https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/22/brazil-election-china-economy-brics-bolsonaro-lula/
For China, the Brazilian president is an ally against the West.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2022, 8:00 AM
When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s last presidential election in October 2018, an editorial in the China Daily, a newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party, reflected Beijing’s cautious optimism about the new leader. Though Bolsonaro had sounded “less than friendly to China on the campaign trail,” the China Daily expressed “sincere hope” that he would “take an objective and rational look at the state of China-Brazil relations,” opining that the two countries were “hardly competitors.”
At the time, the far-right Bolsonaro had a track record of systematically attacking Beijing. Ahead of the election, he had warned that “China is not buying in Brazil; it is buying Brazil” and visited Taiwan, tweeting that he planned to…
