Technology and 5G, telemedicine, education and connectivity, but also investments, reindustrialization, energy transition and climate change. Brazilian President Lula returns to Beijing to talk about peace in Ukraine but the focus of the visit is on trade agreements. 15 agreements signed in the Chinese capital between Lula and Xi Jinping including one on the development of a CBERS 6 satellite, to monitor the Amazon region, violently deforested especially in the Bolsonaro era. The other agreements concern trade facilitation, investment promotion and food standards applied to food trade according to the Brazilian newspaper Valor Econo'mico.

The Brazilian president's first stop in Shanghai, in one of the most important research and development centers of Huawei, the hi-tech company strongly opposed by the US and many Western countries: Huawei could be a potential security risk, and in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro's son, Eduardo, openly accused it of espionage. Therefore, innovation first of all to ensure economic and technological growth, in order to make Brazil credible as a major player in the international geopolitical chessboard. "The time when Brazil was absent from major world decisions has passed. We are back on the international scene, after an inexplicable absence." said Lula as soon as he arrived in Shanghai. But the talks with Beijing aim to strengthen a commercial partnership between the two countries born and grown in the last twenty years, damaged above all in the diplomatic sphere in the isolationist era of the ultraconservative Bolsonaro, who on more than one occasion has attacked China in ways considered by Beijing decidedly offensive.

So on the one hand a strong cooling of political relations between the two countries during the government of the former president of Brazil, on the other the logic of realpolitik that have maintained a good level of economic and commercial exchanges between Brazil and China. Every year, China buys tens of billions of dollars of soybeans, the basis of China's diet, beef, poultry, wood pulp, iron ore, sugar cane, cotton and crude oil. Cellulose is the main industrialized product. For its part, Brazil imports pharmaceuticals, machines and plants, telecommunications components and fertilizers from China. Chinese companies are involved in massive public works in the country such as the construction of the São Paulo metro line. Not only that: at the beginning of April, the Brazilian government announced a novelty destined to have a profound impact on trade relations between the two countries but also on the framework of global trade: trade between Brazil and China will be conducted in their respective currencies, without using the US dollar. This means that they will take place in Brazilian reals and yuan and no longer in dollars as normally happens in international transactions. The tendency to replace the dollar with other currencies has begun to assert itself even since Russia, under economic sanctions, trades with foreign countries with currencies other than the dollar: this has led some analysts to suppose that an alternative economic axis to the Western one, led by China, is taking shape. In the vision of the New Silk Road, Latin America has an increasingly important role and Brazil would like to have the leading role while some countries, such as Honduras for example, are aware of it to the point of having suspended diplomatic relations with Taiwan to establish them with the People's Republic of China. Brazil also plays a leading role through former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who has held a prestigious post, the leadership of the New Development Bank, supported by China.

During her first stop in Shanghai, Lula met her to congratulate her and attend the swearing-in ceremony.

The institution proposes itself as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, controlled mainly by the United States and its Western allies. It focuses on BRICS. Established over 7 years ago, the bank has approved 99 loan projects totaling more than $34 billion, mainly for infrastructure, China's foreign ministry said. A large part of the credit was allocated to Brazil with particular attention to the São Paulo metro line. "China has become the largest foreign investor in Brazil in the last 13 years," says Brazilian lawyer Durval de Noronha Goyos, founder of the first international law firm in Latin America, professor of Chinese Language and Culture at the University of São Paulo (UNESP), member of the Portuguese Academy of Letters and Culture. China is Brazil's main trading partner and in 2022 trade between the two countries reached $150 billion with $89.7 billion exported by Brazilians to China. Brazil alone received nearly half (48%) of Chinese investment in Latin America between 2007 and 2020, or more than $70 billion. In 2021, 28 major projects were launched, particularly in the energy sector (48%) and information technology

"A strategic partnership whose foundations rest on the 1948 constitution despite the fact that diplomatic relations between Brazil and China were established in 1974".

And recent are the cultural relations between the two countries, a slow mutual discovery of two distant worlds that nevertheless have come closer thanks to the intense economic and commercial exchange. Mutual knowledge has only deepened in the last two decades. Twenty years ago in Brazil nothing was known about China and the same happened in China, where Brazil was an absolutely unknown country.