How to Build a Shared Cooperation between Brazil and China? Making the China Relationship a Strategic Public Policy
Brazil–China relations have entered a new phase. Over the past two decades, China has become Brazil’s most important trading partner and an increasingly significant actor in investment, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, finance, science and technology, and the digital economy. The relationship now reaches directly into many of the issues that will determine Brazil’s development trajectory.
This creates a new policy challenge.
Brazil needs to strategically think about and plan its relationship with China, treating it as a key component of its national development strategy rather than as a set of individual and disconnected institutional engagements.
This does not mean reducing the diplomatic or international dimensions of the relationship. It means recognizing that its economic scale and multidimensional character make China policy increasingly consequential for Brazil’s domestic development choices.
Brazil faces persistent challenges of low productivity, deindustrialization, technological dependence, infrastructure deficits, regional inequality and the need to accelerate its energy and digital transitions. Cooperation with China cannot solve these problems by itself. But China’s accumulated capabilities, technological transformation, investment capacity and experience in infrastructure and industrial development make the relationship an important potential instrument for addressing them.
The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether Brazil should deepen cooperation with China.
The question is how Brazil should plan that cooperation so that it contributes to solving Brazil’s major development challenges.
This is the rationale for shared cooperation.
Shared cooperation does not mean that Brazil and China have identical interests. Shared does not mean the same; it means connected. It means identifying where distinct national interests and capabilities can become complementary and deliberately organizing cooperation around those complementarities.
The concept therefore starts with two questions that must be asked simultaneously:
What does China want from Brazil?
What does Brazil want from China?
Strategic cooperation emerges when these interests can be connected to the development objectives of both countries.
1. Brazil Needs to Plan the Relationship It Wants
Brazil should establish a National Plan for International Cooperation with China.
The starting point of such a plan should not be a catalogue of sectors in which cooperation is possible. It should be the major problems Brazil needs to address.
This distinction is fundamental.
A conventional approach begins with opportunities: Chinese investment, Chinese technology, infrastructure projects, new markets or financing. A strategic public policy begins with national objectives and asks how external partnerships can contribute to achieving them.
Brazil should therefore identify a limited number of development challenges in which cooperation with China could have a significant transformative effect.
Industrial transformation is one such challenge. Brazil needs to increase productivity, diversify its productive structure and occupy more sophisticated segments of global value chains. Chinese investment and technological capabilities can contribute to this objective, but only if cooperation is connected to domestic production, supplier development, technological learning and industrial upgrading.
Infrastructure and connectivity constitute another. Brazil’s infrastructure needs are not simply logistical problems; they affect productivity, regional integration and the country’s capacity to connect its productive economy to global markets. Cooperation with China should therefore be linked to Brazil’s own infrastructure priorities, including the integration of South America.
Science, technology and innovation are equally central. Brazil needs to expand its capacity to generate and absorb technologies, rather than remaining primarily a consumer of technological products. Partnerships with Chinese universities, research institutions and firms can become instruments of joint technological development.
The energy transition offers another area of strategic complementarity. Brazil possesses major renewable-energy resources and capabilities, while China has developed extraordinary industrial and technological capacities in renewable energy, electric mobility, batteries and related technologies.
Agriculture, food security, health, biotechnology and digital transformation offer similar opportunities.
The point is not that China should solve these problems.
It is that Brazil should identify where China’s capabilities can become part of a Brazilian development strategy.
2. Brazil Must Know What It Wants from China
Brazil has developed considerable institutional capacity to understand China as a trading partner and diplomatic actor. It now needs greater capacity to understand China as a developmental partner: what Chinese institutions, companies and research organizations seek internationally, what capabilities they possess, and how these interests may intersect with Brazilian objectives.
But understanding China is only half of the task.
Brazil must be able to articulate what it wants.
President Lula has already pointed in this direction. In 2024, he argued that the Brazil–China partnership should move beyond commodity exports and expand into science and technology, including areas such as semiconductors and software, with the aim of generating employment and development in both countries. This ambition was reflected in the elevation of bilateral ties during Xi Jinping’s 2024 state visit to Brazil, when the two governments committed to seeking greater synergies between their development strategies and to expanding cooperation across infrastructure, energy, agribusiness, communications and other strategic sectors. The challenge is to translate this political ambition into a coherent Brazilian planning capacity that identifies where cooperation with China can contribute to long-term national development.The challenge is to transform this political ambition into a planning capacity.
A Brazilian National Plan for International Cooperation with China should therefore identify, for each priority area:
· the capability Brazil seeks to develop;
· the specific contribution that cooperation with China could make;
· the capabilities Brazil can bring to the partnership;
· the institutional and private-sector actors that need to participate;
· and the long-term outcomes Brazil seeks to achieve.
