By Miguel do Rosário
The interview with China expert Elias Jabbour on the program *Reconversa*, hosted by Reinaldo Azevedo and Walfrido Warde, delivers high-quality insight into the frenzied geopolitical shifts of recent days.
To think geopolitics today is to think about China.
And to think about China is to grasp its historic challenge—a challenge often thrust upon it—to resist Western imperialism.
Anyone who thought the concept of imperialism was outdated, gathering dust alongside books from the 1960s or confined to leftist discussion circles, may be rethinking that stance after President Donald Trump launched an economic offensive against China of unprecedented scale in modern history.
True, the U.S. has imposed sanctions and tariffs on other nations since its inception. The free trade system promoted by the so-called collective West, especially after World War II and the creation of multilateral organizations to oversee international commerce, has always had to bend to American interests.
But what we are witnessing now has no precedent.
In 2024, the trade flow between China and the United States reached $688 billion—11% of China’s total trade volume that year, which surpassed $6 trillion and represents a significant share of global trade.
The Trump administration slapped China with cumulative tariffs of 125% on all its products.
So far, China has responded with 84% tariffs, also across the board on U.S. exports.
There’s no other way to define this—given both the severity and the consequences—than as an act of war. And it became even more explicit when Trump “backed off” on similar harsh tariffs for other countries, dialing them down to 10%, while maintaining the maximum pressure on China.
“War is merely the continuation of politics by other means,” said Clausewitz, and there’s little doubt that Trump’s tariff blitz—despite his announcement of a 90-day “pause”—marks the beginning of World War III.
Naturally, humanity’s challenge will be to keep the conflict confined to economic skirmishes and avoid military escalation. But it would be naive to think that’s sustainable in the long run.
Take the aggressive rhetoric and economic pressure the U.S. has applied to Iran, complete with open threats of bombing—this too is a way to pressure China, which, as the world’s largest oil importer, would be the primary victim of any spike in fossil fuel prices.
A Middle East war involving Iran would send oil prices skyrocketing.
The U.S., on the other hand, might be somewhat insulated, having once again become the world’s top oil producer.
Just this week, Ukraine’s president Zelensky launched a bizarre anti-China propaganda campaign, showcasing a few Chinese mercenaries captured on the Russian side of the battlefield as if they were official agents of the Chinese state.
Of course, there are mercenaries of all ethnicities fighting on both sides. The Russians have also identified Brazilians fighting for Ukraine, but Putin hasn’t taken to the global media to claim that Brazil is siding with Kyiv.
Both Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu are trying to frame their conflicts as part of a broader global war of “Western values” against imagined enemies—a loose (and undoubtedly fictitious) alliance of Islamic forces, progressive movements, Russians, non-aligned nations of the Global South, and above all, China.
Thomas Friedman, a well-known mouthpiece for Western interests in major U.S. and European newspapers, recently jumped into the tariff debate to stress the need to protect Europe’s “industrial democracies” from China’s advance—a bizarre and cynical way to frame yet another ideological bloc.
But behind the curtain of bluster and stock market speculation, the reality is simple: the West’s “industrial democracies” are falling behind, for many reasons.
Their political model has ossified into a formalistic caricature of democracy where oligarchies rotate power. Europe—still relatively egalitarian—would rather cling to genocidal imperialism, hostile to diplomacy and built on lies, than embrace a new world order in which Global South nations, led by China, would gain greater voice and presence in global debates.
Europe, for better or worse, may still enjoy a few more decades of comfortable decline—its high-speed rail, free public universities, and liberal democratic gains mostly intact since the end of WWII.
Brazil, however, is not so fortunate. Like many of its Global South peers, Brazil is still living through its own “hundred years of humiliation.”
China’s “century of humiliation” refers to the period from the end of the Opium Wars—won by Britain—until the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
But one could extend that humiliating century, marked by foreign plunder and oppression, into the late 1970s, when China finally resolved many internal contradictions, broke out of global isolation, and launched the rapid development process that continues to astound the world.
“Chinese socialism is characterized by the transformation of science into an instrument of government,” Jabbour says in the interview. “In an obscurantist world—this world we’re in—socialism today manifests as the transformation of reason into governance.”
That, he argues, is the way forward for Brazil and the entire Global South: science. Even in political construction.
“Our problem is that we’re unable to develop a science that enables us to govern the country through a broad front. That too is science,” Jabbour says, noting that major national breakthroughs came when the left broke out of its isolation.
