Beijing Bets on BRICS as Biden Ramps Up Tech and Trade War

Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing for only his second trip abroad of 2023 to attend the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa next week. What’s so important about the meeting that Xi feels the need to attend personally? Sputnik reached out to veteran China watcher Thomas W. Pauken II for answers.

President Xi is set to touch down in South Africa next Monday for a four-day state visit. The overseas trip is Xi’s first since his visit to Moscow in March for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Along with his attendance of the BRICS Summit, the Chinese leader is set to meet with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other regional leaders for the China-Africa Leaders Dialogue, a platform helping to facilitate Beijing’s ambitious vision for ramping up trade, investment, infrastructure, resource extraction and energy cooperation with the African continent.

Why Does China Need BRICS?

As a founding member of the BRICS group, China received a new impulse for policy, infrastructure, trade, finance and people-to-people contact-based coordination for its global Belt and Road infrastructure and trade initiative. Using BRICS, Beijing has been able to ramp up infrastructure cooperation with Russia and other Eurasian Economic Union members, and to sign a memorandum of understanding with South Africa on the construction of a ‘21stCentury Maritime Silk Road’.

And although China has grown into an economic superpower in its own right over the past two decades, the BRICS format provides the Asian giant with an important tool of leading developing economies to expand markets and secure crucial natural resources and food. Brazil and India, for example, are among the top five largest food producers in the world, while Russia and South Africa are among the leading global producers of resources like gold, diamonds, bauxite, lithium and chromium in the world. Combined, the BRICS bloc rivals the economic power and influence of the G7.

BRICS as Alternative to the West?

China was able to forge its economic rise by ramping up investment and trade cooperation with the United States and other Western countries. Even today, the US, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and Germany remain among the top ten export destinations of Chinese goods. However, under President Xi, China has gradually and carefully moved to reorient trade policy toward other countries, including Russia, and developing nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America. This shrewd strategy, signaling a slow split from the vision of ‘Chimerica’ – the early 21st century vision of an economic super bloc in which China and the US are inexorably linked to one another economically, helped Beijing avoid economic catastrophe after the US launched a continually escalating trade and technology war against China in 2018.

“Obviously BRICS is very important for China,” veteran China analyst and author Thomas W. Pauken II told Sputnik. “Right now the Western countries led by the United States are leading a China decoupling policy. So BRICS is a fair alternative to the Western powers and the G7. By President Xi going to South Africa, he’s showing how significant it is and that all of China should pay attention to it.”

Pauken believes that if the BRICS group can expand its global influence by adding new members, the bloc can become “sort of an alternative” to the West. “This is actually really important because right now what I sort of anticipate in global trends is that there’s going to be a G7 vs. BRICS Plus” style arrangement, the observer explained.

“I think the West has sort of gotten used to being on top and thinking they are in control of the world and the global society with their so-called ‘rules-based’ mechanism or governance. However, there’s a new emerging world of the emerging markets of developing countries, along with China, India and Russia, that are sort of growing closer together because they realize that the Western powers and democracies are not exactly looking out for the best interest of the developing countries. So we’re seeing this sort of new world order of BRICS where they’re not going to always agree amongst each other, but at least they will have deeper respect for each other, and won’t be looked down upon like the Western powers looked down upon them,” Pauken said.

China’s Interests in Africa

Modest Chinese investment in Africa began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, but saw a major boom beginning starting the 2000s as the Asian nation began to bear the first fruits of its drive to become the industrial “workshop of the world.” Between 2000 and 2021, Chinese exports to Africa skyrocketed from just $5 billion to over $145 billion, climbing further, to $164.5 billion, in 2022. China importing some $117.5 billion in goods and resources from the continent last year.

Chinese investment in, loans to and trade with Africa have become so intensive over the past decade that it has already overtaken the United States as the continent’s largest trading partner, and is expected to top the European Union's combined trade with Africa by the end of the current decade.

“Obviously they [China, ed.] have major investments through the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa, along with their playing a major role in the development of infrastructure,” Pauken said, pointing, in particular, to Beijing’s focus on road and rail infrastructure.

Chinese development projects are not charity, the observer emphasized, highlighting the difference between the Chinese approach and the American “missionary” vision of aid to African countries.

“The Chinese are looking Africa more as a business partner, whereas Americans a few decades ago just saw the Africans as beggars. That is a major difference. This is why the US keeps talking about ‘debt trap diplomacy’, because they’ll say ‘oh, we are these missionaries that have great motives and we just gave them money, whereas the Chinese are expecting some type of return on investment’. However, China treating Africans as equal business partners is actually showing more respect than what the Americans have done when they treated the Africans as beggars,” Pauken emphasized.