Cristovam Buarque: Brazil and China are today very tied. At least from the Brazilian point of view, China is the main partner in trading, a lot more important than, for example, United States and Argentina, the other two great partners. But we have been just trading in goods. We need more. For example, we need cooperation between our universities. We have to have programs, put together our students and Chinese students, our teachers and China's teachers, to bring Chinese to Brazil, to send Brazilians to China. For many years, we have been looking to United States and Europe to study with a lot of scholarship. Let's have more scholarships between Brazil and China.
We need cooperation also between scientific institutions. We have a very important group, for example, in the health system, health technology. We need to work closely with the Chinese scientists. We need cooperation in arts and culture, which would be very good. We need to bring to Brazil more artists from China and to send to China our artists. We need to translate more books from Chinese authors and to translate into Mandarin the work of Brazilian authors.
We have a world ahead to cooperate. Let's not stop and do trade only. On trade, we already have good cooperation. Now we need to improve that to other sectors.
And finally, I think that we have to learn from China, the way China does politics. I'm not talking politics in this sense of congress. I'm talking also in the sense of government: China knows how to do projects. Brazil knows how to make the project but have terrible difficulty in executing the project. China can teach us how to execute our project. We have a lot to learn with China. And I think the cooperation would be good also to China.
Guancha: At the same time, Brazil has long standing security agreements with the US. In your opinion, how should Brazil balance relations with China and the US, which are both important partners to Brazil?
Cristovam Buarque: That would be an exercise in the future. We have to learn how to cooperate in this world, because we had the experience of mainly bilateral relationships, and a world with one pole, with one superpower.