On September 29, the president of the New Development Bank (NDB), Dilma Rousseff, received the highest honor awarded by the People’s Republic of China: the Friendship Medal. Rousseff, who will lead the bank until July 2025, talked to journalists from Brazilian media outlets at the State Guest House, Diaoyutai, in western Beijing.
At the press conference, she discussed Brazil’s possible entry into the new Belt and Road Initiative, the future of the bank she chairs, the possibilities of increasing the use of local currencies instead of the US dollar, industrial policies in Brazil, and the growth and presence of the far right in the world.
Regarding the Belt and Road, Rousseff highlighted the initiative’s characteristics and advantages of the initiative, such as the possibility of setting up industrial and technological parks and the fact that the initiative does not require exclusivity. Rousseff concluded by saying “I think Brazil has to take advantage of all the opportunities that come its way.”
“The Bank has a great characteristic: it is made by and for the countries of the Global South,” said Rousseff about the NDB, also known as the BRICS Bank. The bank’s priorities are to finance the private sector with local currencies increasingly and to boost sustainable projects.
The president of the NDB mentioned a project the bank has started working on to produce organic fertilizers from organic waste. This project is one of the partnership initiatives between the Chinese University of Agriculture and the University of Brasilia.
Read the interview below:
Brasil de Fato: Should Brazil join the Belt and Road Initiative?
Dilma Rousseff: the Belt and Road Initiative is a Chinese program, a good international cooperation program. Why? Firstly, because it is one of its kind and has a broad scope: US$1 trillion has been spent over the last 10 years. It covers infrastructure, roads, ports, airports, digital infrastructure, social structures, security, health and education, and even sewage and drinking water.
This is important for Brazil and for the countries of the Global South too. The proposal is to make a partnership focusing on industrialization, with industries, industrial parks and technology transfer. That’s the greatest opportunity for international cooperation that the Belt and Road brings. And the issue of industrial parks, if you look along the entire route of the Belt and Road, especially when it comes to Global South countries, such as those in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates have industrial and technological parks, and so is Indonesia.
I think this is the fundamental proposal for Brazil. They call all their international cooperation here the Belt and Road Program. So, I believe that a partnership in which you take advantage of all the possibilities is very important.
The second aspect is that Belt and Road doesn’t require exclusivity. You can partner with the Belt and Road and as many others as you like. The third feature that I think is important is that both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank are in related or parallel investments, including both UNEP and UNDP.
Fourth: for the first time, you see a country with international prominence proposing common development. Usually, a division of labor was proposed: “Look, I’ll industrialize and you produce commodities.” Today, producing commodities is fundamental.
For example, we cannot give up being the world’s largest food, agricultural and protein products exporter to China. But what we cannot do is accept an international division of labor in which we produce commodities, and they produce manufactured products. This division of labor is old, outdated and does not interest us.
We have to look for partnerships that include the transfer technology. How do you reach out to developed countries? I believe in two things: I believe that a country has to invest a lot in education and, at the same time, try to build a partnership with the best international institutes. That’s why I took part in Science Without Borders [Program] in the past [during her terms as Brazil’s president] because we need post-doctoral, doctoral and technical training to be able to develop technology or be a recipient of technology.
You have to be able to transfer technology from other countries. If I’m not mistaken, England was the only country that didn’t copy from any other country to make the Industrial Revolution. The United States and Germany copied from England; Japan copied from the United States; Korea, from Japan and the United States; China, from the Asian Tigers and the West. Countries are always copying each other. The process of transferring technology and achieving the Fourth Industrial Revolution is crucial for Brazil.
Brazil can’t just be a consumer of e-commerce apps or Uber, but we must be able to use all the factors of the Fourth Industrial Revolution [for Brazil’s benefit]. When people say that Chinese electric cars are cheaper, it’s because there are more robots on the factory floor, making labor productivity higher. You put a lot of robots in all the activities and you’re going to get a better, cheaper car, and you’re going to introduce technology that you don’t see in other cars.
I want that for Brazil. I believe that Brazil will have a partnership with China, a high-quality strategic partnership. What will it be called? Each country will have its own program. We’ll have the PAC [Growth Acceleration Program] and other programs to reindustrialize the country and boost scientific and technological development, education, science and technology. They [Chineses] have a cooperation process. I think Brazil has to take advantage of all the opportunities that come its way.
What are the priorities of the New Development Bank and what are the prospects for the institution?
The bank is for the big emerging countries of the Global South, made by and for these countries. Its fundamental objective is the development of infrastructure in all areas, with a very strong focus on sustainability, that is, combating the effects of climate change and [developing] effective actions to help reduce the temperature to the parameters defined by the UN and all the countries that took part in the Paris Agreement, which is a 1.5% increase in temperature compared to the pre-industrial era. We are committed to this.
