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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is the official host of this week’s BRICS summit, which agreed to more than double the membership of the emerging markets bloc, but the real big man is Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The Chinese president has received special treatment from the moment he arrived for the state visit ahead of other leaders and was awarded the Order of South Africa, a recently created honor.
“President Xi, the people of South Africa salute you,” Ramaphosa said after meeting Xi at the airport, an honor no other leader has received. Even Narendra Modi, leader of India, the BRICS’ second-largest economy, has been welcomed by Ramaphosa’s deputy.
Xi’s importance can also be seen in the anxiety over his failure to deliver his first major address to BRICS business circles at the summit. No explanation was given for his attendance at the leaders’ dinner later in the evening, but it was the low point of the carefully planned event.
The real evidence of Xi Jinping’s importance is the expansion of the G5, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It fits with Xi Jinping’s plan that China should lead the developing world against U.S. “hegemony,” even as he grapples with an economic slowdown and deflation at home.
Xi Jinping said that the expansion of BRICS from 5 to 11 countries “conforms to the expectations of the international community and conforms to the common interests of emerging market countries and developing countries.”
Reflecting Beijing’s diplomatic triumph, “I read the speed and scale of the expansion as clever negotiating by China,” said Ziyanda Stuhlman, senior analyst for Africa at the Eurasia Group think tank.
Although if China wishes to truly stand up to the G7 and other Western-dominated institutions, the enlarged bloc will face more internal conflicts than ever before.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, traditional military allies of the West, and Argentina and Egypt, big IMF borrowers, have been invited to join Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa in an expansion largely fueled by the club’s largest economy. mediated by the body.
“The BRICS countries started the process of expansion during the Chinese presidency,” said Li Kexin, China’s special envoy to the BRICS countries. “Since then, China has been cooperating with other BRICS countries to steadily advance the process of eastward expansion.”
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country, will become the smallest member of the BRICS by gross domestic product, but it is Beijing’s main debtor.
Signs of China’s peaking export prowess help mask concerns about sluggish growth at home. Chinese state-owned automaker Chery is the “Official Presidential Vehicle Partner” for the event, providing a convoy to transport international delegates around South Africa’s financial centre.
Although Ramaphosa told Xi “the need to narrow the trade deficit between South Africa and China” — which topped $10 billion last year — the deal his government signed with Beijing aims to promote Chinese technology to overcome South Africa’s rolling blackouts pain of.
Xi Jinping’s delegation did its part to widen the trade surplus with South Africa, taking over the hotel and flying in a dedicated cargo plane all the goods needed to completely renovate the hotel.
“They brought beds, mattresses, curtains, carpets, everything. There was nothing South African in the Chinese president’s room,” Bheki Cele, South Africa’s police minister, told a broadcaster.
Analysts point out that it is not in the political interests of the BRICS to raise an economic elephant at the summit this week: China’s increasingly problematic investment model driven by infrastructure and real estate, which will affect commodity exporters such as South Africa and Brazil.
Xi also said this week in a meeting with African leaders on the sidelines of the summit that China would “make better use of resources to work with Africa”, suggesting that Beijing’s diplomacy is quietly mirroring these economic changes.
The Johannesburg summit was also notable for a rare bilateral meeting between Xi and Modi, where they agreed to ease tensions on the China-India border that have led to serious skirmishes in recent years. The two countries will remain in a growing security dilemma as India expands its strategic ties with the US and other Western countries.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country and Southeast Asia’s largest economy, is a natural economic candidate for the BRICs, but it appears wary of joining a club increasingly dominated by China.
Jakarta was due to be one of this week’s invitees, but declined to submit its interest as President Joko Widodo’s government debated whether to join, despite its fast-growing economic ties with other member states.
However, while Xi Jinping this week successfully promoted the BRICs as the preeminent international forum, achieving that remains a challenge, analysts said.
“The G7 is structured in a positive way, as like-minded liberal democracies coming together,” said Prial Singh, a senior fellow at the South African Institute for Security Studies. hodgepodge.
“The only common unifying issue for which they came together was opposition to the current international system dominated by the West.”
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