlook under Flávio as one of ‘cold politics, hot economics’: commodity trade would likely continue, but the political relationship and cooperation in strategic sectors could deteriorate. The experience of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency has already shown the limits of commercial interests in sustaining a broader political partnership.

For the Brazilian people, the consequences extend well beyond foreign policy. The election will also shape the struggles over labour rights, public services, agrarian reform, and the defence of democratic space. Brazil’s renewed role in South–South cooperation under Lula has opened possibilities for a development project that responds to the needs of its working people, but realising those possibilities depends on the political and social forces capable of carrying it forward.

The Brazilian people have fought through dictatorship, neoliberal restructuring, parliamentary coups, and the rise of the far right to defend their political and social gains. This election is another moment in that longer struggle, now unfolding amid renewed US imperial intervention and a transformation of the world’s technological foundations. The future of China–Brazil cooperation will depend on the capacity of organised popular forces to build a sovereign national project and turn international cooperation into lasting changes in people’s lives.

Tings Chak 翟庭君 is the Asia Co-Coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Researchand an editor of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought

This article was produced by Globetrotter.