China smells an opportunity to develop a coalition of middle powers against the G7. President Xi Jinping isn’t hiding the aspiration anymore to counter other US-led groupings via BRICS.
“If we expand BRICS to account for a similar portion of world GDP as the G7, then our collective voice in the world will grow stronger,” said a Chinese official, according to Financial Times.
Beijing is targeting to induct countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia into BRICS, which are relatively agnostic about Chinese ideas of trade and investment and the underlying concept of China-led order.
BRICS to counter US
China’s ‘head-of-state diplomacy’ or ‘major country diplomacy’ – at play in the BRICS Summit – is shedding the past squeamishness of geopolitical aspirations while pressing the “accelerator button” of China’s diplomacy.
Chinese experts see BRICS as a mechanism to confront the US ideologically. BRICS’ original agenda was never really a geopolitical one when it was founded back in 2009.
“Western media have not only started smearing BRICS as a challenge to the rules-based world order but also are trying to disintegrate the ‘BRICS’ from within and isolate China and Russia by luring India to join the US’s ‘Indo-Pacific’ mechanism,” wrote Xu Wenhong, deputy secretary-general of the Center for One Belt One Road, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Even Xi has taken a direct swipe at the US in his signed article published by South African media before he left for BRICS.
He criticised the ‘small yard, high fence’ approach of the US. National Security Advisor of the US Jake Sullivan had said in 2023 that Washington would protect its foundational technologies through a targeted strategy dubbed as ‘small yard, high fence’.
Beijing sees this as a US strategy to hobble China’s growth in the high-tech industry and ultimately to contain its overall expansion. But now, Beijing wants to use BRICS as a bulwark against the US and its alliance system.
China is keen on expanding the BRICS but New Delhi isn’t sure, it could redefine the original vision of the grouping. Beijing is no longer hiding that it wants to use BRICS as a bandwagon against the US and its allies.
Also read: A BRICS currency can weaken US hold over emerging economies. India needs to decide its role
Push for yuan
Beijing might try to rebrand its Belt and Road Initiative and lending practices through the New Development Bank (NDB) of BRICS.
“I believe the NDB and the BRI share the same vision in this sense,” wrote Dilma Vana Rousseff, the president of the New Development Bank and former president of Brazil. The headquarters of the BRICS bank is in Shanghai.
According to some enthusiasts, the other promise of BRICS is a common currency. South African officials have confirmed that discussion about the common currency isn’t on the summit agenda. Even New Delhi isn’t thrilled with the idea.
For Beijing, the ideological undercurrent of de-dollarisation is a promising prospect it wants to cash out on. Emerging economies increasingly want to settle the foreign trade balance in local currency, bringing forward the idea of common currency. But Beijing could potentially push for inducting the Chinese yuan as the trade settlement currency. But India will resist such a proposal.
So, BRICS common currency is unlikely to live up to the hype, but Beijing will encourage emerging economies to move away from the US dollar.
Also read: Can a good acronym give currency to a group that’s lost relevance? The curious case of BRICS today
China’s diplomacy
Domestically, Beijing will sell BRICS and G20 summits as a success for China’s foreign policy where Xi shined ‘once again’. Authoritative commentaries published before the BRICS summit have urged China to press the ‘accelerator button’ of diplomacy as the country faced severe headwinds.
Chinese state television even released a new documentary about Xi’s diplomatic engagements this year titled Let’s walk the road of modernization hand in hand to build a community with a shared future for mankind. The film presents an aspirational world of trade and connectivity between BRICS countries, including a voiceover by Xi. He promoted the idea of ‘BRICS+’ to grow the network of friends.
The hashtag “2023 BRIC Summit Leading Film” was viewed 84.9 million times on Chinese social media site Weibo. All the major Chinese state outlets published BRICS news stories and op-eds on their home pages to attach special significance to the summit and Xi’s style of diplomacy.
If, for a minute, we assumed that other BRICS members like South Africa could balance the influence of Beijing, we might want to rethink.
Beijing is training ruling party officials from six African countries in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania, according to Axios and the Danish newspaper Politiken.
Last year, Tanzania’s Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School welcomed ruling party members from several African countries, including Tanzania, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. They are taught party governance and Xi Jinping Thought.
The executive school for politicians is the first example of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exporting its political ideology outside of China through direct engagement with a political system of another country.
The case doesn’t just apply to African countries keen on joining BRICS; even in Southeast Asia, Beijing is pulling all the levers to buy influence among the political elite.
The other giant in the BRICS room, Russia, is missing from action as its President Vladimir Putin can’t attend the summit because of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. He will be represented by Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov.
China’s aspiration to develop alternative arrangements to challenge US-led groupings will not just be restricted to BRICS. As domestic consumption is in the fray, Beijing’s need to search for foreign markets for its manufacturing-driven juggernaut makes the BRICS mechanism a ‘promising’ opportunity. But closely linked to the economic rationale is China’s geopolitical aspiration to create a favourable environment around the world for the CCP and to counter the US.
Pretending that BRICS can function purely as a financial mechanism to help emerging economies will be a costly blunder that New Delhi cannot afford.
The author is a columnist and a freelance journalist. He was previously a China media journalist at the BBC World Service. He tweets @aadilbrar.Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)