Brazil´s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has begun what is widely expected to be one of the most important and strategic international trips of his third term, with a delegation of key officials and hundreds of businessmen.
In this state visit to China, Brazil’s biggest trading partner, until Friday, Lula will travel to the cities of Shanghai and Beijing and meet with the Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In his last interview before departure, granted to the program A Voz do Brasil, Lula highlighted the purpose of the trip, which will be a kind of relaunch of relations with the Asian country.
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“In China, we are going to consolidate our relationship with China, I am going to invite [President] Xi Jinping to come to Brazil, to get to know Brazil in a bilateral meeting, to show the projects of interest. What we want is to build a partnership with the Chinese, to form a partnership with the Chinese, so that they can invest in things that do not exist, a new highway, railroad, hydroelectric plant, anything that means something new for Brazil,” he said.
The trip to China is Lula’s fourth international visit after taking office. The president has already been to Argentina, Uruguay and the United States. Lula also received, in Brasilia, the Prime Minister of Germany, Olaf Scholz, at the end of January.
Part of the entourage that arrived before the president managed to advance on important issues. One of them was the end of the embargo on the sale of Brazilian beef after 29 days of suspension. The decision, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, was taken after a meeting between Minister Carlos Fávaro and the Minister of General Administration of Chinese Customs, Yu Jianhua, in Beijing, on March 23.
With Lula’s presence, it is expected that more than 20 agreements between China and Brazil will be signed. One of them will be for the construction of CBERS-6, the sixth of a line of satellites built under the bilateral partnership. According to the Brazilian government, the new model´s technology allows the monitoring of biomes such as the Amazon Forest even with clouds.
President Lula will participate in the inauguration ceremony of former President Dilma Rousseff as head of the BRICS’ New Development Bank.
On Friday, the official agenda in the Chinese capital includes a meeting, in the morning, with the president of the National People’s Congress, Zhao Leji, at the Great Palace of the People. Afterwards, the President will lay flowers at a ceremony in Tiananmen Square.
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The same day, Lula will meet with the Prime Minister of China, Li Qiang, and later will be received in an official ceremony by President Xi Jinping. The program will have an open meeting, a ceremony for the signing of bilateral agreements and then a closed bilateral meeting.
2023 also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of trade relations between Brazil and China, a year before the establishment of Sino-Brazilian diplomatic relations.
The official delegation led by Lula includes eight ministers (Finance, Environment and Climate Change, Agriculture and Livestock, Science, Technology and Innovation, External Relations, Mines and Energy, Agrarian Development, Development and Social Assistance) and five governors (Bahia, Ceará, Maranhão, Pará, Rio Grande do Norte) among other State officials and around 200 representatives of Brazilian companies.
