BRICS may nominally be set to cover 46% of the global population with its invitation to Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last week, but the bloc’s mark is increasingly the thumbprint of a single man: Chinese President Xi Jinping.
President Lula da Silva of Brazil celebrated. At least publicly. He had just seen the BRICS bloc that he helped found back in 2009, when, without South Africa, it was simply BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), open its doors to five new dictatorships and one deeply indebted democracy, vaulting its numbers to 11 at its 15th summit. Human rights luminaries like Belarus, Cuba and Venezuela are waiting in the wings for future summits.
“What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country,” Lula said at a press conference as the meeting concluded, simultaneously demolishing democracy, competence and the majority of other states, who are yet to be welcomed into the club.
By this token, it is immaterial whether the geopolitical future of our planet is guided by theocracies that appear to beat women to death for the crime of “bad hijab,” absolute monarchies, ethnic cleansing facilitators or petrostates that undermine Lula’s hard work in the Amazon. The key point is that they are powerful within their own spheres. Like Bolsonaro’s Brazil would still be, if it had fallen into dictatorship, too.
This is the brave new multipolar world that apparently offers the Global South an off-the-shelf mix of funding options without pesky inconveniences like credible environmental impact assessments, nuclear nonproliferation conditions or transparency about what gets spent where by whom at which cost. The 21st century leader has a Shein haul of debt options and political support groups to flit between. He or she can align with those who abduct their own daughters or borrow from those who issue death sentences when they want a piece of land to construct over. Naturally, their own transgressions will be overlooked should they implement similar polices themselves.
Privately, Lula may have misgivings, for the summit was a power grab for Beijing, which has championed expansion. Almost every single one of the new faces is a dependable ally for China in the BRICS+ milieu. One day, like with the UAE, they’re hand in hand, flying joint military exercises over East Turkestan (Xijiang). The next, as with Egypt, they’re making cute new authoritarian paradises in the desert together. Iran signed a 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with China in 2021. Argentina signaled similar intentions in 2014 and joined up for the Belt and Road Initiative in 2022. Ethiopia’s public borrowing has relied heavily on China, to which it recently owed $13.7 billion dollars, and it is copying China’s strategy of building a parallel internet while periodically blocking uncomfortable elements of the global version.
Leaning to Beijing, the BRICS+ nexus now offers a widening platform for authoritarian leaders to exchange ideas and fortify themselves against international criticism over matters like war crimes, deaths of political prisoners and the treatment of the Uyghurs looking up at those Emirati warplanes. For Xi, it is another vehicle to remodel international human rights norms and diffuse his governance model through the developing world, as his regime has been evidenced doing, despite claims to the contrary.
Among the new members, Argentina offers an interesting window into the future of South-South exchanges. A mixed reaction to becoming BRICS+ emerged from its complex media ecology, in which both public and private media have multiple ties to Beijing. Some holders of such agreements penned enthusiastic portraits of the opportunities that membership will open up, but others platformed doubt as to whether it would materially benefit their country. It could merely serve political aims instead.
Some concerns centered around Brazil and India, but, again, China is where the influence lies. Already, Argentina has adjusted local freedom laws in Jujuy province in a manner that benefits thirst for lithium from China among others and has contracted the sanctions-busting Chinese firm ZTE to install facial recognition tech in the same protest-hit region. Argentina houses an opaque People’s Liberation Army telescope amid wider military exchanges between the two countries. And, in the midst of financial distress, the biggest debtor to the IMF has borrowed around $111.8 billion from Chinese entities. One can imagine that Buenos Aires may be leaned upon to follow Beijing’s line for internal BRICS+ discussions.
Perhaps most significantly, however, Argentina has also recently flipped its debt repayments to the International Monetary Fund from dollars to yuan, which may nod at another reason why Beijing seeks to nurture a bloc in addition to its existing constellation of bilateral deals. For some time now, it has been crafting strategy to displace the dollar’s supremacy for international trade. By doing so, it would both insulate itself against sanctions in the event of an attack on Taiwan and hone its own coercive tool. The United Arab Emirates, Thailand and Bangladesh have all been involved in nascent attempts to create yuan-based international payment systems. The latter two have apparently applied to join the former as BRICS+ members in the near future.
Yuan substitution is unlikely to go down well with India’s Narendra Modi, whose own penchant for authoritarianism does not preclude conflict with China. Talk of an entirely new BRICS currency for trade between members is an alternative that has also been swirling around the 15th summit. However, Modi is likely to be outmaneuvered by the BRICS+ coterie of China’s friends, and significant hurdles would have to be overcome to coin a unit of exchange to unite such disparate economies. Provided it can reliably hold value and convince on liquidity, the yuan may therefore appear more viable, especially for those who need to evade sanctions sooner rather than later. This is, at least, Xi Jinping’s dream.
Hence, even as BRICS enlarges, it is drawing down towards the single dot of authoritarianism, orchestrated by a Han supremacist. Its surface appearance of diversity all tends back to the simple idea of unfettered and often unelected leaders doing as they wish with both their peoples and their people’s money, cascading Beijing’s influence out through ever-widening circles of threatening governance, very often visited upon the Chinese diaspora and followers of Islam, despite their superficial elevation with the admittance of four Muslim-majority states.
Multilateralism is a noble and necessary pursuit that could serve to better entrench democracy and basic human rights, but BRICS is not truly broadening options for the people of this world. It is slowly but surely bolting the door on their right to choose anything other than a repressive system.
Image: GovernmentZA, CC BY-ND 2.0
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