This book sets out to explore the new role of China in Brazilian politics and geopolitics. As China has become Brazil's biggest trade partner, Brazil's political economy has been transformed in subterranean ways, and China's role in the global economy has become a hot topic in Brazilian politics. By bringing into light a new generation of Brazilian scholars, this book seeks to consolidate the scholarship developed in the last decade and promote a new approach to Brazil-China relations, written from the perspective of the global south.

This book re-examines the relationship between development strategy and political regime in twentieth-century Brazil. The first part of the study examines the beginning in the 1920s and 1930s of the centralized regime and state-centered development model later challenged in the 1980s, taking into account the economic and political role of Sao Paulo relative to the federal government. The analysis provides a distinctive account of the regime ruling Brazil from the 1930s through the 1980s. The second part focuses on the process of economic and political change in the 1980s and 1990s, paying particular attention to the Cardoso administration.

This book critically examines the driving forces, discourses, and conflicts surrounding Chinese investments in overseas farmland, with a specific focus on Australia. With growing amounts of finance channeled into the purchase of overseas food and farming assets, China has become a frontrunner in the global land rush. Unlike much of the existing literature that focuses on emerging economies such as Brazil or Africa, this book examines Chinese farmland purchases in the developed country context of Australia. Based on four years of extensive field work in Australia and China, it traces the encounters and interactions between investors, regulators, deal brokers, farmers, and eaters that shape the ways in which individual Chinese investment projects materialize in the Australian countryside. In contrast to conventional wisdom portraying China’s overseas land rush as a state-led strategy to feed the Chinese population, this book reveals that Chinese investments in Australian farmland have been propelled by the intersecting interests of international finance and business elites looking to cash in on booming Chinese demand for high-quality, Western food products. This book provides a unique transnational perspective on China’s overseas farmland purchases and shows how Chinese farmland investments produce uneven geographies of agri-food globalization that cut across national borders. Through the lens of China’s agri-engagement in Australia, this book advances our theoretical understanding of the new types of power relations and dynamics shaping an increasingly multi-polar agri-food system. This book will be useful to students and scholars of agri-food studies, Chinese studies and globalization with an interest in the global land rush and the shifting contours of the global agri-food system.

Instead of emphasizing China as a developing country, Chinese President Xi Jinping has identified China as a big power and accentuated China’s big power status. This book explores the narratives and driving forces behind China's big power ambition. Three narratives rooted in Sino-centralism are examined. One is China’s demands for the reform of global governance to reflect the values and interests of China as a rising power. Another is China’s Belt and Road Initiative to construct a nascent China-centred world order. The third is the China model and self-image promotion in the developing countries. There are many forces that have driven or constrained China’s big power ambition. This collection focuses on two sets of forces. One is China’s domestic politics and economic incentives and disincentives. The other is China’s geo-political and geo-economic interests. These forces have both motivated and constrained China’s big power ambition. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

The last quarter of the twentieth century was a period of economic crises, increasing indebtedness as well as financial instability for Latin America and most other developing countries; in contrast, China showed amazingly high growth rates during this time and has since become the third largest economy in the world. Based on several case studies, this volume assesses how China's rise - one of the most important recent changes in the global economy - is affecting Latin America's national politics, political economy and regional and international relations. Several Latin American countries benefit from China's economic growth, and China's new role in international politics has been helpful to many leftist governments' efforts in Latin America to end the Washington Consensus. The contributors to this thought provoking volume examine these and the other causes, effects and prospects of Latin America's experiences with China's global expansion from a South - South perspective.

China's future is arguably the most consequential question in global affairs. Having enjoyed unprecedented levels of growth, China is at a critical juncture in the development of its economy, society, polity, national security, and international relations. The direction the nation takes at this turning point will determine whether it stalls or continues to develop and prosper. Will China be successful in implementing a new wave of transformational reforms that could last decades and make it the world's leading superpower? Or will its leaders shy away from the drastic changes required because the regime's power is at risk? If so, will that lead to prolonged stagnation or even regime collapse? Might China move down a more liberal or even democratic path? Or will China instead emerge as a hard, authoritarian and aggressive superstate? In this new book, David Shambaugh argues that these potential pathways are all possibilities - but they depend on key decisions yet to be made by China's leaders, different pressures from within Chinese society, as well as actions taken by other nations. Assessing these scenarios and their implications, he offers a thoughtful and clear study of China's future for all those seeking to understand the country's likely trajectory over the coming decade and beyond.