Ever since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which fostered international cooperation on sustainable development in a post-Cold War world, Brazil and China have engaged on environmental issues, cooperating under the three Rio Conventions on climate change, biodiversity, and desertification.
In the decades since, Brazil has often held a positive environmental image in the world, given its rich biodiversity – despite primary forest loss of 8.6% over the past 20 years – and a relatively clean energy mix, with more than 60% of its electricity generated by hydropower. This has stood in contrast with the reputation of China, regularly viewed as a net polluter that pursued growth at all costs for decades, and paid little attention to its domestic environment or global commitments to emissions reductions.
As Brazil’s export-oriented economy has grown, deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes has been downplayed as a necessary sacrifice for national development – even before the conservative governments of Michel Temer (2016–2018) and later Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) took over. China, meanwhile, has responded to global warming and geopolitical pressures with massive reforestation policies and institutional reforms, which position environmental problems as a more central political and cultural issue.
China is currently pursuing a national transformation as part of the so-called “construction of an ecological civilisation”, one of the trademark ambitions of its leader, Xi Jinping. The philosophical concept, originally from Soviet thought, was taken up by the leadership of the Communist Party of China around the year 2006, the same year the country became the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide, surpassing 6 billion tonnes of emissions annually.
The underlying understanding of ecological civilisation as a development paradigm is that, in order to achieve socialist development in harmony with nature, the current mode of industrial civilisation has to be overcome, in a similar break as happened with agricultural civilisation. To guide subsequent policies, six central principles were written into the Chinese constitution in 2018, the last of which stipulates China’s commitment to building a “global ecological civilisation”, pointing to a need for transformations beyond its borders.
As Chinese overseas activities slowly start to respond to these ideas, the question of what ecological civilisation could mean for Latin America has still been barely explored in academic literature.
In a recently published book chapter, my co-authors Jefferson Santos, Talitta Pinotti and I present some ideas about the future role of ecological civilisation for investment and trade between Brazil and China. We suggest that China could raise its influence on the global environmental agenda through its commercial relationships by implementing strong environmental standards beyond just the Belt and Road Initiative – its global infrastructure development programme, of which Brazil is not yet a part. These could be closer to those it is implementing domestically, and Brazil would be a meaningful starting point for such overseas initiatives, so that China’s foreign direct investment does not become part of a race to the bottom or risk creating a “pollution haven”.
Our chapter is part of the book How China is Transforming Brazil, coordinated after former president Jair Bolsonaro was voted out of office in 2022, and which provides an overview of many facets of the changing relationship, from culture to infrastructure to the environment.
In the environmental sphere, a lot has already changed since the beginning of 2023. Newly returned President Lula has made commitments to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, but has also stirred up controversies over Indigenous land demarcation, being reminded of the power of Brazil’s agribusiness lobby that opposes many of his environmental plans.
As an idealistic environmental framework, China’s ecological civilisation could be better leveraged by Latin American leaders to bring about more structural changes to the region’s own national environmental politics.
Brazil must go far beyond ending illegal deforestation. Responding to the ideas on biodiversity protection and mitigation of unavoidable impacts proposed in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, Brazil could justify a much more radical decarbonisation of its economy and set new indicators that finally include socio-environmental issues beyond GDP like health, environment, inequality, and employment quality.
This will, however, depend not only on backing from Lula’s cabinet, but also on convincing the conservative majority in the Brazilian congress. It will need all of Lula’s attention and rhetorical skill to stress the urgency to redefine the relationship between China and Brazil, breaking away from previous governments’ emphasis on extractive activities, to highlight the potential of their interdependencies instead of the subdued neo-colonial relationship it has at times been accused of taking with the Asian nation. Progressive ideas will have to reinvent themselves and find synergies between those greener practices being promoted along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), those of Chinese investors in Brazil and the country’s re-industrialisation strategy.
A changed relationship
Thirty years ago, when China and Brazil established their strategic partnership, the world was experiencing an unprecedented rise in cooperation and openness after the end of the Cold War. In 2004, the Sino-Brazilian High Level Commission for Consultation and Cooperation (COSBAN) was founded, providing a unique space for coordinating cooperation between the two emerging economies. Later, the cooperation was formalised as a “global strategic partnership” and, in the wake of the financial crisis, the multilateral environment gained another key forum involving the two nations: the BRICS bloc, in which they convene with Russia, India and South Africa.
However, many characteristics of the two countries’ cooperation have changed significantly since the 1990s. China’s nominal GDP has caught up fast, and it became the world’s second-largest economy in 2010, while Brazil stagnated around the 10th position all throughout the 2010s. Meanwhile, the US and EU began to perceive China as a rival to the Western-dominated global order, and peripheral world regions began to see the emerging power, instead, as a promising trading partner who brought new offers to the table with fewer strings attached, due to its principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs.
From a largely commerce-oriented relationship in the early years, the two countries’ relationship has diversified significantly since. Among their shared interests are not only social development and poverty alleviation, technological innovation or the recent emphasis on multilateralism and support for peace negotiations in Ukraine, but also combatting climate change, on which they recently issued a joint statement.
