Brick by brick, Xi Jinping boosts BRICS cooperation

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 turning its attention to the burgeoning international mechanism to see how it will boost self-development and respond to problems. global.

As a strong supporter of cooperation between the BRICS countries, Xi once compared its five members to the five fingers of a hand: They are short and long if extended, but form a powerful fist if closed together. Now that hand has grown bigger and stronger, with its members expanding last year, but the essence of Xi’s metaphor is increasingly pertinent.

As the world enters a new period of turbulence and transformation, the leader of the largest developing country is prepared to help guide the BRICS, the most prominent echelon of the Global South, to play a greater role in building a better shared future for humanity.

Golden Value

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

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

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

Thanks to the joint efforts of its members, the gold value of BRICS has continued to increase. World Bank data shows that the BRICS countries’ share of global GDP rose from 18 percent in 2010 to about 26 percent in 2021, registering an increase each year of that period.

Among the factors driving its remarkable growth is a strong orientation towards real results. “The 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 in all member countries worth approximately 35 billion US dollars until the end of 2023.

In view of 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 incorporate cultural and people-to-people exchanges into the drivers of BRICS cooperation, in order to further improve the link between these nations and strengthen the basis of the group’s 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 witnessed 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 the BRICS. BRICS Cooperation Research Center at Beijing Normal University.

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

The golden trajectory, as many observers have noted, has not only largely debunked various pessimistic claims such as the BRICS being nothing more than “a motley crew”, but has also significantly increased its appeal to the rest of the world.

A bigger BRICS

On the morning of August 24 last year, the Sandton Convention Center in Johannesburg burst into applause after the announcement of the historic expansion of the BRICS. That, Xi said at the news conference, demonstrates “the determination of the BRICS countries and developing nations to unite.”

Since the creation of the BRICS mechanism, openness and inclusion have been the constant commitment of its members. Xi has repeatedly stressed that the BRICS countries do not meet in a closed club or an exclusive circle. “A tree cannot make a forest,” he said in 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 an open mind, the group developed a tradition of inviting leaders from other countries to their 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 that rapprochement practice and introduced the “BRICS Plus” program, encouraging greater participation of other emerging markets and developing nations.

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

Over the years, with profound changes that have reshaped the world at a level rarely seen in history, the Chinese president has unswervingly defended openness and cooperation. “Under the new circumstances, it is even more important for BRICS countries to pursue development with open doors and push forward 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 in asking countries to take sides, nor an exercise in creating a block confrontation,” Xi said. “Rather, it is an effort to expand the architecture of peace and development,” he said.

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

“There is a reason why these countries decide to join the 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 the BRICS.”

A bigger voice

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

Commenting on this summit, Al Jazeera noted that the leading countries of the Global South seek “a greater voice in a global 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 grouping, which is not waiting for the West.”

The BRICS is an important force in shaping the international landscape. Promoting a more just and equitable international order has been a consistent theme in Xi’s comments on BRICS cooperation.

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

The NDB exemplifies this effort. “The establishment of the bank serves as a beneficial complement and improvement of the existing financial system,” Xi said, adding that this “can encourage deeper reflection and more active reforms in the global financial system.”

During 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. “It is the vision that we do not want the BRICS to speak only for a few countries. What we want is for the majority of countries to be part of the BRICS,” he told Xinhua.

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

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

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

Xi maintains that development is an inalienable right of all countries, not a privilege of a few. Under its grand vision of building a community with a shared future for humanity, China has been joining efforts 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 on several occasions.

“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.