Cobus van Staden is the co-founder and managing editor of the China Global South Project, an independent startup tracking China’s influence throughout the Global South. He is also a senior research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs, and a non-resident fellow at the Department of Journalism at Stellenbosch University, where he focuses on Chinese messaging in Africa.
BRICS is an awkward group, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But its appeal across the Global South shows that resentment about Western global leadership is emerging as an umbrella issue uniting countries as disparate as communist Cuba and anti-communist Indonesia.
Geopolitics dominates the rhetoric on climate change in Washington D.C., but the developing world needs renewable energy, not debt and lectures on what a baddie China is.
Hunan Province wants to be a key node in Africa’s trade with China and the rest of the world. This is a refreshing change for a continent whose people often feel future-starved, and tired of empty rhetoric from Western capitals.
Most poor countries — and that means most countries — don’t like the current “rules-based international order,” but America is not prepared for the enormous appeal of China’s influence, argues Cobus van Staden in our inaugural Southern View column.
Amid the Ukraine war and the economic impact of massive sanctions on Russia, China is deftly connecting worries about international turbulence with Africa’s wider perception that it’s perpetually ignored. Here’s what that means for the future of China’s relations with the Global South.