Beijing’s southern moment

Coined by US antiwar activist Carl Oglesby in 1969, the meme ‘Global South’ (Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia) is seeing quite a revival. Blurred by big differences between its members, the term is too broad. Yet leaders, pundits, scholars and international organisations find it a gift that never stops giving. The PRC is no exception: among its geopolitics experts, positioning toward the Global South and its cognates is gaining traction as a topic.

Historian and pundit Stephen Kotkin (Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University) describes the ‘Global South’ as even more an oxymoron than a meme, given the concentration of human demography and political sociology north of the equator, the unlikely linkage of Saudi Arabia, Russia, the PRC… the exclusion of major areas of backwardness in the US, Europe, Australia, and so on. All the more reason to say, ‘It’s the politics, dummy’. 

multiple positioning: member, model, leader

Beijing officially portrays itself as a natural member of the Global South. Wang Yi 王毅 Foreign Minister told a major foreign policy press conference in March that China ‘was, is and will be a steadfast member of the Global South.’ This aligns with the PRC’s self-classification as a developing nation. Reporting Wang’s one-on-one with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on 9 April 2024, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs cited their agreement that Presidents Xi and Putin would ‘...each support the other's presidency, lighting up the 'Southern Moment' of global governance’.

Yet voices within the policy community warn against any ‘permanent Global South member’ status. Yu Jiantuo 俞建拖 China Development Research Foundation, for example, agrees that China is, given its level of development, geography, and historical experience, now a ‘Southern’ state. But this ‘Southern’ identity is morphing and dissolving with development and modernisation. Claiming a ‘permanent Global South identity’ may tempt straying from development. Besides, overemphasis on the southern identity arouses antagonism from the North. Yu adds that states in the Global South have multiple identities. This is true of the PRC, which should avoid typecasting itself.

Framing the PRC as a model to learn from has, starting with Mao Zedong, long entranced the elite. China provides the Global South with a ‘valuable development example,’ finds Tang Lixia 唐丽霞 China Agricultural University College of International Development and Global Agriculture. Its sustained economic growth and claimed victory over absolute poverty positions it as a development model for others facing wealth and equity gaps, environmental and health deficits, and falling development funding.

Proclaiming leadership of the Global South is a far from settled matter. Ren Lin 任琳 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of World Economics and Politics Global Governance Research advises Beijing to downplay such claims. The ‘leader of the Global South’ title should be replaced with narratives stressing Beijing’s ‘stakeholder’ status in global development governance. She admits, meanwhile, that as the PRC has continued to grow and take an active part in global affairs, the South’s overall impact has risen, enhancing its influence. 

As it gets stronger, the PRC can hardly hide its strength, says Zhou Bo 周波 Tsinghua University Centre for International Strategy and Security. ‘Could China, overtaking the US in a decade to become the world’s largest economy, still be deemed a developing country?’ he asks.

BRICS expansion

Leadership claims aside, being the champion of the Global South is a role Beijing indeed bids to fill. Growing the ranks of the multilateral groupings in which it has a central role is a PRC game plan for Global South clout. 

The recent BRICS enlargement provided a case in point. Held in Johannesburg in August 2023, the 15th BRICS summit was its first face-to-face conclave since the COVID-19 outbreak. Six new members were admitted: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The expansion, long promoted by Beijing, heavyweight of the group, was a serious upgrade (despite Argentina’s later exit). With the growth, BRICS claims to be a voice of nearly half the world’s population (3.5 bn people or 45 percent); worth over US$28.5 tn (some 28 percent of the global economy), its member economies carry real weight.

Beijing portrays BRICS as representing the interests of the Global South, providing ‘Southern’ states with a louder voice in global politics and the world economy. As per Wang Yi, the BRICS spread reflects the collective rise of a Global South that, no longer a silent majority, is a force to be reckoned with. A stronger BRICS, Wang claims, is a vector of peace and ever greater support for justice and should not be feared.

structural constraints

Post-enlargement, 34 more states are expressing interest in joining BRICS. The number of countries vying for membership in 2024 has PRC foreign policy experts anticipating a new wave of BRICS expansion, a rare occurrence in the history of multilateral agencies. 

Yet further BRICS growth, as sceptical PRC experts warn, faces ‘structural constraints’. Its ability to keep gaining size and strength is, for Wang Youming 王友明 CIIS (China Institute of International Studies) Department for Developing Countries Studies, a serious concern. Most global multilateral groups, he argues, face a ‘big scale, low efficiency’ dilemma, some reduced to ‘talk shops’ thanks to a desire for prominence. As well as such ironies as ‘more members, less consensus’ and ‘more initiatives, less enactment’, Wang sees on the cards rising debate on the cost/benefit of horizontal expansion and vertical deepening. Ensuring cooperation grows in both breadth and substance remains, he says, a challenge.

Another concern, notes Wang, is the BRICS’ absorption of medium-sized states like Indonesia and Turkey. He claims Indonesia is averse to groupings that aim to counter other groups; Turkey’s thinking is similar.

Behind this claim is debate through 2023 about minilateralism. Generally a disparaging term for a range of groupings, this is based in abstract terms on ‘common interests’ rather than ‘common values’, hence not driven by left/right ideology; yet best exemplified, for Beijing, by emerging groups like the intrinsically ‘anti-China’ AUKUS (Australia/UK/US) and ‘Quad’ (US/Japan/India/Australia).

Resemblance of the Global South's own role to Western minilateralism is yet another emerging challenge.

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IR experts

Membership, strategic objectives or established institutions are ill-defined, yet the Global South has international political aspirations and is already a force to be reckoned with. Developed world powers are hence underscoring the group’s global clout. Resisting alignment with the US/West on major issues, Global South states can influence and indeed constrain the latters’ initiatives. This obliges them to take the Global South more seriously, allowing it to define itself.

Beijing should, she proposes 

• set the record straight within Global South states, revealing certain developed powers’ intention to sever their ties with Beijing
• work to depoliticise the Global South concept, stressing that jointly pursuing development should be the core of its rising role in global governance
• downplay the issue of who leads the group

Ren holds a PhD from the Free University Berlin’s Centre of Global Politics, where she compared European and Asian reconciliation and conflict resolution. Her scholarly career has been as an assistant professor and a research fellow at IWEP at CASS. Ren has chaired a National Social Science Fund project on emerging states’ roles in global governance. Her work focuses on global governance, above all BRICS and G20 and nontraditional security issues (e.g. cyber security), and European security and politics.

Fan has outlined his Global South vision publicly in two metaphors

•  ‘North in the South’
  • The PRC seeks to unite the Global South states, changing the old world order
  •  a new development model, rather than breaking for its own sake, is the aim
  • ‘we want to develop ‘fraternal partners’ in the South who our public goods can cover, indeed come under our military umbrella, to build a new developed sector in the South’, akin to ‘the North’
• ‘South in the North’
  • today’s North  is not monolithic: some Northern states are close to the South, plus classes and populations in the developed world resemble those in the South
  • the future world order must be inclusive, uniting such populations and uniting them

Holding a PhD in geopolitics, Fan’s work centres on international relations, history, and European and US politics. Working at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Institutes of European Studies and American Studies, he was the executive editor-in-chief of Social Sciences in China.