Is the "Global South" a new arena for competition between China and the West?
Developments like the first ever U.S.-Pacific Island Country summit in Washington DC, in September 2002, are widely viewed as match already begun. The summit is a pointed reaction to China's signing of a security agreement with the Solomon Islands in April, followed by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to eight countries in the Pacific Islands region.
But, it is useful to note that "Global South" is not a standard Chinese vocabulary to frame the world. The corresponding wording Quanqiu Nanfang can be sporadically found in databases of Chinese publications academic and journalistic, but almost exclusively as a quotation of its use by non-Chinese authors and speakers.
When used in the English language for discussing Chinese foreign policies, the geographical scope of "Global South" is similar to Yafeila (Asia, Africa and Latin America) in Chinese. Yafeila was used to express Third World solidarity, most prominently in the years when China was campaigning for diplomatic recognition by the United Nations. But since the early 1980s, the reference has virtually disappeared in Chinese commentary on world affairs.
What's the significance in noting this gap in framing Chinese foreign relations? For international, particularly Western analysts, adopting "Global South" can help seeing Chinese activities in one country as indicative of what to come for other nation-states that outside the conceptual Western world. However, that approach can lead to undue alarm and even unwarranted geo-strategic anxieties.
As I see it, the conceptual gap goes to the heart of competing understandings of international development cooperation. Modern Chinese thinking is heavily impacted – though not always explicitly acknowledged – by Sun Yat-sen's prolific writings on the topic in the early 1920s. Sun was committed to ridding China of its abject and pervasive poverty of his times. His 1922 book The International Development of China , published in English and by the Knickerbocker Press, based in New York, was a comprehensive expose of his writings in Chinese. Among other things, Sun championed four fundamentals:
- promotion of infrastructure development in China
- development through agricultural and industrial growth (as opposed to financial dynamism)
- utilization of foreign inputs, but in a controlled manner
- creation of international agencies devoted to promotion of development in the world
Sun's articulations, if only strong in envisioned outcomes but weak in actionable means, survived his times. Mao Zedong would call him a forerunner of modern China's pursuit of modernization. In terms of handling the nation's foreign relations, Sun's idea of "all [nations] are equal" ( tianxia datong ) resonates with framings like "five principles of peaceful coexistence" and/or "a world community with a shared future". It can be said that fundamental tenets undergirding Sun's conceptualization of the development of China and the rest of the world is intuitive in Chinese scholarly and policy thinking.
In other words, viewed in a Chinese prism, the nature of North-South relations, even during the heydays of the Cold War when the framing was a mainstay, is not as post-colonial as it is implied to mean in the Western sense of the term. As a matter of fact, China did treat its participation in the Bandung Conference of Asia and Africa in 1955 as definitional of its foreign policy, but it did not join either the South-South Cooperation movement or the Non-aligned Movement in full force. Even today, China does not formally align with the Group of 77, which grew out of those political movements led by newly independent countries.
Under Deng Xiaoping, China moved away from the "Three Worlds" formulation to identify the nature of North-South relations to be international security – with nuclear disarmament by the superpowers as the main indicator – and South-South relationship as development, i.e., economic growth as the primary task, rather than revolutionary change to the post-WWII international system.
Even so, what is the relevance of this review of history for discussions about China's policy approaches to Asia, Africa and Latin America today?
First, Chinese thinking about the country's engagement in development finance arrangements for other middle- and low-income countries as a natural step of action. China first joined major multilateral development banks, including the IMF and the World Bank (1980), the African Development Bank (1985), the Asian Development Bank (1986), the Inter-American Development Bank (2009), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (2016).
Either as a contributor or as a borrower, membership in these multilateral development banks helped China in its pursuit of economic growth and social development. Then, it initiated establishment of the New Development Bank (NDB, 2014) the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB, 2015). It is true that the clientele of the AIIB and NDB is in the Global South. But, as is broadly recognized, contributions by these banks, especially in infrastructure development, fill a much-needed void for world development.
Second, China put forward a Global Development Initiative (GDI) in 2021. The GDI is very much a continuation of the Belt and Road initiative (BRI), first articulated in 2013. To the extent that there are additional elements to it, the GDI makes alignment of priority areas for cooperation with those in the United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). China's emphasizes cooperation through UN development agencies in implementing the GDI, as opposed to the BRI, which is a primarily bilateral endeavor.
Third, the Global Security Initiative (GSI), which China tabled in February 2002, is probably what caught enhanced attention in the West. But much of the text in the GSI amounts to reframing of the "five principles of peaceful coexistence", as is consistently repeated in previous Chinese position papers on international security.
What is new in the GSI, especially to American and other Western observers, is inclusion of reference to the term "indivisible security" therein. It becomes catchy partly as the term is standardly associated with Russian rhetoric on its pursuit of, dating back at least to the early 1990s. But the Chinese language equivalent can mean inalienable and inseparable as well, depending on the object of reference. In Chinese dialectics, development and security are antecedent to each other.
In the final analysis, prospects for either the GDI or GSI will have to depend on the level of buy-in from countries in the Global South. More significantly, a government in the Global South simultaneously relates to competing development and security initiatives from major countries. For discussions about dynamics between China's interactions with the West, it is useful and even necessary to come to a common understanding of the notion of "Global South".
Zha Daojiong is a professor of international political economy in the School of International Studies and Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, Peking University. This note is his prepared remarks at the "Great Power Competition in the Global South" panel of the 2022 edition of the Stockholm China Forum, held on October 25.