“An isolated communist is a dead communist. That’s a historical lesson. Independence, the republic, abolition, the 1930 Revolution, Lula’s 2002 election—none of these civilizational milestones came from a single party. They were built by heterogeneous majorities.”
Now heading the Pereira Passos Institute, a public agency tied to Rio de Janeiro’s city government, Jabbour is trying to persuade Mayor Eduardo Paes of the need for deeper integration between Brazil’s economy and China—the world’s most dynamic economic pole.
“I’m really concerned about the post-Lula era. And I consider Eduardo to be a key figure. He straddles the line between JK and Teotônio Vilela. That’s how we should see him, in my humble opinion.”
Paes, he explains, mirrors JK (Juscelino Kubitschek) in his liberal roots gradually shifting toward developmentalism. One example is Paes’s resistance to a vision of Brazil’s future centered on agribusiness from the country’s central-western region—a vision potentially cemented by the new Chancay port in Peru, which will export Brazil’s grain and minerals once the necessary transport infrastructure is complete.
At the same time, Paes echoes Teotônio Vilela, a conservative senator who became a voice of resistance during Brazil’s military dictatorship—driven by similar historical dilemmas.
A likely candidate for Rio’s state government in 2026 and a public supporter of Lula’s reelection, Paes, according to Jabbour, has a “strategic objective” of making Rio “the vanguard of national resistance” against the reactionary values represented by the agribusiness heartland, Bolsonaro-style politics, and the fascist far right.
“He’s someone who moved from one camp to another. Not by choice, but because history demanded it.”
And now—with Trump’s tariff apocalypse lending his words even more weight—Jabbour draws a telling contrast: “American foreign policy is the Old Testament. China’s is Confucius. The idea of a ‘shared future for humanity’ didn’t originate with the Communist Party—it’s Confucian.”
“Brazil’s reindustrialization,” he continues, “and I say this to Eduardo Paes, hinges on full productive integration with China. But we need to talk to the Chinese like adults.”
To Jabbour, full integration is not about ceding sovereignty—it’s about leveraging Brazil’s massive trade flow with China to finance a modernization of infrastructure and the productive system.
“Our current trade with China is colonial. It offers no strategic return. It doesn’t build the future. It’s short-sighted,” Jabbour warns.
He urges Brazil’s intellectuals to develop a science “capable of grasping the concept embedded in China’s real social movement”—and to adapt those lessons in a way that advances Brazilian society.
Jabbour says he feels “very alone” in Brazil’s political discourse. He faces resistance from the left for his pragmatic stance—both in advocating broad political alliances and rejecting rigid ideological dogma.
“There’s a difference between fighting for equality, peace, justice, and socialism—and getting lost in fantasies, in a Pink Panther world. You have to ask whether science supports your hypothesis. That’s the question I’ve been asking since ’94 or ’95, with over 30 years of studying China.”
“People confuse what it means to be radical. They think it means being reckless,” Jabbour adds.
“But to be radical is to have a sense of historical process. I consider myself radical because I go to the root of things—because I have that historical vision. And people often forget that being broad in politics can mean being radical in substance.”
He’s also rejected by the right for defending a “science of projection”—an economy rooted in long-term planning, which he sees as the core formula behind China’s success in building socialism.
His favorite thinkers along those lines include Ignacio Rangel, Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, Darcy Ribeiro, and Celso Furtado.
According to Jabbour, the main contradiction in Brazil today isn’t between fascism and democracy per se, but between a submissive, neoliberal fascism and a true national development project.
“You’re not alone anymore,” Reinaldo Azevedo tells him at the end of the interview. The author of this piece disagrees with Jabbour on that point—and a few others.
First, Jabbour is not alone. He may be in the minority, but he’s not isolated. There are people trying to think strategically about Brazil. What’s desperately needed, though, are more forums, events, and spaces to bring these people and ideas together.
A second critique—more philosophical than polemical—is that a culture of planning must necessarily include political planning. If we aim for long-term economic projects, the same should apply to politics. This is especially important in dispelling the clouds of pessimism.
Before China reached the political stage that enabled its astonishing development, it went through a long and painful period of political maturation.
We are living through our own “hundred years of humiliation.” We’ve overthrown two “dynasties”—the neoliberal one of the 1990s and the fascist one in 2022—but both still have their tentacles in today’s politics. Only when we crush them once and for all—through a medium- to long-term strategy—will we be ready to begin our own accelerated development journey, cutting across this country like China did, with high-speed trains.