China Hot Take: Brazil Riot a ‘Made in U.S.’ Embarrassment

The Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times lamented a riot in Brazil this weekend as somehow a “made in U.S.” phenomenon that exposed Washington as “phony” and “moralistic.”

The state outlet concluded that the South American riot was proof of the inevitable failure of American-style free societies.

Thousands of protesters attacked the headquarters of the three branches of government – the Congress, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), and Planalto, the presidential palace – in Brasilia, the national capital, on Sunday, causing damage deemed “irreparable” to some of the sites and historical artifacts housed there.

The protesters, opponents of convicted felon President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, are part of a movement demanding for months that the armed forces overturn Lula’s victory in October’s presidential election on the grounds that Lula was convicted of corrupt acts during his last terms in office. The STF overturned the conviction on procedural grounds in 2021, allowing Lula on the ballot. The STF’s role in both allowing Lula to run and censoring references to his conviction prompted widespread outrage in the country; the mob on Sunday damaged the STF headquarters the most of all its targets in response to these decisions.

Lula, a hardline socialist who greatly expanded ties to China during his first two terms in office, defeated conservative Jair Bolsonaro, who also maintained friendly ties with Beijing. A subset of Bolsonaro supporters argues that the Brazilian constitution’s provision to enact “federal interventions” when necessary allows the armed forces to remove an illegitimate president and claim their demand for a military ouster is not akin to a coup d’etat.

No images from the riot appear to indicate any connection to the United States, American politics, or the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot at press time.

Despite the lack of evidence for its case, the Global Times insisted that the American Capitol riot inspired the storming of Brasilia and was a moral defeat for the United States.

“Despite US President Joe Biden denouncing the [Brazil] riots [sic] as an ‘assault on democracy’ in a Twitter post, the spread of ‘made-in-US’ Capitol Hill riot model has made Washington’s phony, moralistic rhetoric ridiculous,” the Global Times denounced in an article published Tuesday, “and the ‘Capitol Hill riot’ has the potential to be repeated in other Latin American countries, where US regards as its sphere of influence, experts noted.”

The January 6 Capitol riot was a response to the election of leftist President Biden in 2020; rioters claimed Biden’s election was marred with irregularities and illegitimate. Unlike the events in Brazil, however, the rioters did not target the Supreme Court or the White House. The Washington incident also lacks the context of Brazil: protests attracting millions of people since at least 2015 in response to “Operation Car Wash,” a sprawling corruption scheme implicating dozens of politicians in nearly every political party that was organized under Lula. In 2016, 3.6 million people took to the streets of Sao Paulo, the nation’s largest city, to demand the impeachment of then-President Dilma Rousseff, a Lula protege. Congress ultimately impeached Dilma, Lula was arrested and convicted, and Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election.

The Global Times anti-American coverage of the events in Brazil omitted the context of the riot and did not mention Operation Car Wash. Instead, it held the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an American political event with an offshoot in Brazil, directly responsible for the riot.

“Both Trump and Bolsonaro have endorsed the CPAC while they were in office, and made its far-right conservatism taken root in their countries,” a Chinese regime-approved “expert” asserted, “and the two riots reflected the same logic, which is denial of the election results, and even the system itself.”

In a separate editorial on Tuesday, the Global Times proclaimed that anti-government riots would not exist “without the example of the U.S.”

“The ‘Capitol riot’ sets a poor precedent for the world. Washington’s manner toward the riots has superficially reached a consensus, but political polarization and division have not eased, but instead have intensified,” the Chinese newspaper argued. “Now people can see that the ‘US-style democracy’ not only collapsed inside, but also began to roll down with the surrounding rocks.”

The editorial omitted multiple incidents preceding January 6 with overt similarities to what occurred in Brasilia – the most prominent of these and anti-Chinese government riot in Hong Kong. In 2019, a mob of anti-communist protesters stormed the headquarters of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, the lawmaking body of the city – smashing its windows, spraying graffiti throughout the building, and rendering the legislative floor unusable.

The protesters were objecting to a proposed bill that would have allowed communist China to extradite anyone present in Hong Kong if accused of violating Chinese communist laws, which severely restrict freedom of expression and other basic human rights. Beijing responded to those protests with violent assaults on protesters, mass arrests, and the illegal imposition of a “national security” law via the communist National People’s Congress essentially outlawing dissent. Under the “One Country, Two Systems” policy, Chinese laws do not have legal authority in Hong Kong, but police enforced the “national security” law, anyway.

China also experienced a major anti-lockdown riot in Hubei province, the origin location of the Chinese coronavirus, in March 2020, in which trapped residents flipped over police cars and assaulted officers with their own shields. Similar scenes repeated themselves throughout China in 2022. Last week, protesters in Henan province attacked police and again flipped over a police vehicle in opposition to restrictions on fireworks.

No high-profile politicians or foreign government media have accused China of inspiring the Brasilia riot at press time.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.