With just a few days to go before Brazil’s presidential runoff on 25 October, Invent the Future reporter Sara Vivacqua speaks to Isabel dos Anjos Leandro – Brazilian political scientist, long-standing Workers’ Party (PT) activist and political educator from Minas Gerais – about what’s at stake.
They discuss the open campaign of US pressure on Brazil’s election and its links to the Bolsonaro family; the surprise first-round result, in which Flávio Bolsonaro edged ahead of Lula; where Lula can find the votes to win, from the undecided to the millions who abstained; the grassroots campaign spreading beyond the party and onto social media; what is really driving the Bolsonaro vote; and why a Flávio Bolsonaro victory, alongside a far-right Congress, would threaten the 1988 Constitution and the independence of the Supreme Court.
The interview is in Portuguese with English subtitles; an English translation of the transcript is below.
Sara Vivacqua: Today I’m here with Isabel dos Anjos Leandro, a Brazilian political scientist with a doctorate and post-doctorate, and a long-standing activist in the Workers’ Party, with a background in political education, party strategy and programme development.
Isabel is currently coordinator of Lula’s presidential campaign in Minas Gerais, and also works as a parliamentary adviser in Minas Gerais.
Isabel, thank you for joining us today here on Invent the Future.
Brazil goes to the polls on 25 October in a presidential runoff between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro. In this contribution to an International Manifesto Group webinar on the Brazilian elections, Carlos Martinez argues that the outcome matters far beyond Brazil’s borders: the election is a front line in the struggle between a declining US-led imperialist system and a rising multipolar world.
The talk sets out the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and Washington’s campaign of tariffs, sanctions, terrorist designations and alleged foreign financing against Lula’s Brazil; contrasts it with China’s partnership in trade, investment and industrial development; and looks at what a Bolsonaro government would mean for BRICS, for Palestine and Iran, and for the Global South.
Other speakers know far more than I do about Brazil’s domestic dynamics, so I’ll focus on what this election means for the wider Latin American region, for China, for BRICS, and for this overall, historic struggle between a declining US-led imperialist system and a rising multipolar world.
It’s my view that, of all the elections in the Americas this year, this is the one whose outcome matters most to the Trump regime, which is why it has been so flagrantly interfering, as we’ve been hearing. And the election is of critical importance to the Global South as well, essentially for the same reasons: Brazil is currently on the front line in this war between imperialism and multipolarity.
The Donroe Doctrine
The US National Security Strategy, published last December, promises to “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, and to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy”.
A few analysts interpreted this document as a sort of retreat into the US’s traditional backyard. But the criminal war on Iran, launched a couple of months later, in February this year, shows that the US is not retreating from anywhere. The document is about consolidating the Americas as a secure rear base for a long campaign against China, against Russia, against Iran, and against the peoples of the Global South more generally.
We’ve already seen what this ‘Trump Corollary’ looks like in reality. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been kidnapped, along with First Combatant Cilia Flores. The US is attempting to impose control over Venezuela’s abundant oil resources.
A talk given by Carlos Martinez to the Young Communist League’s Harry Pollitt School, on China’s international strategy on climate and the environment.
Carlos looks at what’s actually happening on the ground: China’s solar capacity has overtaken coal for the first time, its carbon emissions have been flat or falling for nearly two years, and it’s now exporting that green transition to the Global South – financing solar and wind projects across Africa, helping Cuba keep the lights on through a brutal US blockade, and making clean energy cheap enough for the rest of the world to actually use. The talk sets this against the record of the imperialist powers, and makes the case that China’s record isn’t an accident, but the product of a planned, socialist economy.
Transcript
Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me, and thanks to the Young Communist League for organising this year’s Harry Pollitt School – and for supporting the Socialist China Conference last weekend.
I’ve been asked to talk about China’s international strategy in relation to the environment.
Starts at home
China’s international role rests on what it has done at home, so let me start there briefly.
For years we were told that China was the world’s greatest climate villain – the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases; building coal plants left, right and centre.
It’s true, China is overall the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – albeit it’s a very large country with a population of 1.4 billion people, and a manufacturing powerhouse that engages in a great deal of industry, and its per capita emissions are half those of the United States or Canada.
