Key Messages
• China’s core objective in engaging with members of the Global South remains the pursuit of mutual economic opportunities through trade and investment. The extensive and structural need for growth throughout the developing world creates ample space for contributions from China, India, and other emerging economies.
• By projecting a ‘collective rise of the Global South’, China offers assurance of partnership rather than a locomotive-style of stewardship in policy or material support. This can help resonate with the insistence on sovereignty and practices of poly-alignment in diplomacy.
• Development initiatives proposed by China deliver public goods in the Global South. In turn, long-term infrastructure projects can help enhance connectivity of all economies of the world.
• Some countries in the Global South may have preferred to have a China that takes clearer moral positions on incidents of injustice within or against societies in the Global South. The Chinese offer of a dialogue on civilizations is an attempt to address the imbalance between the material and ideational disconnect.
• The advent of Trump 2.0 incentivises the Global South to tone down the rhetoric for change in the international system. Meanwhile, with the prospect of Trumpian policies continuing, countries of the Global South are seeking stability by strengthening relationships amongst themselves.
Introduction
The very wording “Global South” did not gain traction in official Chinese phraseology on world affairs and/or foreign relations until July 2023 when Foreign Minister Wang Yi observed that “as the largest developing country in the world, China is naturally a member of the ‘Global South.’” Among the many discernible background developments, the absence of an invitation to participate in the Voice of Global South Summit, organised by India in January 2023, worked to incentivize Chinese foreign policy elites to directly engage the topic. After all, the summit featured the participation of leaders and ministers of 125 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania.
Initially, the Chinese language equivalent of ‘Global South’ (quanqiu nanfang) was put in quotation marks to connote hesitancy or disagreement with the framing of the concept in foreign, especially Western contexts. Soon, in research literature by Chinese academics, references to the Global South – without quotation marks – became the norm. In Chinese foreign policy practice, at the BRICS Plus dialogue held in October 2024, President Xi Jinping observed a “collective rise of the Global South”. His reference to a ‘collective rise’ can be read as a subtle response to the uncertainty or even skepticism among those countries that identify themselves as being in the South but view China as too distant in terms of capacity and potential in handling world affairs.
This article proceeds from recognition and acceptance that definitions of ‘Global South’ will continue to vary and be contested. Still, countries outside the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are grouped in this article as being in the South of the world’s economic-political dynamics today and for the foreseeable future. Such a treatment is possible as, historically speaking, the search for leadership and influence is an innate and natural component of nation-building for all countries climbing the ladder of development.
This article begins with an understanding of the ideational underpinnings behind the recent Chinese turn towards embracing Global South as an expression. It then discusses relations between China and India in the context of developmental issues that weave together the Global South as a participatory project. The last section touches upon how evolution of relations with the US may impact China’s engagement with the Global South.
China in the Global South
Post-WWII China had its own version of the South as a category of the geopolitical world: Asia (Yazhou), Africa (Feizhou) and Latin America (Lading Meizhou) or Yafeila for short. The use of the term started with news reports on the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, and was extended to include Latin America and the Middle East to substantiate the Chinese reference to the ‘third world’. From an international studies perspective, the Yafeila framing served a domestic agenda of signaling to its own population the government’s devotion to breaking the country out of diplomatic isolation. Internationally, China cultivated its ties with Yafeila countries through measures that included the provision of economic aid, dispatch of medical teams, and commodities trade. In material terms, what China offered was negligible, especially in comparison with advanced economies. But the gestures of friendship took place against the background of China itself was struggling to meet the basic needs of its own population. As a political messaging strategy, China projected its own history of having prevailed through colonialism by foreign nations, China offered moral support to countries that needed it. China’s success in gaining membership in the United Nations in 1971 was a particular highlight of its success in winning support and solidarity from countries of the Global South.
In Chinese annals of South-South cooperation, the China-Ceylon Rice Pact (1952), the China-India Panchsheel Agreement (1954), and China’s participation in the Bandung Conference are particularly noteworthy. They laid the foundation for the practice of international development cooperation with Chinese characteristics: receiving assistance from abroad and providing assistance to needy countries later. Still, as China stayed away from formal association with the Group of 77 as well as the Non-Aligned Movement, its impact on shaping the norms of engagement among the South (or the “Third World”) was limited.
