French president Emmanuel Macron, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and then last week Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: the visitor’s book for Xi Jinping’s administration has been filling up fast of late.
Lula found common ground with Xi over global governance: reducing the dollar’s dominance, shifting geoeconomic power towards groups such as the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and criticising the US for encouraging war in Ukraine.
In practice, these grandiose ideas are heavily oversold. They do not mean Brazil has joined a Chinese geopolitical camp and abandoned the US and the EU. More concerning for Washington and Brussels should be that China is offering immediate help for Lula’s priority of reindustrialising Brazil, which may challenge the rich economies’ traditional role in investment and trade.