It’s also true that China still burns more than half the world’s coal.
But there is an unmistakeable direction of travel. In July, China’s installed solar capacity overtook coal for the first time, reaching 1,286 gigawatts – around ten times Britain’s entire generating capacity from all sources. Coal has gone from around 80 percent of China’s energy mix a few decades ago to under 50 percent today, and this number continues to fall. Where new coal stations are built, these are typically to provide backup capacity for intermittent renewable sources, which means they’re playing an important role in the energy transition. In 2025, China added more solar than the rest of the world combined.
China’s carbon emissions have now been flat or falling for nearly two years. And last year, for the first time, China committed to an absolute cut in emissions: 7 to 10 percent below peak by 2035.
As is well known, China is by far the world leader in electric vehicles, electric buses, high-speed rail, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies.
None of this happened by accident. Carbon Brief recently went through the 72 thematic five-year plans published by Chinese ministries this year, and found that 54 of them – three quarters – include policies or targets related to climate change and energy. Decarbonisation in China runs through the whole system of economic planning.
That’s possible because the commanding heights of the economy are in public hands, because the major banks are state-owned, because even the private economy is regulated and incorporated into the planning system, and because economic priorities are connected to the long-term needs of society rather than the pursuit of short-term profit.
Affordable and renewable
The single biggest contribution China has made to the global fight against climate breakdown is something fairly prosaic: it has made clean energy cheap.
Over the last 15 years, the global cost of solar power has fallen by more than 80 percent, and wind by around 60 percent, almost exclusively the result of Chinese investment, innovation and scale. As Kevin Tu of Columbia University put it, “if the Chinese manufacturers had not brought down the cost of panels by more than 95 percent, we could not see so many installations across the world.”
This is a game changer for the Global South. Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources – meaning that it’s exposed to a hell of a lot of solar radiation – but until recently it was too expensive to leverage that. Now it isn’t.
Africa’s solar installations rose by 54 percent last year. And when the criminal US–Israeli war on Iran sent oil and gas prices through the roof this spring, countries across Asia and Africa responded by buying Chinese solar.
In March, according to Ember Energy, Chinese solar exports hit an all-time record of 68 gigawatts, equivalent to Spain’s entire solar capacity. Exports to Africa nearly tripled in a single month, and Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya each imported more than a gigawatt for the first time.
So every target in China’s five-year plan is also manifested in the green transition in the Global South.
Global cooperation
In 2021, Xi Jinping announced at the UN General Assembly that China would build no new coal-fired power plants abroad. Today, 59 percent of China’s energy projects in Africa are solar and wind.
Chinese companies have built the Benban solar park in Egypt, wind farms in Ethiopia and South Africa, hydroelectric stations in Zambia, and a battery-backed solar plant is going into every one of Zambia’s 156 constituencies.
And this is not about creating a relationship of dependency. China is helping countries in the Global South to build their own renewable energy industries. For example, when Zimbabwe decided to stop exporting raw lithium, a Chinese company committed 400 million dollars to building a processing plant there.
The most moving and most poignant example is Cuba. Facing a barbaric – let’s say it, genocidal – energy siege imposed by the Trump regime, with the national grid collapsing again and again, and tens of thousands of patients waiting for operations, China has helped Cuba install around 900 megawatts of solar power. At the Socialist China conference last Saturday, First Secretary at the Cuban Embassy Pablo Ginarte told us this had taken the renewable share of Cuba’s electricity from around 3 percent to 21 percent in a single year. As he put it: “The United States cannot blockade the sun”.
Bizarrely, there are some in the West, and in the Western left, who see all this progress and call it “green imperialism”. These modern-day Lenins have come up with a new definition of imperialism that doesn’t include domination or coercion; where a country can become an imperialist power without wars, coups, military bases, destabilisation campaigns, unilateral sanctions, economic coercion, unequal exchange or structural adjustment. Apparently China has become imperialist through building solar farms in Zambia. Either this is a stunning and important theoretical development, or it’s utter nonsense; I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Defending multilateralism
China has also been the most consistent defender of the international framework for tackling climate change. It insists on the Paris Agreement, and on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities – the idea that the rich countries, which caused the problem, should take the lead in cutting emissions and should provide technology and financial resources for sustainable development in the Global South.
