This book chapter looks at the political economy of the emerging relations between Brazil and China. The trade pattern between the two countries resembles a traditional core-periphery relationship in which Brazil exports raw materials to and imports manufactures from China. While China continues its industrial upgrade by obtaining the resources it needed through trade, it is unclear, apart from trade surpluses for resource exporters, the long-term benefits for its trading partners. Despite advocating for a different kind of development and a history of state-led industrialisation, decades of neoliberalisation has transformed Brazil’s socio-economic structure and decimated its industrial bases. To what extent the shift to the left in the political sphere under Lula leadership can lead a restructure of its economic development away from neoliberalism is still unknown. Is the neoliberal path of reprimarisation continuing with Chinese investments? Is Chinese capital any different to the Western capital in Brazil? Can China’s “projectment” economy, in Brazilian economist Ignacio Rangel’s term, help Lula’s government to drive the required socio-economic changes in Brazil? Who decides whether it will be a force for reprimarisation or development? This chapter analyses and answers these questions from a Marxist geopolitical economy approach. While the states are the obvious actors in the bilateral relations, it argues that crisis in the U.S.-led global capitalism and the balance of forces in the society can be decisive in shaping the relations. It concludes that the political future of Brazil will depend on the one hand whether China, as the industrial powerhouse of the world, can maintain its course for socialist modernisation (over the tendency of capitalist accumulation) and on the other hand, whether the anti-neoliberal forces under the current government in Brazil can emerge to negotiate and steer Chinese investments in the favour of their national development.