Lula in Macron shadow to tail China for dragon’s dollar play
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, April 11: After staging a coup by creating a rift in the western block by charming French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese President Xi Jinping will be laying the red carpet for fellow comrade from Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. In a mirror-image copy of the large entourage of Macron, Lula is also accompanied by nine Cabinet ministers and several business executives as he arrives in Beijing.
After assuming the third term as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and also President of China, Xi has unleashed an aggressive foreign policy which has speed and agility to surprise the China-baiters in the international relations.
Macron has created a flutter by stressing on the strategic autonomy tune for Europe, which has been music to the ears of Xi and the Chinese diplomats. Macron has also made eloquent arguments for Europe to de-link from the US game in Taiwan and escape the Chinese crossfire.
The strategic thinkers have ascribed macron’s eloquence to the long held desire of France to emerge as the third power in the world. But it has also been largely noted that Europe has bartered away the economic autonomy to China by tying to its fate to Beijing’s stake in the global supply chains. This explains why Macron took several business executives to China, while his government battles the popular anger on the street against the sinking economy and the runaway inflation, solely due to the energy prices and the shortage.
Lula is almost in the similar boat as is the case with Macron. Lula’s predecessor Jair Bolsonaro was a China baiter and an ally of the US. But he passed on a battered economy to Lula, who stormed to the office after hard selling his socialist welfarism to the people in the elections last year.
Like France with which China has a $87 billion annual trade, Beijing is the largest trading partner with Brazil. Also, Brazil and China are part of BRICS, which has gone adrift in the recent months, as India remains busy with the G20 presidency and Russia having become a pariah in the global diplomacy after invading Ukraine.
“The stalemated Russia-Ukraine war has become China’s geopolitical golden moment, as it has geopolitically weakened Russia, while an overextended US has got stuck in the quagmire of prolonged European security crisis. Xi is aware that he can pick and choose his partners on the global stage,” wrote former diplomat DB Venkatesh Verma.
China is eying to rope in Brazil for its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. China will also be further deepening its hold in the Latin America. China’s trade with Latin America has grown at a mind-boggling speed in the last two decades to make the constituent countries heavily dependent on Beijing for their economy.
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