The Trade That Didn’t Turn Right: Brazil, China, and the Limits of Ideology

Jair Bolsonaro campaigned largely on an anti-China, pro-Washington platform. Still, he governed for four years over the fastest-growing trade relationship in Brazil’s modern history. The lesson is not about Bolsonaro. It is that financial dependency on China now sets the boundaries of what any Brazilian government, left or right, can do, and because Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy, that boundary shapes the region.

South America’s rightward turn since 2023 has produced a steady stream of commentary asking whether the region is “pivoting away” from China and back toward the United States. The answer, at least in the case of the region’s largest economy, is that the question rests on a premise the numbers don’t support. Brazil already ran this experiment. It elected an avowedly anti-China, pro-American far-right president in 2018, and the result was not decoupling. It was acceleration.

The Bolsonaro Test Case

Before his election in 2018, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s position on China was unambiguous: he accused Beijing of trying to buy up Brazil rather than trade with it (BBC, 2019), and his early foreign policy team, led by Ernesto Araújo, built an explicitly pro-U.S., pro-Trump foreign policy doctrine that broke with decades of Brazilian diplomatic tradition of strategic non-alignment (Guardian, 2019).

The test failed. A peer-reviewed study of the period found that Bolsonaro’s foreign policy rhetoric toward China did genuinely shift. But “despite the strong remarks and a visit to Taiwan, Brazil’s partnership with China remained strong as trade between the two countries reached all-time highs” and this shift “did not disrupt the broader relationship due to the pre-existing partnership and widening asymmetry between the two countries” (Bessimo & Amorim Neto, 2024). Chinese investment in Brazil, the same study notes, actually increased under Bolsonaro (Bessimo & Amorim Neto, 2024).

The single most telling data point may be diplomatic rather than economic: in November 2019, ten months into Bolsonaro’s term, Brazil hosted Xi Jinping for the 11th BRICS Summit in Brasília (Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2026). A president who ran on distancing Brazil from China spent his first year in office rolling out the red carpet for BRICS’ most consequential member.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Brazil–China bilateral trade reached $36.9 billion in 2009, the year China first overtook the United States to become Brazil’s largest trading partner (SECEX, 2026). By 2020, in the middle of Bolsonaro’s term, it had reached $102.5 billion according to Brazil’s own Secretariat of Foreign Trade (SECEX, 2026), even as the pandemic collapsed trade worldwide. By 2022, his final full year, it reached over $150 billion (SECEX, 2026). U.S.–Brazil goods trade grew across the same period, but from a smaller base and at a materially slower pace.

Figure 1: Brazil’s trade with China outpaced its trade with the United States throughout the one Brazilian presidency that ran explicitly on reducing dependence on Beijing. The gap didn’t narrow during the anti-China administration — it widened.

By 2024, bilateral Brazil–China trade reached $158 billion, and by 2025 a record $170.9 billion, the tenth consecutive year at an all-time high (SECEX, 2026). Notably, this run of records spans two ideologically opposite presidencies: Bolsonaro’s far-right government and Lula’s return to the center-left in 2023. The line didn’t bend at the inauguration in either direction.

Why Ideology isn’t the Load-bearing Variable

The structural reason is straightforward and Brazil-specific: China is the primary buyer for exactly the commodities Brazil’s economy is built to produce. Soybeans, crude oil, and iron ore made up the overwhelming share of Brazil’s exports to China in 2024, with China absorbing 44 percent of Brazil’s total oil exports alone that year, more than triple the next-largest buyer (Brazil Energy Insight, 2026). None of that depends on who occupies the Planalto. It depends on Chinese industrial demand, Brazilian agricultural capacity, and a supply relationship built over two decades of infrastructure and financing commitments that no single administration can unwind in a four-year term.