The turn for China’s attraction the Global South came in the early 2000s. The country’s achievement in poverty reduction was promoted as exemplary by multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The “Go Abroad” campaign in 2000 served as a prelude to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. By making policy coordination, project planning and co-investment as the operational modality of the BRI, China promoted the idea of “developing other countries as a means of developing itself”. The rest is history.
Studies abound to account for flows of trade investment between China and economies in the Global South in the past two decades. In 2022, China offered its Global Development Initiative (GDI), on top of BRI. Neither initiative fits into the conventional mode of development assistance but instead both operate with terms of engagement suited to China’s interests. By making an ‘initiative’ a process of mutual engagement from project conceptualization to implementation and use after construction, Chinese interests have a foot in the door at every stage of the business/economic cycle. Of course, Global South partners in these initiatives make their own decisions based on their identification of comparative advantage.
Still, the real match between China and many of the polities of the Global South however, is arguably, the concurrence over this philosophy: “the essence of governance is livelihood; and the essence of livelihood is adequacy”, meaning that delivering on the basic needs of the populace, rather than ideological issues like political legitimacy and electoral process, is what truly matters. Put another way, China is “a metaphor for ‘doing it your own way,’ and the belief that “each country is free to do what it wants within its sovereign territory”.
In a culturally and intellectually Chinese sense, visions for engaging the world and the Global South therein were laid out in Sun Yat-sen’s The International Development of China (published 1922), including the idea of creation of an international development bank. Accordingly, the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank in 2014, is more an affirmation of faith than a design to disrupt the existent system. But, in the larger world, the heuristic question of China in the Global South versus China and the Global South will continue to be unsettled. In part, this has to do with competition for leadership between China and India, real or perceived.
The Global South: China and India
India and China offer similar grand narratives for situating themselves in the Global South. India invokes the ancient concept of ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, the world as one family. China promotes a community of mankind with a shared future. Each has a foundation to claim continuity in their respective narrations, as evidenced, for example, in their emphasis on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as a cardinal principle for the conduct of diplomacy between all states.
Independent India has an undisputed record of activism in South-South Cooperation. Together with Myanmar, Indonesia, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and Pakistan, India sponsored the 1955 Bandung Conference. Collaboration among leaders of India, Egypt, Indonesia, Yugoslavia and Ghana was instrumental in launching the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. In the 21st century, high-level forums like the India-Brazil-South Africa Forum (2003) and the India-Africa Forum summit (2008) are frequently cited examples of Indian efforts to build up networks of cooperation and solidarity in the Global South. Throughout history, India cultivated extensive trade and investment ties with economies in Africa, Central Asia, and other parts of the world as well. Therefore, it is only natural for India today to make enhanced outreach to the Global South a pillar of its overall domestic development.
India has promoted its own initiatives of regional economic connectivity through transport infrastructure. According to one line of analysis, Indian initiatives like the Chabahar port in Iran and the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor are a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. But, such a sense of binary choice can hardly meet the test of reality on the ground. For the host economy, the country source of a port/railroad matter far less than having it serve its own purpose of growth, as should be the case.
Is India’s pursuit of ties with the Global South a counterbalance to China and vice versa? The question is by and large rhetorical.
First, different from the Global North/West, whose core members are bound by cross-continental military alliances, financial and trade networks that derive from hundreds of years of history as well as influence on post-WWII international institutions upon their formation, the Global South still lacks a firm institutional base in any of these areas. In a sense, the United Nations General Assembly continues to function as the diplomatic/political platform for Global South governments to voice their protests against the continuation of injustice as they see it. BRICS does have two decades of history of formalized diplomacy and momentum. However, largely because societal linkages among participating members of the grouping continue to be weak, BRICS is, in reality, a continuation of the South-South Cooperation movement of the past. Its strength in diplomacy, though, comes through voluntary and selective association.
