Brazil’s Growth Depends on China

October 6, 2010

In America, we often hear complaints about the trade deficit between China and the U.S. but seldom China’s trade with the rest of the world.

One example is Brazil.

On the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, which is the commercial heartland of Brazil and home to 17 million, people are in a fever over China–but that fever is not the same as in the U.S.

With limited resources , China has been buying raw materials from all over the globe helping keep raw material prices up.  This has benefited Brazil.

China is the world’s most populous nation but only has 7% of the world’s fresh water, 3% of the globe’s forests and 6% of the land that grows food.

However, Brazil has what China does not have–water, forests and land to grow food on.

Today that has made Brazil the largest national economy in Latin America. In 2009, China moved past the U.S. to become Brazil’s largest trading partner. Source: Telegraph.com.uk

Trade between China and Brazil is not a one-way street. China is also investing in Brazil in areas such as telecommunications, pipelines, shipping, manufacturing, the oil industry, etc.

In fact, a BBC, World Service poll explored people’s opinions in 33 countries and discovered that China had almost twice the positive influence globally that the U.S. has. Source: Global Scan.com

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Love, Business and War

June 2, 2010

What happens today will be history tomorrow. With that in mind, I copied this opening quote from what Willi Paul wrote for Sustain Lane.com, “By stealing our technology, copying our products, forcing us into a trade deficit, manipulating their own currency and then buying our debt, the Chinese may win the long-term war of globalization.” Paul’s rant goes on with examples of how the Chinese are unscrupulous spies and thieves.

Western Opium destroying Chinese lives

If America and the rest of the Western world are in a trade war with China, the Chinese did not fire the first shot. In the 18th century, the powerful Qianlong Emperor rejected proposed trade and cultural exchanges with the British Empire and said the Qing Empire had no need for goods and services the British could provide.

The Western powers did not like being told “no”, so during the 19th century two Opium Wars were fought with China to force the door to trade and Christianity open—I recall that Japan was forced to trade with the West too, which resulted in the bombing of Pearl Harbor leading to World War II.

In fact, those trade wars started by Western powers with China in the 19th century aren’t over yet and the rules of fair play do not apply to love, business and war.

See The Reasons Why China is Studying Singapore

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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