While energy, mining and food industries still dominate their exchanges, both countries’ image of each other has changed to a more cautious stance. Chinese investment in Brazil reached a 13-year low last year, amid regulatory delays, the impacts of the Ukraine war and China’s prioritisation of investment in BRI countries. Elsewhere, infrastructure projects such as railways are being planned or implemented with Chinese backing in environmentally sensitive regions in the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado, having been facilitated under the more lax environmental approach of the Bolsonaro era.
Globally, the mounting number of political pledges to halt deforestation certainly tackle an important dimension of the problem, but they do not go far enough. During the much-awaited visit of President Lula to China in April 2023, the two countries’ strategic partnership was reiterated, and a “new era” was said to have begun. In the resulting joint communiqué on deepening relations, new areas of cooperation like the digital economy and poverty reduction stood alongside environmental protection, climate change and biodiversity conservation. These issues are already on the agenda for Brazil in cooperation with the European Union and United States, but fundamental frictions about financial contributions and autonomy have led President Lula to make clear that Brazil will not accept “green neo-colonialism” in this area.
Amidst a visible surge in extreme weather events, China could help to write a new chapter with Brazil and other countries from the global south. In their joint communiqué, the two countries emphasise the historical responsibility of developed countries to address climate change and the lack of climate finance for developing nations to comply with the targets of the Paris Agreement. Chinese policy innovations that align with its goals of ecological civilisation, such as carbon markets, eco-certifications and ecological redlines may offer best practices for combining climate action and nature conservation, and already provide possibilities for cooperation between China and Brazil, as a recent perspective article in the National Science Review pointed out.
Globally, the mounting number of political pledges to halt deforestation certainly tackle an important dimension of the problem, but they do not go far enough. During the much-awaited visit of President Lula to China in April 2023, the two countries’ strategic partnership was reiterated, and a “new era” was said to have begun. In the resulting joint communiqué on deepening relations, new areas of cooperation like the digital economy and poverty reduction stood alongside environmental protection, climate change and biodiversity conservation. These issues are already on the agenda for Brazil in cooperation with the European Union and United States, but fundamental frictions about financial contributions and autonomy have led President Lula to make clear that Brazil will not accept “green neo-colonialism” in this area.
Amidst a visible surge in extreme weather events, China could help to write a new chapter with Brazil and other countries from the global south. In their joint communiqué, the two countries emphasise the historical responsibility of developed countries to address climate change and the lack of climate finance for developing nations to comply with the targets of the Paris Agreement. Chinese policy innovations that align with its goals of ecological civilisation, such as carbon markets, eco-certification and ecological redlines may offer best practices for combining climate action and nature conservation, and already provide possibilities for cooperation between China and Brazil, as a recent article in the National Science Review pointed out.
Even though Brazil is not part of the Belt and Road – partly due to its diplomatic tradition of preferring involvement in multilateral projects from the start – as China’s biggest trading partner in the region, the ideas and implications of ecological civilisation are certain to influence standards in the whole region.
Within COSBAN, Brazil is already strategically placed to have institutionalised dialogues on the environment with China. While the commission’s environment-linked sub-commissions did not meet during the Bolsonaro administration, the recent joint declaration on climate change established a new dedicated sub-committee on environment and climate change, which can significantly move this agenda forward.
The next steps for Brazil and China
Despite recent indications and China’s policies calling for a lower reliance on soybean imports, especially from South America, commodity trade between the two will still have a future. The idea of China’s ecological civilisation is a commitment to a civilisational shift in our relationship with nature. However, the changes it brings about at this point seem to be largely limited to its national borders.
The implications for its international trading partners – in particular providers of raw materials and commodities like soy and iron ore, as is the case for Brazil – are that they can only truly make use of a shift in the politics of green development if they “speak China’s language of ecological civilisation”. This points to inconsistencies and contradictions in its sixth principle of building a global ecological civilisation: for instance, the continued reliance on technology to resolve environmental problems and parallels with the Western discourse on “green growth” continue to prevail in China’s own policies despite academics stressing that “ecological civilisation is not equal to green industrial civilisation”.
Another important next step for the cooperation would be to define clear rules and effective mechanisms to rid production chains of environmental crime and rights violations. To be the environmental leader that Brazil aspires to be, researchers from climate nonprofit Plataforma Cipó suggest, its leaders should “encourage a multilaterally negotiated framework to establish robust socio-environmental criteria and requirements”.
Latin America’s biggest economy is poised to take historical geopolitical shifts. It can be more ambitious about what an ecological civilisation could look like in Brazil.
If such policies do not commit to a radical break with old developmentalist ideas, such as continuing the use of fossil fuels and production-based development, Brazil will not be a coherent partner in building a global ecological civilisation. Conversations about regenerative and socio-biodiverse economies – like those at the recently concluded International Conference on the Amazon and New Economies, and in initiatives such as Amazonia 4.0 – are necessary.
There needs to be more talk with and about China’s ecological civilisation that expresses the shortcomings of growth-centred and industrial development models.
With the 50th anniversary of Brazil-China diplomatic relations on the horizon next year, Latin America’s biggest economy is poised to take historical geopolitical shifts, and an opportunity to redefine its development model. It can be more ambitious about what an ecological civilisation could look like in Brazil. Demanding higher environmental standards and commitments to ending deforestation from investors would be an important first step to develop a new economic relationship beyond extractivism. But to show their firm commitment to a global ecological civilisation, both Brazil and China must urgently overcome their dependencies on fossil fuels to meaningfully change global environmental governance.