This is also why the U.S.–China trade war has, twice now, worked in Brazil’s favor regardless of who was president: when China imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural exports in 2018, Brazilian soybean exports to China grew by nearly $7 billion in a single year, “a permanent expansion” of Brazil’s share, according to Brazil’s own central bank (Banco Central do Brasil, 2025).

The 2025 round of U.S. tariffs is reported to be repeating the pattern (China Law Vision, 2025). A trade conflict initiated in Washington keeps making Brazil more financially dependent on Beijing, an outcome no Brazilian election has the power to switch off.

Why this Matters Beyond Brazil

Brazil is not just one node in South America’s political map, it is the region’s largest economy, and its trade relationship with China functions as a ceiling on how far any rightward shift elsewhere in the region can actually reduce Chinese economic influence.

If the country best positioned to attempt decoupling (with a president who campaigned on it, allied himself rhetorically with Washington, and governed for a full term) could not slow the relationship down, the argument that Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, or Colombia’s incoming government will meaningfully reduce their own countries’ China dependency deserves real skepticism.

This is where the region’s two live institutional processes matter more than any individual election. BRICS membership, once granted, has proven stickier than campaign rhetoric: Brazil remains a founding member regardless of who is president, and hosted the bloc’s leader without incident during its most nominally anti-China administration.

The EU–Mercosur Partnership Agreement, signed in January 2026 after a quarter-century of negotiation and now provisionally applying as of May 2026, is the first structural counterweight with any real scale, but it took 25 years to reach this point, a timeline no single presidency comes close to matching. Brazil’s next election, in October 2026, will change who negotiates on the country’s behalf inside that agreement. It will not change the agreement’s timeline, and it will not undo two decades of Chinese demand for Brazilian soybeans, oil, and iron ore.

The pattern to watch over the next several years, then, isn’t which party wins in Brasília. It’s whether the EU–Mercosur agreement survives full ratification by all twenty-seven EU states — a process that could take years and that the European Parliament has already referred to the Court of Justice of the EU for review (European Parliament Legislative Train, 2026) — and whether that agreement, if it survives, can shift Brazil’s trade gravity in a way that four years of explicit political hostility toward Beijing never managed.

Bibliography

• Banco Central do Brasil (2025) ‘Brazil’s bilateral trade with the U.S. and China’, Inflation Report, June. Available at: https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/ri/inflationreport/202506/rpm202506b4i.pdf
• BBC (2019) ‘Um ano após reclamar que China “compraria o Brasil”, Bolsonaro quer vender estatais e commodities em visita a Xi Jinping’, October. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-50161509
• Bessimo, T.P.B. and Amorim Neto, O. (2024) ‘The Brazilian extreme-right and China’. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1866802X241263362
• Brazil Energy Insight (2026) ‘China’s purchases boost Brazilian oil exports to second highest level in history’, April. Available at: https://brazilenergyinsight.com/2026/04/09/chinas-purchases-boost-brazilian-oil-exports-to-second-highest-level-in-history/
• Brazilian Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services (MDIC), Secretariat of Foreign Trade (Secex) (2026) Comex Stat, June. Available at: https://comexstat.mdic.gov.br/pt/geral
• China Law Vision (2025) ‘Opportunities and challenges of Brazil-China trade under the impact of US tariffs’, 15 May. Available at: https://www.chinalawvision.com/2025/05/international-trade/opportunities-and-challenges-of-brazil-china-trade-under-the-impact-of-us-tariffs/
• European Parliament (2026) ‘The trade pillar of the EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement’, Legislative Train Schedule. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-global-europe-leveraging-our-power-and-partnerships/file-eu-mercosur-association-agreement
• The Guardian (2019) ‘Brazilian diplomats “disgusted” as Bolsonaro pulverizes foreign policy’, 25 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/25/brazilian-diplomats-disgusted-bolsonaro-pulverizes-foreign-policy
• The Telegraph (2009) ‘China overtakes the US as Brazil’s largest trading partner’, May. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/5296515/China-overtakes-the-US-as-Brazils-largest-trading-partner.html