China is running over the West. This book shows the risks for Brazil

The clock strikes past three in the morning and the noise doesn't stop. Hammers, trucks, saws, and jackhammers. It's 2011, and on the 37th floor of a building in Zhongguancun, a neighborhood that would become Beijing's Silicon Valley, a young Brazilian tries to sleep but can't. Days later, he enters a construction site on the same street, sees workers sleeping in containers, and learns the concept of the "always hot bed": one person works twelve hours while another sleeps in the same bed.

When the first person returns, the second one gets up. There was no time for the bed to cool down while China's GDP grew by more than 10% per year. The insomniac on the 37th floor is Ricardo Geromel, now one of Brazil's leading experts on China. He was a commodity trader in Hong Kong, an entrepreneur in Beijing in 2011, covered billionaires for Forbes, and wrote the bestseller Bi.lio.nár.ios.

In 2019, Geromel led an immersion in China for the partners of a Brazilian asset manager. The trip ended with an invitation to return to Brazil, where he was a partner in the fund between 2020 and 2024. Geromel is co-founder of FCGI, a company that has taken over a thousand Brazilians to get to know China from the inside, in meetings with local leaders.

His rare access appears in the newly launched O Novo Poder da China, which takes the reader into meeting rooms with entrepreneurs and investors.

You may not be interested in China, but China is already interested in you. Brazil was the country that received the most new Chinese investments in 2025. China is in your home's electrical outlet, in the port that exports our soybeans, in the app, in your neighbor's car, in the price of wine, and soon in your medical diagnosis.

Your competitor may not be Chinese yet, but the benchmark in your sector already is. Geromel challenges the reader to forget GDP for a moment and look at electricity. China's GDP can be inflated by intangible services, financial bubbles, and regulatory approvals. But electricity consumption doesn't lie. Electricity is machines on, ovens on, data centers processing, trains running, and factories breathing.

By this benchmark, the world has a new absolute leader. In the year 2000, China produced about a third of the electricity generated by the United States. In 2024, it produced almost two and a half times more. The country already consumes more electricity than the US, the European Union, and India combined.

The most geopolitical chapter of the book starts with a phrase said in 2003 by Hu Jintao. He warned that certain external powers could "strangle China's energy arteries." The artery had a name and address: the Strait of Malacca. More than 83% of China's imported oil and two-thirds of its trade pass through it. At its narrowest point, Malacca is less than 2.8 kilometers wide. For Beijing, depending on Malacca is living with a rival's hand around its neck.

The Chinese response was to take the ball. As Johan Cruyff taught, if you have the ball, the other team doesn't score. The Chinese possession of the ball is the so-called new three: solar panels, lithium batteries, and electric vehicles. Each solar panel is one less barrel crossing Malacca. Each battery is electricity displaced in time.

Each electric car is less dependence on imported oil. In 2023, the solar panels installed in China already generated the equivalent of 2.7 million barrels of oil per day. No ship, no strait, no risk of embargo.

Energy is also fundamental in the AI era. The main bottlenecks are not just models, chips, and talent, but also abundant, cheap, and reliable energy. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has said that "eventually, the cost of intelligence will converge with the cost of energy. The abundance of AI will be limited by the abundance of energy."

In China, AI is born as infrastructure, and open-source prevails. There is a historical reason for this: the SaaS model never took off there. The American market educated companies and consumers to treat software as a recurring service, like a utility bill. The Chinese ecosystem grew under a different logic, in which software came free, embedded in hardware, or was customized and paid for once.

When the era of LLMs arrives, this difference becomes destiny. If you can't sell the expensive lamp, you spread the wiring. You open the model, drop the cost, seek to become a technical standard, and monetize later, where value capture is inevitable: infrastructure, services, integrations, support.

In healthcare, the book points to another tsunami. For years, China was synonymous with generics and outsourced stages for Western companies, the global back office of the sector. The regulatory repair started in 2015 helps explain the turn: the time to authorize human trials fell from 501 to 87 days, and the average wait to approve a new drug plummeted from 35 months to eleven.

In 2024, seven major global pharmaceutical companies paid $31.5 billion to license or acquire molecules originating from China. Geromel states that you will take Chinese medicine, perhaps without knowing it, because the name on the box may remain Western.

In agriculture, Geromel sounds the alarm for Brazil. The sector is the pillar of Brazilian solvency but depends on a hungry dragon. In 2025, 65% of the soybean complex exported by Brazil went to China, and 73% of the soybeans imported by the Chinese came from here. When they hear that China is dependent on Brazilian agriculture, the Chinese correct: we are not dependent.

We are. Being is permanent. Being in a situation is circumstantial. Beijing sees the current situation as unsustainable, a serious problem to be managed, reduced, or redesigned.

In 2011, China was building the future without apologizing for the noise. Fifteen years later, part of that noise has arrived in our backyard. The bed remains hot – and this book is a map for those who don't want to be caught sleeping.