As Chinese President Xi Jinping and a host of other leaders gather in Kazan, Russia, for the 16th BRICS summit, the world is once again turning the spotlight on the burgeoning international mechanism to see how it will push forward self-development and respond to global woes.
A steadfast champion of BRICS co-operation, Xi once compared its five members back then to the five fingers of one hand: they are short and long if extended, but form a powerful fist if clenched together.
Now that hand has grown bigger and stronger, as its membership expanded last year, yet the essence of Xi’s metaphor is just becoming more relevant.
With the world trudging on in a new period of turbulence and transformation, the leader of the largest developing country is poised to help guide BRICS, the leading echelon of the Global South, to play a bigger role in building a better shared future for humanity. BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is literally called “gold bricks” in Chinese, indicating optimism for its great potential and shining future.
The sanguine view features prominently in Xi’s engagement with the group. He has consistently placed BRICS high 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 Durban, South Africa, and he visited all 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,” noted Bunn Nagara, a senior China researcher in Malaysia. Thanks to the joint efforts of its members, the golden value of BRICS has kept rising.
World Bank data show that the share of BRICS in global GDP grew from 18% in 2010 to about 26% in 2021, with increases in all years during the period. Among the drivers of its remarkable growth is a strong orientation toward real results. “BRICS is not a talking shop, but a task force that gets things done,” Xi once stressed.
Following in this spirit, practical co-operation has always been the foundation of the BRICS mechanism, a good example of which is the launch of the New Development Bank (NDB).
Headquartered in Shanghai, the multilateral institution had approved 105 projects in all member countries for approximately $35 billion by the end of last year. In view of BRICS’ evolving development needs, Xi, at the 2017 summit in China’s coastal city of Xiamen, joined other leaders of member countries in formally incorporating cultural and people-to-people exchanges into the engines of BRICS co-operation, to further enhance the bond between these nations and reinforce the foundation of BRICS interaction.
Powered by the three engines, namely political and security, economic and financial, as well as cultural and people-to-people exchanges, the BRICS co-operation has seen even more substantial progress and growing popular support.
The unique value of the BRICS co-operation goes beyond economic terms, and the mechanism is an innovation of international co-operation, which is in marked contrast to some protectionist, exclusive political, military or economic alliances in the West, said Wang Lei, director of the BRICS Co-operation Research Centre at Beijing Normal University.
In Xi’s words, the BRICS co-operation transcends the old formula of political and military alliances, the old mindset of drawing lines on the basis of ideology as well as the obsolete notion of “you win, I lose” and “winner-takes-all”.
The golden track record, as many observers have pointed out, has not only amply busted various gloom-and-doom claims such as that BRICS is nothing but “a motley crew,” but also increased its appeal to the rest of the world.
Since the inception of the BRICS mechanism, openness and inclusivity have remained its members’ abiding commitment.
Xi has repeatedly emphasised that BRICS countries gather not in a closed club or an exclusive circle. “A tree cannot make a forest,” he said as early as at his BRICS summit debut in Durban in 2013. A year later at the Fortaleza summit in Brazil, he proposed the “BRICS spirit” of openness, inclusiveness, and win-win co-operation.
With such an open mind, the group developed a tradition of inviting leaders of other countries to its summits.
Then at the 2017 gathering in Xiamen, an ancient port city that has evolved into a dynamic hub in China’s opening up and reform, Xi built on that outreach practice and put forward the “BRICS Plus” programme, encouraging more participation of other emerging markets and developing nations.
In fact, this southern Chinese city of Xiamen happened to be where Xi came to work as deputy mayor in 1985 at 32. Now, under Xi’s initiative, an innovation base for the BRICS partnership on the new industrial revolution has taken root there.
Cape Times