Second, to the extent that the notion of the Global South is gaining support through formal association – most notably in the growth of applications for membership in the BRICS forum – the core driving force is arguably more a projection of dissatisfaction with aspects of behaviour by the Global North/West in recent years than a tectonic shift in world economic-political dynamics. Efforts to turn collective complaint into joint action – with proposals of de-dollarization as a prime example – face insurmountable obstacles, including push back by the United States, which is traditionally opposed to any sign of revival of South-South solidarity.
Third, on areas such as energy and resource security, trade and investment opportunities, development finance, technological adaptation and diffusion, China and India each offer unique opportunities for the Global South. There is indeed a competitive element in managing such interactions, with change in capacity and degree of opening the domestic markets for third-party participation being the most consequential factors at work.
Last but not least, it would not be wise for China or India to end up having difficulties in their bilateral ties spill over into projects seen by the majority of the Global South as being conducive to their collective cause. Both Beijing and New Delhi would be wise to pursue impact or leadership through attraction rather than coercion.
Wither the Global South?
Resurgence of interest in framing and debating a/the Global South is largely a result of the intellectual shock of Russia’s war on Ukraine which began in February 2022. The invasion inspired a unity among Western democracies not seen since the first Gulf War. However, Western expectations of global unified condemnation and action against Russia were dashed by the response of the Global South, as the G7 members failed to get sufficient votes to strip Russia of membership on the United Nations Human Rights Council in April 2022. Far from endorsing the Western position, over 40 member states of the United Nations (UN) consistently abstained or voted against resolutions proposed in the UN General Assembly that sought to condemn Russian actions.
After the Western reaction to Israel’s military campaigns in the Gaza Strip in response to the large-scale surprise attack on October 7, 2023, by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Global South’s critique of the global West has become more sustained. Some scholars opine that the world is moving “in the direction of Three Worlds – the global West, the global East and the Global South”.
Whether or not – in the intellectual and political imagination of the West today – the Global South amounts to “a euphemism for the non-white world” is beyond the scope of this article. In practical terms, governments in the Global South can ill-afford not to take US President Trump’s warning seriously: should BRICS member countries replace the US dollar as a reserve currency, the US would level 100% tariffs (a threat he had made weeks after winning the US presidential elections in November 2024). With the American consumer market being the buyer of last resort in many product categories and economies in the Global South competing with each other to trade with the US, foundations are weak for collective action toward unsettling the current world economic order, certainly not in fundamental ways.
The second Trump administration’s overall orientation in trade policy and its negotiating tactics have roots in the history of the United States as a country: tariffs on imports are conceived to serve one or a combination of purposes of increasing government revenue, restricting a foreign partner’s prospects of industrial capacity, and what the American side defines as ‘reciprocity’. But repeated open hostilities towards Panama, Canada, Greenland, etc., on issues as fundamental as territorial integrity risk alienating the US from many countries (not just its security allies) in the long term. However, countries on the receiving end of Trump’s unilateral action in the name of reciprocity find themselves by and large on their own; group protest – much less negotiation – with the US – has not been a viable option.
Concluding Thoughts
Relations between China and India are sufficiently complex and challenging to allow much space for emotively inspired competition in leadership and influence in the Global South. If there is a lesson for developing countries since the end of the Second World War, it is that binary thinking about world affairs carries serious flaws. In the world of diplomacy, there is not and cannot be a “locomotive” – with the rest being boxes on a freight train traveling a set rail line – while trying to promote solidarity. Chinese and Indian interests and practices will continue to intersect in the Global South and beyond. But the true test is how well India and China fit into the template of actions as desired by a country of the Global South and its society rather than pursuit of the goal of having the other excluded.
Future prospects for the Global South are likely to continue to be uncertain. The uncertainty stems in a good part from the unpredictability in relationships among big powers, not least the US, China, Russia and the European Union, whose decisions are more directly felt across the world. However, the notion of the Global South can help serve as a useful reminder that agency in international affairs is by no means limited to a country’s power in aggregate terms. The notion of collective will, projected or inferred, on the part of nominally small and weak countries, continues to be a force to reckon with in world politics.