Although, as an aside, in reality it’s China that’s doing the lion’s share of this work!
Meanwhile, Trump has pulled out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, and made “drill, baby, drill” the official energy policy of the most powerful country on Earth.
Not to mention waging war on Iran and supporting a genocide in Gaza, both of which are having devastating environmental consequences.
Meanwhile, Washington and Brussels slap tariffs on Chinese solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles – the very things the world needs most – and accuse China of “overcapacity” for making too many of them.
Why this matters
What does all this mean for us in Britain?
First, it means that the New Cold War is not only a threat to peace; it’s a threat to the planet. Every tariff on Chinese solar panels and every attempt to cut China out of supply chains makes the green transition slower and more expensive, in Britain as much as anywhere. A Britain that cooperated with China on renewable energy, on electric transport, on grid technology, would be doing far better on its climate commitments, and furthermore would bring down energy bills.
Second, it’s a reminder that socialism works. The West has had more than 30 years of climate summits, and we’ve been told the whole time that the market will sort it out, or that we can save the planet if only we take shorter showers and make sure we put our packaging in the right bin. China has shown that a green transition happens when a socialist state plans for it, invests in it and puts the long-term needs of humanity ahead of short-term profit.
And third, many people who care about the environment are starting to look at China with fresh eyes, and to ask why it is succeeding where our own rulers are failing. As young communists, you are well placed to help them find the answer.
Xi Jinping said last year that “however the world may change, China will not slow down its climate actions, will not reduce its support for international cooperation, and will not cease its efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind.”
Let’s do what we can to support that, and to build a world where cooperation, not coercion, is the guiding principle of international relations.
In a result that defied the pre-election polls, Flávio Bolsonaro took first place in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on 4 October, edging out President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of a runoff on 25 October. In the following article, Carlos Martinez and Sara Vivacqua examine why the far right did so well – a ruling class in crisis, the politics of fear and faith – and what is at stake in the second round.
They argue that a Bolsonaro victory would threaten the 1988 Constitution itself, hand Washington its biggest prize yet under the so-called Donroe Doctrine, and do enormous damage to the multipolar project and to the Amazon. Yet they also show why the material basis of China–Latin America cooperation is too strong to be disrupted on purely ideological grounds.
This article was first published in the Morning Star.
In a surprise result that defied pre-election polls, the far right had a very good night in Brazil last Sunday. Flávio Bolsonaro – son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup – took first place in the presidential election with 47 percent of the vote, against 45.2 percent for the incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. With neither candidate passing the 50 percent threshold, the two will meet again in a runoff on 25 October.
The bad news does not end with the presidential elections. Of the 54 Senate seats contested, 34 went to the right or far right, among them Michelle Bolsonaro and Carlos Bolsonaro, the former president’s wife and second son. Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) is now the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, with 121 seats to the Workers’ Party’s (PT) 70. The PT held on to its traditional strongholds in the north-east (the poorest region, with the highest proportion of Afro-Brazilians), but the overall picture is of a significant shift to the right.
A ruling class in crisis
Capital quickly delivered a favourable verdict: the Financial Times reports that the Brazilian real rose 4.2 percent against the dollar and the São Paulo stock exchange jumped almost 8 percent to a record high, as investors bet on a Bolsonaro government that would “mount rapid spending cuts” and dismantle environmental regulations. That should surprise nobody: always hostile to Lula and the PT, Brazil’s ruling class and its media stenographers have led a frenzied demonisation campaign against the left, portraying the PT as corrupt and incompetent.
The country is running a budget deficit of close to a tenth of GDP, with some of the highest interest rates in the world, and Lula has governed since 2023 alongside an obstructive, conservative-dominated Congress. In spite of these severe economic and political constraints, the PT government has taken Brazil off the UN Hunger Map, restored and expanded Bolsa Família, made bold commitments on environmental protection, and refused to subordinate the country’s foreign policy to Washington.
In the following article, Carlos Martinez draws on a recent visit to Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, to examine how the city has become at once a centre of frontier technology – home to DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics and Alibaba – and a testing ground for ecological civilisation.
