Brisbane83!Is China a part of the global south?
Beijing certainly thinks so. For instance, at the recently concluded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, a conference held every three years between China and African leaders, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke of the global south’s “shared path toward modernization.” China has set up a development fund containing the term “South-South.” And Foreign Minister Wang Yi has also explicitly stated more than once that China is and will always be a member of the global south.
Though the terms used have changed over time, China’s rhetorical embrace of the developing world is not exactly new. Its roots go back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. After the revolutionary fervor of the early 1950s subsided somewhat, China participated in the historic 1955 Bandung Conference that brought Asian and African leaders from recently decolonized countries together in a common front against global inequities. In 1964, Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s righthand man, formulated China’s Eight Principles for Economic Aid and Technical Assistance to Other Countries. Mao’s own worldview defined two “intermediate zones” between the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter zone comprising Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The intermediate zones framing later morphed into the Three Worlds theory in 1974. In a conversation with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, Mao defined the “Third World” as including Africa, Latin America, and all of Asia, except Japan. This brief reference was elaborated on at length in a famous speech by Deng Xiaoping to the U.N. General Assembly in the same year, in which he said: “China belongs to the Third World.”
Mao, like many of his contemporaries, defined the Third World in predominantly economic and postcolonial terms. The framing made sense in the 1970s, when China was among the world’s poorer countries. The average Chinese lived no better, and in some cases worse, than the wide swath of recently decolonized countries.
Fast-forward to today, and much has changed. A different understanding of the meta-region stretching from Latin America to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands is needed—and in turn, China’s place within it must be reconsidered.
In this meta-region, 45 states that the United Nations has dubbed “least developed countries” remain mired in poverty and, in some cases, state failure. But about 80 others have grown substantially. Many, especially in Asia, made globalization and capitalism their own and turbocharged growth with corresponding social investments. They industrialized, integrated with the global economy, and built respectable levels of domestic infrastructure.
China itself is among the biggest beneficiaries of this transformation—from a country that experienced state-induced famines during the disastrous 1958-62 Great Leap Forward to now a highly industrialized, upper-middle-income country.
As economies diverge and the colonial era recedes into the past, the term “global south” has gained currency, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is best described as a “geopolitical fact,” a vast middle that sits outside the great-power system made up of the three great powers and core U.S. allies in Europe, East Asia, and Australasia. The “rest” have achieved varied levels of economic and social development but remain outside the select club of core alliances and global rulemaking. By definition, therefore, a great power cannot be a part of the global south.
China’s sheer size; high levels of GDP, trade, investment, and increasingly innovation; and successful military modernization mean that it now qualifies as a great power. It has joined Russia and the United States in this select category—though the United States is clearly the most powerful of the three and Russia barely makes the grade.
China is indeed working closely with a few global south states on major issues, for example with Brazil on a Ukraine peace plan, and as a part of the BRICS grouping. But Beijing’s global south rhetoric, while drawing on a real shared history, is today a stratagem, designed to win influence among the developing world and further its aims of influencing the global order. If anything, China’s emergence as a great power opens the door for a divergence from the global south on three important fronts: trade and investment, climate, and geopolitics.
Divides on trade are already visible. Middle-income global south countries such as Indonesia and Chile have recently slapped tariffs on Chinese imports as China has increasingly shifted into advanced manufacturing. Jakarta has just banned a giant Chinese online retailer, citing threats to local businesses. Mexico wants to reduce Chinese imports in its supply chain. Concerns over local trade have also triggered actions against Chinese imports in Brazil.
Meanwhile, Beijing’s flagship investment program, the Belt and Road Initiative, has become much smaller and more targeted of late, with spending falling off sharply as a slowing China focuses more at home. China is also on the “other side” when it comes to negotiating debt relief with poorer states in the G-20’s Common Framework, an odd position for a nation that claims to still be developing.
China and the global south have historically cooperated closely on climate change in the G-77+China coalition. They routinely push the U.N. principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) and legitimately demand much greater climate finance commitments from wealthy states. The CBDR principle puts the onus on financing the energy transition on the global north, since wealthy countries have been the dominant contributors to destructive climate change due to their much larger cumulative carbon emissions. Unsurprisingly, Washington tends to minimize or ignore CBDR in climate negotiations.
But China’s own emissions have risen to the point that it has itself become a major contributor to not only annual but also historical emissions. With 14.7 percent of the global share, China now ranks third in cumulative emissions since 1750, not far behind the United States and the European Union. (The leading global south emitter, India, comes in much lower at nearly 3.4 percent.) The CBDR principle puts China on the side of wealthy states much more than developing countries.
China could justifiably point to its already significant efforts as a source of climate finance. But it will resist what should be a logical shift in its status and oppose formally taking on climate finance targets.
China and the global south may also yet diverge on the broader geopolitical plane. Highly militarized U.S.-China competition can destabilize the global order and risk major conflict; it is therefore not in the global south’s interests. Any actions by Beijing contributing to regional or global destabilization will not be welcomed in the global south. (The same is true for any such behavior by Washington.)
But China’s relative weakness compared with the United States, and an economic slowdown at home, also creates incentives for a revived G-2 in order to craft updated rules of global governance. Xi seemed to propose exactly this last year.
Washington is currently in no mood to engage in such a conversation with Beijing due to China’s perceived threat to its global primacy, sharp differences over Taiwan, and the Russia-Ukraine war. But as planetary challenges multiply, and as China closes the gap in strategic innovation despite its economic crunch, both sides may be incentivized toward deeper, though sectoral, cooperation—perhaps after a nasty crisis that stops short of war.
Any new, future G-2, even if partial, would sit uneasily with most of the global south, as the latter’s demands might not be factored in a backroom deal between the two most powerful states in the international system. The very act of excluding these states from such a conversation would also rankle. The net effect would be to widen their divide with Beijing.
China could bridge its growing gap with the global south by being more proactive on issues such as debt, climate, and trade and refraining from provocative actions in theaters such as the South China Sea. Continuing U.S. failures that cost the lives of innocents (such as in the Middle East escalation) or U.S. over-militarization in Asia could also ensure China remains attractive in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
While Beijing has traditionally enjoyed a natural convergence with the global south, the future looks a lot more complicated.