The image is a little blurry, like in old home movies, but the message that emerges is clear. It is a video report from the American news agency AP that circulated a few days ago on X (formerly Twitter): It shows the arrival of heads of state at the seventh Non-Aligned Movement summit in New Delhi in 1983, in a revolving fleet of black Mercedes. They were welcomed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, standing tall and proud in her green and yellow sari. She then addressed her colleagues from the rostrum. At the end of her speech, Fidel Castro warmly embraced her.

The message was of a large, rather disparate family of countries, many of which had emerged from decolonization and which, in the midst of the Cold War, wanted to make their own voices heard outside the two dominant American and Soviet blocs – even though some, like Cuba, were in fact aligned with the USSR. The initiator of this movement was Gandhi's father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first head of government of independent India. At the time of the 1983 summit, India and China – which only attended as observers – had a comparable GDP, but only a tiny fraction of that of the United States.

Forty years later, on September 9 and 10, India is hosting an entirely different summit, the G20, which it is chairing this year. The context is also very different. China, the world's second-largest economy, rivals the US. The International Monetary Fund predicts that in 2023, it will contribute 35% of global growth, India 15% and the West 14%. While China's economy is stagnating, India's is booming. It is now the world's most populous country, ahead of China. And it has just landed on the Moon.

This long-organized G20 summit, to be attended by President Joe Biden, the main Western leaders and those of the major emerging countries, was to be a culmination of this "Indian moment." A last-minute announcement has spoiled the party: Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, will be replaced by his prime minister. This is in addition to the absence of Vladimir Putin, whose war in Ukraine has made him unpalatable to the West.

This is the first time Xi has missed a G20 summit, and Beijing has given no explanation for his no-show. Is it to avoid a summit with Biden on the sidelines of the G20, whom he is due to meet in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' meeting in San Francisco? Is it to focus on his domestic problems? Or is it to show host Narendra Modi who sets the pace in Asia?

This last explanation, set against the backdrop of the two Asian giants' rivalry for leadership of the Global South is obviously supported by many observers. Competition between Beijing and Delhi was already an underlying theme of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Johannesburg at the end of August, dominated by Xi from start to finish. The group's enlargement to 11 countries, in particular, was seen as a success for China, which would like to see in the BRICS an embryonic alternative order to that which the US has organized around itself.

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