As India prepares to host the 18th BRICS Summit this weekend, and as prime minister Narendra Modi is set to hold a bilateral meet with president Xi Jinping, China’s growing global influence and the changing dynamics of India-China relations will be under focus. But to understand where China is headed, it is important to first understand the thinking behind its rise.

 

‘Xi Jinping’s New Era China: The Inside Story’ (Pentagon Press) by renowned China expert and public intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn offers a closer look at the president’s leadership, China’s transformation and its growing ambitions on the world stage. The book takes readers beyond the headlines to understand the ideas and policies shaping China under Xi. It examines his vision of the “Chinese Dream” and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation", along with China’s economic transformation, technological ambitions, national security and international strategies, including the Belt and Road Initiative and its growing engagement with the Global South.

 

With BRICS emerging as an important platform for the Global South, the book examines China’s growing influence within the grouping and its broader efforts to reshape global economic and geopolitical relationships.

 

 

 

China has always maintained the importance of BRICS as an exemplar of a multipolar world, and this vision is getting sharper and its appeal is becoming stronger. President Xi Jinping’s statement at the 2023 BRICS Summit serves both to reinforce the growing importance of BRICS as a multinational economic organisation and to give BRICS an enhanced role in ‘universal security,’ as Xi put it, which requires, he says, “a commitment to a new vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security.”

 

From China’s perspective, the BRICS Summit is axial for increasing its power and influence and thereby creating an alternative to the G7 and perceived USA/Western domination of international economics, finance, and trade. Over 40 countries have expressed interest in joining an enlarged BRICS, about two dozen have submitted formal requests, and six countries have been granted formal admission: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Argentina, the UAE and Ethiopia.

 

BRICS enlargement is considered a ‘win’ for China, which has been championing the expansion strategy in an attempt to challenge the leadership of the USA and its allies and to reshape the global world order. Moreover, a larger BRICS benefits China by increasing trade broadly and, more importantly, by diversifying its trade dependency, over time, away from the USA/Europe. Another objective, over time, would be adopting an alternative currency to the US dollar for international trade settlements, which would diminish US power (especially in case of sanctions).

 

China’s appeal is that countries in the developing world – the Global South – can have greater influence on international economics, finance and trade by acting collectively in an expanded BRICS. Xi calls for countries to build partnerships not alliances: promoting the former to produce win-win outcomes, while opposing the latter, which creates only zero-sum games. That more and more countries are knocking on BRICS’s door, is what China calls “a testament to the vitality and influence of the BRICS cooperation mechanism.” China plays its long suit, “urging the international community to refocus on development issues.”

 

This does not mean there is unity among the five BRICS. India, in particular, is becoming stronger: its economy is growing fastest and its geopolitical ambitions are expanding. (At the G-20, a few weeks later, India was foremost in promoting the Global South, particularly Africa.) Brazil and South Africa (especially) have serious economic problems. Russia, obviously, needs BRICS countries to avoid complete ostracism due to its unprovoked, brutal invasion of Ukraine.

 

In his BRICS speech, Xi was undisguised in criticising US ‘hegemony,’ accusing the USA of “fighting countries” that threaten American dominance of geopolitics and international finance, accusing the USA of arbitrarily trying “to cripple emerging markets and developing countries.” He said, “Whoever develops well, they seek to contain. Whoever catches up, they seek to trip up,” warning of a “slide into the abyss of a ‘new Cold War.’”

 

Xi lays out a Manichean choice: walk towards prosperity through openness and inclusiveness, or fall into depression through hegemony and bullying. China offers the former, Xi says – and it takes no imagination to figure out who pursues the latter. Calling for “civilisational exchange and mutual learning,” Xi argues that “hyping up a bimodal contradiction between ‘democracy and authoritarianism’ or ‘freedom and despotism’ can lead only to a divided world and civilisational conflict.”

 

Xi’s words are unprecedented in recent times, perhaps affected by the tightening bite of USA high-tech restrictions (i.e., semiconductors) and the USA rallying regional countries into an unnamed but obvious anti-China grouping: Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. The USA, of course, asserts that China’s repression at home and aggression abroad has brought it all on itself, an accusation China vehemently rejects. Right now, sadly, that’s where we are.