La Jornada – Brick by brick, Xi Jinping promotes cooperation with BRICS

Beijing. As Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders gather in the Russian city of Kazan for the 16th BRICS summit, the world is once again focusing its attention on the burgeoning international mechanism for determining how to boost self-development and responding to global problems.

As a strong advocate of cooperation among BRICS countries, Xi once compared his five limbs to the five fingers of a hand: they are short and long when extended, but form a powerful fist when extended. close together. Today, that hand has become bigger and stronger, with its membership increasing in the last year, but the essence of Xi's metaphor is increasingly relevant.

As the world enters a new period of turbulence and transformation, the leader of the largest developing country is ready to help BRICS, the most important tier of the South, play a greater role in building a better common future for humanity.

Gold value

BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, are literally called “golden bricks” in Chinese, indicating optimism about their great potential and bright future.

This optimistic outlook figures prominently in Xi's commitment to the group. It has always given priority to BRICS in China's foreign policy agenda. His first appearance on the multilateral stage as Chinese head of state was at the 2013 BRICS summit in the South African city of Durban, and he visited the other four BRICS countries in the first two years of his presidency.

“China, led by President Xi Jinping, has contributed significantly to the success of BRICS,” said Bunn Nagara, a senior China researcher in Malaysia.

Thanks to the joint efforts of its members, the value of BRICS gold has continued to increase. World Bank data shows that the BRICS countries' share of global GDP increased from 18% in 2010 to around 26% in 2021, registering an increase every year during this period.

Among the factors behind its remarkable growth is a strong orientation towards concrete results. “BRICS is not a gathering, but a working group that achieves results,” Xi once stressed.

In this spirit, pragmatic cooperation has always been the basis of the BRICS mechanism, a good example of which is the launch of the New Development Bank (NBD). Headquartered in Shanghai, the multilateral institution has approved 105 projects across all member countries worth around US$35 billion until the end of 2023.

Given the evolving development needs of the BRICS group, Xi, at the 2017 summit in the Chinese coastal city of Xiamen, joined other member leaders to formally integrate cultural and people-to-people exchanges into the drivers of BRICS economic cooperation. , in order to further improve the bond between these nations and strengthen the foundations of group interaction.

Driven by the three drivers, namely political and security, economic and financial, as well as cultural and people-to-people exchanges, BRICS cooperation has seen even more substantial progress and growing popular support.

The unique value of BRICS cooperation goes beyond economic terms, and the mechanism is an innovation of international cooperation, which contrasts sharply with some protectionist and exclusionary political, military or economic alliances of the West, said Wang Lei, director of BRICS cooperation. Research Center of Beijing Normal University.

In Xi's words, BRICS cooperation transcends the old formula of political and military alliances, the old mentality of drawing lines based on ideology, as well as the outdated notion of “you win, I lose” and “winner takes all”.

The golden trajectory, as noted by many observers, not only largely refuted various pessimistic claims, according to which the BRICS are nothing more than a “motley crew”, but also significantly increased their attractiveness to the rest of the world.

A BRICS ms large

On the morning of August 24, the Sandton Convention Center in Johannesburg burst into applause after the announcement of the historic BRICS enlargement. This, Xi said at the press conference, demonstrates “the determination of BRICS countries and developing countries to unite.”

Since the creation of the BRICS mechanism, openness and inclusion have been the constant commitment of its members. Xi has repeatedly emphasized that BRICS countries do not come together in a closed club or exclusive circle. “One tree cannot make a forest,” he said during his debut at the BRICS summit in Durban in 2013. A year later, at the Fortaleza summit in Brazil, he proposed “the BRICS spirit of openness, inclusion and mutually beneficial cooperation. .

With such open-mindedness, the group has developed a tradition of inviting leaders from other countries to its summits. At the 2017 meeting in Xiamen, a former port city that has become a dynamic center of China's reform and opening-up, Xi built on this practice of rapprochement and introduced the “BRICS Plus” program, encouraging greater participation from other emerging markets and developing countries. .

In fact, Xiamen, a city in southern China, is where Xi went to work as deputy mayor in 1985, at the age of 32. Now, under Xi's initiative, an innovation foundation for the BRICS partnership on the new industrial revolution has taken root there.

Over the years, with profound changes that have reshaped the world to a level rarely seen in history, the Chinese president has tirelessly championed openness and cooperation. “Under the new circumstances, it is even more important for BRICS countries to pursue development with open doors and advance cooperation with open arms,” ​​Xi said at the 14th BRICS Summit in 2022.

A year later, more than 60 countries gathered in Johannesburg for the BRICS summit. The meeting “is neither an exercise to ask countries to take sides, nor an exercise to create bloc confrontation,” Xi said. “Rather, it is an effort to expand the architecture of peace and development,” he said.

Besides the countries that became full members on January 1, 2024, more than 30 countries have also officially applied to join BRICS, while many other developing countries are seeking deeper cooperation with the group.

“There is a reason why these countries decide to join BRICS,” said Mekhri Aliev, director of the BRICS innovation base in Xiamen, explaining that it is “because they see the future, they see potentials and opportunities within BRICS.”

A bigger voice

Three months after its enlargement decision, the BRICS group convened an extraordinary joint summit on the situation in Gaza with the leaders of the invited members, as well as with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. It was a first meeting for the group. The meeting, as Xi said, marks “a good start” for greater BRICS cooperation after their enlargement.

Commenting on this summit, Al Jazeera He stressed that the main countries of the South seek to “make their voice heard in a world order dominated by the West”. Steven Gruzd, an analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said “this reflects the growing assertiveness and confidence of the BRICS group, which is not waiting for the West.”

The BRICS play an important role in the evolving international landscape. Promoting a more just and equitable international order has been a recurring theme in Xi's comments on BRICS cooperation.

Effective coordination between BRICS members and other countries in the South “adds more bricks to the architecture of global governance,” Wang Lei said.

The NDB illustrates this effort. “The establishment of the bank is a beneficial complement and improvement to the existing financial system,” Xi said, adding that it “can encourage deeper thinking and more active reforms in the global financial system.”

In a meeting in Beijing in 2023 with Dilma Rousseff, former Brazilian president and current head of the NDB, Xi called on the NDB to help modernize more developing countries. Rousseff shares Xi's vision. “We don't want BRICS to speak only for a few countries. What we want is for the majority of countries to be part of BRICS,” he told Xinhua.

As Xi emphasized, strengthening global governance is the right choice if the international community wants to share development opportunities and address global challenges.

“In economic terms, non-Western nations – with BRICS at the forefront – are pushing the world towards a new reality: a the state in which economic, social and monetary development that disrupts what the world has considered normal for nearly eight decades,” observed global investment expert Jeff D. Opdyke.

Guan Zhaoyu, a researcher at the Institute of Eurasian Studies at Renmin University of China, said BRICS cooperation “is neither anti-West nor intended to overthrow the existing world order, but rather to constructively reform its unfair aspects to give more opportunities to the world”. in development.

Xi maintains that development is the inalienable right of all countries and not the privilege of a few. Under its grand vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, China has joined forces with other developing countries to advance their respective modernizations.

China will always be a member of the Global South and the developing world, Xi has said repeatedly.

“President Xi has sent a very clear message: China will join other emerging markets and developing countries in the process of global modernization and ensure that no one is left behind,” Guan said.