After years of dithering, Brazil will reportedly not join China’s trillion-dollar connectivity project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI.) President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s special presidential advisor on International affairs, Celso Amorim, told O Globo newspaper that Brazil wants to advance its relationship with China without signing an “accession agreement.”
Rather, it would like to pursue “synergies” with China on a project-by-project basis. “They [China] call it the belt [and road] … and they can give whatever names they want, but what matters is that there are projects that Brazil has defined as a priority and that may or may not be accepted [by Beijing,]” he said.
