The Wall Street Journal reports that Brazil and China used the G-20 meeting in Rio de Janiero to move closer together. The article said:
As Xi Jinping prepares for a thorny trade relationship with President-elect Donald Trump, he is cultivating a rapport with someone he calls a like-minded good friend, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The resource-hungry Chinese economy depends on Brazilian iron ore, soybeans, beef, oil and other commodities to the point where Brazil is the rare country with a trade surplus with China, its biggest trading partner. Brazil, in turn, has an appetite for a variety of Chinese semiconductors, fertilizers, steel and auto parts, chemicals and vehicles.
The leaders said they signed a memorandum of understanding between a company affiliated with Brazil’s Ministry of Communications and Shanghai Spacesail Technologies, which operates a low-orbit satellite communications system. Xinhua news agency said the Chinese group would offer communication internet services to remote areas of Brazil.
The arrangements could pave the way for China to launch low-orbit communication satellites from Brazil’s geographically well-situated Alcântara Space Center. That could spur Beijing in the emerging space race with the U.S. and give da Silva new options for guiding communications over Brazil’s vast territory, including the Amazon.
When I was the Science Counselor at the American embasy in Brazilia, Brazil was working on developing the space capability that it is now planning to share with the Chinese. The Brazilians wanted to buy American equipment for their project, and selected a US company to provide communications and tracking hardware for it. However, the Pentagon denied an exprt license for the equipment because it said the equipment could be used to develop a military missile. This infuriated the Brazilians because it held up their whole space program. We, the State Department, finally got the US to reverse this decision and approve the export, on the basis that the equipment was not suitable for develpng such a missile, but the damage was already done to the trade relationship between Brazil and the US. I doubt that Chine will make a similar mistake.