Carlos traces both transformations back to Zhejiang’s “Eight-Eight Strategy”, launched in 2003 when Xi Jinping was provincial Party secretary, and shows how public institutions have created the conditions for innovation while directing it towards wider developmental goals. He sets out the material record of the green transition – distributed solar overtaking coal, clean rivers and a restored West Lake, a metro network that has grown fivefold in seven years – while also confronting the contradiction at its heart: the AI and cloud-computing industries that make Hangzhou a technology leader are among its fastest-growing sources of electricity demand.
The direction of technological change, he concludes, is a political choice, requiring “long-term planning, public investment and institutions capable of subordinating private profit to the common good”. The article complements Gary Wilson’s recent analysis of the US chip blockade and the discussion on AI and the new quality productive forces at the recent Socialist China Conference.
A version of this article first appeared in Beijing Review.
Visiting Hangzhou in April, the signs of change were everywhere: electric vehicles crowding the roads, an extensive metro system, e-bikes as a default mode of transport for millions, and well-maintained residential communities built around shared green space and public amenities.
Hangzhou has emerged simultaneously as a centre of frontier technology and a testing ground for ecological civilisation. It is home to DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics and Alibaba; it is also a city of restored waterways, expanding wetlands, distributed solar power and extensive low-carbon transport.
Both of these development threads have common roots in a strategy laid down more than two decades ago.
A twenty-year harvest
Hangzhou is now a megacity of 12.7 million people. Its economy reached 2.3 trillion yuan ($330 billion) in 2025, while the core industries of its digital economy account for 29.5 percent of GDP. This is not a small technology enclave surrounded by an otherwise traditional economy. Digital development has become one of the city’s principal productive forces.
The Western media discovered Hangzhou’s technology sector in early 2025, after the success of DeepSeek and the emergence of the so-called “six little dragons”: DeepSeek, Unitree, Game Science, Deep Robotics, BrainCo and Manycore Tech. The label is journalistic rather than official; what matters is the ecosystem beneath it.
Three of the six have founders who studied at Zhejiang University, which has established itself as one of the world’s leading research institutions. Those companies have also benefited from dense manufacturing supply chains, a large pool of engineers, competitive domestic markets and a local government willing to build institutions around emerging industries.
This is a story of public institutions creating the conditions in which innovation can occur, then attempting to direct that innovation towards wider developmental goals.
The origins lie in Zhejiang’s “Eight-Eight Strategy”, launched in 2003 when Xi Jinping was provincial Party secretary. The strategy combined advanced manufacturing, regional integration and scientific development with the construction of an “ecological province”.
Unitree tells a related story. The launch price of its humanoid robots fell from around $90,000 in 2023 to $5,900 in 2025, reflecting the depth of China’s component suppliers and manufacturing infrastructure.
Ecological civilisation in material form
Hangzhou’s green transformation has followed the same pattern: targets, infrastructure, experimentation and adjustment.
The city of Hangzhou itself reached 7.55 gigawatts of solar capacity by June 2026, already exceeding its 2030 target of 6.5 gigawatts. The provincial energy big-data centre monitors energy systems in real time, while virtual power plants coordinate batteries, electric vehicles and commercial buildings to help balance supply and demand. The energy transition is therefore not simply a matter of installing panels; it involves constructing a more flexible and intelligent electricity system around them.
By 2025, 99.7 percent of the province’s nationally and provincially monitored water sections were at Grade III or better. All eight major river systems, together with the Grand Canal, reached that level for the first time. In Hangzhou, monitored surface-water sections and drinking-water sources have achieved full compliance for five consecutive years.
The municipal response has been to impose a power-usage-effectiveness ceiling of 1.2 on new large data centres, while expanding solar power, storage and smart-grid management. This is the real content of a green transition: not the absence of contradictions, but the capacity to identify and manage them.
The city’s experience suggests that future technology and ecological development cannot be separated. Artificial intelligence can help integrate renewable energy, manage transport, monitor pollution and use resources more efficiently; but it also consumes electricity and materials on an enormous scale. The task is not to choose between becoming “smart” and becoming green. It is to ensure that technological development remains subject to social and ecological goals.