This would change the basis on which Brazil engages Chinese partners.
Instead of primarily asking:
What can China offer Brazil?
Brazil should be in a position to say:
This is what Brazil needs to build. This is where Brazil sees China’s capabilities contributing to its development objectives. And this is what Brazil can build with China.
That is the foundation of strategic agency.
3. Shared Cooperation Means Turning Complementarity into Development
The concept of shared cooperation becomes meaningful when interests are translated into concrete development programs. Brazil and China do not have the same economic structures, technological capabilities or development priorities. Their differences are precisely what can create opportunities for complementarity. China’s industrial and technological capabilities can intersect with Brazil’s productive resources, scientific institutions, energy potential, agricultural capabilities, market and geographic position.
But complementarity does not automatically produce development.
It has to be organized.
Consider industrial cooperation. Chinese companies may seek access to Brazil’s market and regional production networks. Brazil may seek investment, technology, employment and industrial upgrading. A shared cooperation strategy would seek to design partnerships that connect these interests through local production, supplier development, joint research, workforce formation and technological learning.
The same principle applies to infrastructure. Chinese financing and construction capabilities can contribute to Brazilian infrastructure objectives, but the strategic question is how individual projects contribute to Brazil’s broader territorial, productive and regional-integration priorities.
This is the difference between mutually beneficial cooperation and strategically organized shared cooperation.
The former asks whether both parties benefit.
The latter asks how those benefits can be connected to long-term national objectives.
4. Build on the Institutions That Already Exist
Brazil does not need to construct a new relationship with China from scratch.
The bilateral relationship already has substantial institutional foundations, including multiple sectoral mechanisms. What is missing is a Brazilian mechanism to integrate these engagements into a common and national strategy. Brazilian government could therefore establish an interministerial commission to develop a National Plan for Cooperation with China, identifying national priorities and strategic objectives.
The two countries have developed cooperation in development, science and technology, agriculture, energy, infrastructure and other fields. More importantly, Brazil and China have already begun creating instruments that correspond to the logic proposed here.
This is important because it suggests that the institutional question is not whether such planning is possible. The foundations already exist. What is missing is their consolidation into a national strategy.
The purpose would be to ensure that major initiatives involving China are considered not only individually, but also in relation to the broader objectives established by the National Plan.
5. From Projects to a National Development Strategy
The National Plan should have a sufficiently long horizon—ideally ten years—to distinguish short-term opportunities from long-term national capabilities. Its purpose would not be to predetermine every future project. It would provide the strategic direction against which projects and partnerships can be assessed. A proposal for investment, infrastructure, technology or scientific cooperation with China should therefore be evaluated through a simple but demanding question:
How does this contribute to a development capability that Brazil has identified as strategically important?
This changes the role of the State.
The State is not expected to determine every economic outcome. It is expected to define priorities, coordinate institutions, reduce fragmentation and create the conditions under which complementary capabilities can generate development.
Chinese investment, technology and financing should be connected wherever possible to Brazilian objectives in production, innovation, employment, infrastructure and technological capability.
This is not about imposing a uniform model on all cooperation.
It is about ensuring that the relationship contributes cumulatively to national development rather than remaining a collection of disconnected successes.
Conclusion: Plan the Relationship to Build the Future
Brazil and China have already established the political foundations for a new stage in their relationship. In 2024, the two governments elevated bilateral ties to a China–Brazil community with a shared future and committed themselves to greater synergy between their development strategies. They identified infrastructure, finance, science and technology, energy transition, digital economy, artificial intelligence and other areas as priorities for deeper cooperation.
In 2025, the two governments reaffirmed the objective of deepening this synergy and expanding cooperation in traditional and emerging areas, including infrastructure, agriculture, energy transition, aerospace, the digital economy and artificial intelligence.
The next step should be to give this political commitment a Brazilian planning instrument.
A National Plan for International Cooperation with China would allow Brazil to move from reacting to opportunities toward deliberately shaping them. It would connect the relationship with China’s development strategy to Brazil’s own efforts in industrialization, infrastructure, technology, energy and social development.
Its starting point should be Brazil’s problems.
Its method should be strategic planning.
Its organizing principle should be shared cooperation.
And its measure of success should be the capabilities that cooperation creates.
Brazil should not allow the scale of its relationship with China to become a substitute for strategic planning. It should use that relationship as an instrument of strategic planning.
The objective is therefore not simply to deepen Brazil–China cooperation. It is to make the relationship part of Brazil’s long-term capacity to develop. Brazil should not wait for opportunities with China to define its strategy. It should define its development strategy—and organize cooperation with China around it.
Editor: Zhiyu Wang
