It's easy to get lost in all the acronyms. There's BRICS, a group originally made up of five major "emerging" countries – if we consider Russia to be "emerging" – which has since expanded to include four other members, who are meeting together, along with some 20 other friendly countries, from Tuesday, October 22, to Thursday, October 24, in Kazan, Russia. Moreover, there are also the countries that have joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Central Asian states united with Moscow and Beijing to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).
The list of countries involved is never quite the same, but the summits do have some similarities: Contentious issues between two participants are left at the door; the meeting ends with a communiqué calling for a new, more representative and fairer world order; the US is not present – and China is always the dominant power.
These various meetings are the embodiment of China's power strategy. To establish its position, it has been both integrating into existing institutions, for example by sending its officials to head UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has had a Chinese leader since 2019, and shaping other, parallel ones.
This diplomatic strategy, comprised of holding alternative summits to those attended by the Western world, embodied by the G7, has enabled Beijing to push its worldview: That one political model – liberal democracy – is no more legitimate than any other, and that the right to economic progress can override other human rights.
Above all, China wants to show that a majority of the world's population agrees on the need to put an end to the America-centric world order. The omnipotence of the dollar, the US's network of military alliances, their vision of human rights, including by promoting political freedoms and freedom of expression at the UN: These are all elements that the People's Republic of China intends to weaken in order to be more accepted.
These formats have proliferated since Xi Jinping came to power in November 2012, and they now form a regular schedule, with China at the center of the family photo each time. As recently as September 4-6, the Chinese capital welcomed representatives from 53 of the 54 African states – with Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, being the only country on the continent to recognize Taipei rather than Beijing.
In return, these weaker countries can claim to have the respect of a larger one, and have its leaders' ear on their specific projects of interest, such as for financing infrastructure projects. With African leaders in September, the final communiqué called for an "equal and orderly multipolar world," an apparently innocuous phrasing which, in Chinese rhetoric, serves as an attack on the US's exorbitant powers.
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