Hangzhou does not offer a finished model, still less a future without contradictions. What it does show is that the direction of technological change is a political choice. Markets can generate new products, but they cannot by themselves coordinate energy systems, restore waterways, build public transport or ensure that the costs and benefits of innovation are shared. Bringing future technology into line with ecological civilisation requires long-term planning, public investment and institutions capable of subordinating private profit to the common good.
During a recent visit to Brazil, Carlos Martinez was interviewed by Flora Villela of Brasil de Fato in Belo Horizonte, where he was taking part in the debate “China and Socialism in the Global Geopolitical Dispute”, organised by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).
In the interview, Carlos makes the case for the socialist character of contemporary China; discusses Western media stereotypes and what democracy actually means in Britain and in China; sets out the transition from a US-led imperialist system towards a multipolar world; and addresses what China can and cannot do in defence of countries under attack by the US, as well as the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
An English translation of the interview is reproduced below. It first appeared in Portuguese in Brasil de Fato.
China and the construction of socialism in the 21st century: expert discusses conflicts and prospects
Author, researcher and activist Carlos Martinez defends the socialist character of contemporary China
By Flora Villela
We are living through one of the most tense moments in global geopolitics: not since the Second World War has the planet seen a period with so many simultaneous armed conflicts and wars.
At the centre of these challenges are military arbitrariness and economic policies imposed on various countries by the world’s greatest power – the United States; new technologies represent civilisational challenges for every nation; authoritarianism is regaining ground and eroding democracies; and the conflicts threaten to produce economic crises that would generate widespread poverty.
Despite this scenario, China continues to emerge as the world’s new economic power, following, by all indications, a path centred on peace. And the defence of multilateralism as a solution to the crisis is gaining strength, particularly in the so-called Global South. Nonetheless, “there is a whole campaign of defamation, a propaganda war in an attempt to win public support for increasingly hostile policies towards China, which at the moment take the form of a Cold War with tariffs, semiconductor restrictions, sanctions and unilateral, coercive economic measures”, argues Carlos Martinez.
A co-editor of the Friends of Socialist China website, an author, researcher and activist, Martinez has written the books The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century and The End of the Beginning: Lessons from the Soviet Collapse. His work focuses on dispelling what he considers an “enormous misunderstanding in relation to China”.
“Even on the left, there is an assumption that China is just another capitalist country and that the conflict between the US and China is an example of imperialist rivalry or the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’. So in my work I try to explain the true nature of China and of Chinese socialism, and at the same time to counter anti-China propaganda”, he explains.
During a visit to Belo Horizonte to take part in the debate “China and Socialism in the Global Geopolitical Dispute”, the author spoke to Brasil de Fato MG. In the interview, we discussed the conflicts under way around the world, the role of Brazil and of this year’s elections, the dispute over global hegemony, and the path of multilateralism and peace.
“It will be a long and painful process towards our post-imperialist world, but I believe that in the end humanity will get there”, says Martinez.
Brazilians go to the polls on 4 October in an election pitting President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro, with the polls showing a technical tie. In the following article, Carlos Martinez and Sara Vivacqua set out why this is the election in the Americas that matters most to Washington – and the one it has worked hardest to influence.
They document the extent of US interference – from tariffs, sanctions and terrorist designations to suspicions of foreign money reaching the Bolsonaro campaign – and situate it within the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, which seeks to consolidate the Americas as a secure rear base for a longer confrontation with China. Against this backdrop, they argue, a Lula victory would show the whole of the Global South that such pressure can be faced down.
This article was first published in the Morning Star.
Brazilians go to the polls this weekend in what will be a crucial election for the country and the wider region. The contest pits the incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro – son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year sentence, convicted of plotting a coup to overturn the result of the 2022 election.
Of all the elections in the Americas this year, this is the one whose outcome matters most to Washington – and the one it has worked hardest to influence. Brazil – a top-ten economy, a founder of BRICS and a driver of the multipolar order – is the last large country in South America that, under Lula, refuses to fall in line with Washington. It is one of the final pieces, and also a potential turning point, in Washington’s strategy for the capture of the Americas.
“Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians. Brazil will remain a sovereign country.”
In his speech at the opening of the 81st United Nations General Assembly on 22 September, Lula denounced foreign interference in the region’s elections and brought it under international scrutiny, in an attempt to prevent an institutional rupture before it could materialise.