We invest in renewable energy, wind, solar, hydroelectric, transmission networks… we invest, for example, in something I think is very important: the issue of waste. I don’t know if you remember that, in Brazil, we have legislation prohibiting to bury or burn waste. We’ve often thought about making energy from waste, from biomass, but the problem is that it’s expensive.
Here they have a project that I think is very important: the bank is working on a high-capacity biodigester. It transforms organic waste through biodigestion into organic fertilizer. We also help the countries participating in the NDB with industrialization and the search for better technology.
I’m due to leave [the presidency of the NDB] at the beginning of July [2025] and I intend to return to Brazil. In Brazil, my intention is to help in any way I can, with everything I’ve learned, with the contacts I’ve made here. I think Brazil has a lot to learn from every country in the world. We have to be open to cooperation. Cooperation will always be a community thing.
Of all the countries I’ve spoken to about technology transfer, I think China has the greatest capacity for cooperation. I’m a great believer in President Xi Jinping’s proposal to build a community of shared futures.
I have this in common with President Xi Jinping, we were presidents when the bank was set up. We are building this bank. It has to expand, Algeria has come in… This is a slow process. The bank is out of its infancy and is reaching adolescence.
We don’t demand any criteria for lending. We don’t say: “Look, you have to privatize your server in order to access 1 billion dollars”. There is no such thing as conditionality. I expect the bank to keep growing, we’re moving forward, one step at a time. Nobody wants to think that this bank will suddenly become a huge bank like other decade-old multilateral banks.
We started with five countries: Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa. Now we have the Emirates, Bangladesh, Egypt and Algeria, nine countries. Many other countries have already applied to join. It’s a slow, cautious process because we have to provide the conditions for these countries to be present.
Three characteristics will guide the bank in the coming years. The first is that it will be increasingly concerned with infrastructure, sustainable development, the environment, industrialization and technology transfer. The second is that the bank will expand into the countries of the Global South, carefully, calmly, but expand. And thirdly, a bank that will increasingly seek to finance the private sector with local currency to ensure that we comply… because we have a plan from 2022 to 2026, in which we have to have 30% of our investment for the private sector and another 30% in local currency.
Before you moved to China, you knew a lot about the country, and I’d like you to share what you’ve learned during your time here. What are some of the characteristics that you think are important to highlight about the Chinese government?
That’s a very good question. I’ll tell you a few things that I find very interesting. I admire some of the characteristics of [the Chinese] governance. China starts from the premise that we are humans and we will make mistakes. So, no project is done without this premise and there are lots of pilot projects. They make pilot projects and test them, [always] on the assumption that the probability is that we will make mistakes because it is an intrinsic characteristic of humans.
In Brazil, many people – including the press – assume that everything is going to be right, but there is no such assumption. When you assume that the probability is that there will be a mistake, you can try and learn by trying.
The second: I discovered that the Chinese reform and opening-up never ends, there is no final day for it. From an economic point of view, they are always reforming and opening up to competition. China has a very strong private sector and a public sector that is smaller than the private sector, but in both there is competition. You rarely have a monopoly company, but it’s important to realize that to build a country, you always have to adapt to reality – and the reality is changing.
Here, you don’t work in the very short term. You don’t think of “chicken flight” as the pattern of growth, but of constant change, and constant alteration of the process. I thought this was a strange story: there’s Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up, and then there’s the other one that comes with Zhu Rongji, all the reform of the banks and state companies, the reduction of state companies. Now, there’s a new process and they all kind of expand over time. This is part of the country’s long-term vision.
Would you do the national champions policy differently today?
The lack of competitive practices in the Brazilian private sector led an American scholar to say that capitalism had to be applied in Brazil. Because Brazilian capitalism was based on the assumption that you had to protect companies against all competitive processes.
China has already had national champions. You can’t pretend that you don’t need national champions. When they started reforming and opening up at the time of prime minister Zhu Rongji, he said: mantain the big ones and privatize the small ones. That’s how the process of privatizing state companies happened. They reduced the number of state-owned companies and preserved the big ones because that was China’s ability to enter the international market.
National champions are the ability to build large companies and enter the international market. You have to build your competitive condition. You can’t compete without changing the economic conditions…
That outdated version that has a contradiction between the state and private enterprise, the state and the market, is completely outdated. In any country in the world, the state has a great capacity to favor its companies and ensure that its market is more competitive, that you have industrial policies.
Today, I find it very strange… For example, Folha and O Globo [two of the biggest Brazilian newspapers] spent their lives saying that industrial policy was a crime, and that anyone who implemented an industrial policy was in fact making a monumental mistake. So, can you explain to me what the United States is doing today?
