Brick by brick, Xi Jinping boosts BRICS cooperation

Chinese President Xi Jimping, Oct 21, 2024 Photo: @BRICSInfo

October 21, 2024 Hour: 5:33 pm

As Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders gather in the Russian city of Kazan for the 16th summit of the BRICS group, the world is once again turning its attention to the flourishing international mechanism to see how it will boost self-development and respond to global problems.

As a strong supporter of cooperation among the BRICS countries, Xi once compared its five members to the five fingers of one hand: They are short and long if extended, but make a powerful fist if clenched together. Now that hand has grown bigger and stronger, with the expansion of its membership last year, but the essence of Xi’s metaphor is increasingly relevant.

As the world enters a new period of turbulence and transformation, the leader of the largest developing country is ready to help guide the BRICS, the most prominent layer of the Global South, to play a greater role in building a better shared future for humanity.

GOLDEN VALUE

BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is literally called “golden bricks” in Chinese, indicating optimism for their great potential and bright future.

This optimistic view figures prominently in Xi’s commitment to the group. He has always 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 the South African city of Durban, and he visited the other four BRICS countries during the first two years of his presidency.

“China, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, has contributed significantly to the success of BRICS”, said Bunn Nagara, senior researcher on China in Malaysia.

Thanks to the joint efforts of its members, the golden value of the BRICS has been steadily increasing. World Bank data show that the BRICS countries’ share of global GDP rose from 18 percent in 2010 to about 26 percent in 2021, registering an increase for each year of that period.

Among the factors driving its remarkable growth is a strong focus on tangible results. “BRICS is not a talking shop, but a working group that achieves results”, Xi once stressed.

In this spirit, pragmatic cooperation has always been the basis of the BRICS mechanism, a good example of which is the launch of the New Development Bank (NDB). With its headquarters in Shanghai, the multilateral institution has approved 105 projects in all member countries worth approximately US$35 billion through the end of 2023.

Given the evolving development needs of the BRICS group, Xi, at the 2017 summit held in the Chinese coastal city of Xiamen, joined other member leaders to formally incorporate cultural and people-to-people exchanges into the drivers of BRICS cooperation, in order to further enhance the bond between these nations and strengthen the basis of the group’s interaction.

Driven by the three engines, namely political and security, economic and financial, as well as cultural and people-to-people exchanges, BRICS cooperation has witnessed even more substantial progress and growing popular support.

The unique value of BRICS cooperation goes beyond economic terms, and the mechanism is an innovation of international cooperation, which contrasts markedly with some protectionist and excluding political, military or economic alliances in the West, said Wang Lei, director of the BRICS Cooperation Research Center at Beijing Normal University.

In Xi’s words, BRICS cooperation transcends the old formula of political and military alliances, the old mentality of drawing lines on the basis of ideology, as well as the outdated notion of “you win, I lose” and “the winner takes it all”.

The golden path, as many observers have pointed out, has not only largely disproven various pessimistic claims that BRICS is nothing more than “a motley crew”, but has also significantly increased its attractiveness to the rest of the world.

A LARGER BRICS

On the morning of August 24 of last year, the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg erupted in applause following the announcement of the historic expansion of BRICS. That, Xi said at the press conference, demonstrates “the determination of BRICS countries and developing nations to unite”.

Since the creation of the BRICS mechanism, openness and inclusiveness have been the constant commitment of its members. Xi has repeatedly stressed that the BRICS countries do not meet in a closed club or an exclusive circle. “One tree cannot make a forest”, he said as early as his debut at the BRICS summit in Durban in 2013. A year later, at the Fortaleza summit in Brazil, he proposed the “BRICS spirit” of openness, inclusiveness and mutually beneficial cooperation.