Brics and G20: all the geopolitical rivalries between India and China. Le Monde report
The rivalry between China and India is also affecting the G20. The Le Monde article
After the BRICS summit, dominated by China, Xi Jinping's no to the G20 summit scheduled for Saturday in New Delhi, India, highlights the tensions between the two Asian giants, who claim leadership of the "Global South". This competition also highlights the West's loss of influence, writes Sylvie Kauffmann, a columnist for Le Monde , in her article.
The image is a little blurry, like in old family home movies, but the message 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 the heads of state at the seventh non-aligned summit in New Delhi in 1983, in a row of black Mercedes , welcomed by Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, standing proud and upright in her green and yellow sari. She then turned to her colleagues from the rostrum. At the end of his speech, Fidel Castro hugged her warmly.
The message was that of a large and rather heterogeneous family of countries, many of which had emerged from decolonization and which, in the midst of the Cold War, wanted to make their voice heard outside the two great blocs, the American and the Soviet one – even if some, like Cuba, were in fact aligned with the USSR. The initiator of this movement was Indira Gandhi's father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first head of government of independent India. At the time of the 1983 summit, India and China – participating only as observers – had comparable GDPs, but only a fraction of that of the United States.
Forty years later, on September 9 and 10, India is hosting a completely different summit, that of the G20, which it is chairing this year. The context is also very different. China, the world's second largest economy, competes with the United States. The International Monetary Fund projects that by 2023, China will contribute 35% of global growth, India 15% and the Americas (North and South) 14%. While China's economy is slowing, India's is booming. Today it is the most populous country in the world, ahead of China. And it just landed on the moon.
The G20, an “Indian moment”
The G20 summit, prepared for some time and attended by President Joe Biden, the main Western leaders and those of the main emerging countries, was supposed to be a sort of apotheosis of this "Indian moment". A last-minute announcement spoiled the party: Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, will be replaced by his Prime Minister. Added to this is the absence of Vladimir Putin, busy with his war in Ukraine and now unwelcome to the West.
It is the first time that Xi has skipped a G20 summit; Beijing offered no explanation for his absence. Is it to avoid a summit on the sidelines of the G20 with Joe Biden, who he is expected to meet in November at the meeting of the Pacific States in San Francisco? To focus on his internal problems? Or to show the host, Narendra Modi, who is the master of watches in Asia?
This last explanation, against the backdrop of the rivalry between the two Asian giants for the leadership of the “Global South”, obviously has many supporters. The competition between Beijing and Delhi was already the basis of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in Johannesburg at the end of August, dominated from start to finish by Xi. The enlargement of the group to eleven countries was seen as a success for China, which would like to see in the BRICS an embryo of an alternative order to the one that the United States has organized around itself.
The announcement of President Xi's absence was also preceded by a Chinese move that did not fail to outrage the Indians – among other things, because they are not the only targets of Beijing's expansionism: the publication of the 2023 edition of the “national map” of China. The regime's geographers are not joking: this official document places the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin plateau within Chinese borders, a region over which Beijing and Delhi have a territorial dispute. “This absurd claim to Indian territory does not make it Chinese territory,” protested the head of Indian diplomacy, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Not exactly the hope of a peaceful G20: with friends like this, who needs enemies?
Multi-alignment
Beyond the cyclical setbacks, the tensions between China and India in the shadow of the G20 reflect an international system in the throes of fragmentation, where China seeks to impose its vision of an alternative order to the Western one, while India above all wants make his way. “I am on my side and no one else's,” Nehru said when asked whether he was on the side of the East or the West. The multipolarity of the 21st century world is more complicated, and India, while keeping an eye on China, navigates between the United States, with which it has become very close, Russia, which is still very useful to it, and some middle powers . Non-alignment has given way to “multialignment”. The democratic model has been replaced by a proliferation of uninhibited autocracies.
It's all very fluid, like the BRICS and the G20. China methodically advances its pawns and its acronyms, replacing the dull star of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the "new silk roads" that European states are abandoning – with the Global Development Initiative (GDI), the Global Security Initiative (GSI) and, why not, the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI).
It is investing in the UN and, outside of it, it is trying to widen the circles around itself, at the risk of rejections: Indonesia, for example, preferred to wait before joining the BRICS. But many other states are candidates. “I haven't seen anyone knocking on the door of the G20,” warned Emmanuel Macron recently. Indeed, yes: it is possible that the African Union will be admitted. But the transformation of the G20 into the G21 must not make the West forget the root of the problem: if it takes too long to share power in the international system it has built, it risks losing it in the end.
(Extract from the eprcomunicazione press review)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/g20-india-cina-brics/ on Sat, 09 Sep 2023 05:11:06 +0000.