The world is changing, mainly because the Fourth Industrial Revolution is going to require a lot of resources. I think Brazil has all the conditions to transform our country into what it can be. Because we have everything. What country has oil, highly productive land, the capacity to produce protein, mineral resources, the industry that we have? We’ve lost some of it, but we still have it.
We’re a country that used to produce jets until recently. We’re going to start producing jets again. There’s no such thing as a division of labor… What’s clear at the current historic stage is that no country in the developed world accepts a division of labor in which I don’t produce any industrial products, machinery or equipment; I just import, you produce – no one accepts that, and why should we?
The BRICS Summit will take place in a few weeks in Russia, and one of the agendas will be de-dollarization. What are the perspectives on this possibility?
Firstly, I don’t think it’s de-dollarization; the issue is the use of different currencies as it did with the euro at one point. And if you look today, what is happening? The multiplication of platforms in local currencies. It is the following: the central banks issue a currency, Central Bank Digital Currency, and start exchanging with each other, eliminating the previous methods of payment.
In the case of the BRICS, of the NDB, it is planned that we will use local currencies because the bank is committed to financing the private sector. The private sector suffers the consequences of the increase in the cost of international financing, due to the fact that it doesn’t control either the interest rate or the exchange rate.
When, for example, the Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the United States, decides to change its policy by raising interest rates, those who have lent in dollars have a change in their debt. We want the financing we do to be in local currency so that the flow of income and payments match up. The way it is, it doesn’t.
We lend funds to South Africa with rand [the South African national currency], and we do it here in China with pandabonds. We want to do it in Brazil and we want to do it in India. Brazil always has the problem of an extremely high interest rate compared to international standards, but you can always find creative ways [to deal with it].
Local currencies will increasingly become a financing tool. In Johannesburg, it was decided that the BRICS would carry out a whole process of research and analysis and would build a currency project. It’s not clear whether it will be a BRICS currency or several currencies from each country. What is fundamental is to have a payment system.
In some countries you can’t invest, you only have a sovereign loan. That is, you can only invest if the state signs off on it, otherwise, you can’t invest. Without financing, nobody is going to invest heavily in infrastructure. At that time, it was 30 years for hydroelectric plants, for large railroads, longer ones, 20 [years] more or less depending on whether it was thermal or gas, 15 to 25 for wind or solar, between 15 and 20 for roads, ports, airports. Up to 10 years in some cases for smaller roads. This requires long-term financing.
And there’s another serious problem going on around the world: a World Bank calculation shows that African countries pay interest rates on their debts that are four times higher than those of the United States, and six times higher than those of Germany. There is also a discrepancy between interest rates and access to liquidity.
How do you see the rise of anti-communism and the growth of the far right?
Brazil has to be careful. The whole classic anti-communist scheme of the 1950s is over. Nobody can live based on the Cold War vision. Brazil had a precarious anti-communist stance; it was considered that our president João Goulart was a hardened communist; he was removed from power.
I respect the Communist Party of China, but I don’t think that Brazil has to be communist. China says that it has a specifically Chinese path. Brazil must have its own path. But this Brazilian path is not the path of anti-communism.
It’s not the path of the Cold War vision, that can no longer happen in Latin America. What happened in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay can no longer happen. I respect what they have built here over the last 75 years, a country they should be proud of.
I don’t think the media should encourage this. Brazil today is in a situation very similar to what is also happening in the United States. The growth of the far right in the world is also due to a certain type of vision… “If you win, I lose”. This so-called zero-sum vision is very bad. This is also the Cold War vision, that there is a communist hiding behind every bush. Here there isn’t a communist hiding behind every bush but a country that mixes Marxist thinking and a 5,000-year-old civilization.
Why do they pay so much attention to education? It’s the same thing that happened in Japan. Japan imported a lot from China, and in Japan, Confucius is the basis for this immense appreciation of education. That’s what China is all about.
You can’t apply any model to Brazil if you don’t understand that we also have our bad side: we had slavery. I always say this: I was born in 1947. Brazil’s Emperor Pedro the Second took an anti-slavery stance and the New Republic was a little nostalgic for slavery. So, the Old Republic was a republic that didn’t give fundamental guarantees when it freed the slaves.
I think 1930 was a milestone. The end of slavery was completed in 1930 when workers’ rights were recognized in Brazil. I was born 17 years later. I know all the prejudices against slavery that still exist in our country, such as what President Lula often says: people couldn’t travel by plane, because the middle class were the ones who traveled by plane.
We have to work to live and in our own way. And this story… Everyone who preaches this Cold War mentality or old-fashioned anti-communism ideas has other interests. I can’t believe that walking down a street in Shanghai you think that communists eat little children, I can’t believe it.
Edited by: Dayze Rocha
