Chinese President Xi calls for accelerated Brics expansion

JOHANNESBURG - China’s President Xi Jinping called for unity among his Brics counterparts at a summit in South Africa on Wednesday as he pushed the case for expanding the grouping to face a global “period of turbulence and transformation”.

Leaders of the bloc of leading developing nations Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are meeting in South Africa’s commercial capital Johannesburg, with discussions on establishing a framework and criteria for admitting new members topping the agenda.

While all Brics members have publicly expressed support for growing the bloc, divisions remain over how much and how quickly.

The group have adopted a document that sets out guidelines and principles for the group’s expansion, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said on Wednesday.

“We have agreed on the matter of expansion. We have a document that we have adopted that sets out the guidelines and principles, processes for considering countries that wish to become members of the Brics,” Ms Pandor said on Ubuntu Radio, a station run by South Africa’s foreign ministry.

A more detailed announcement will be made by the Brics leaders before the conclusion of the summit on Thursday, she said.

Bloc heavyweight China has long pushed for expansion, hoping that broader membership will lend clout to a grouping already home to about 40 per cent of the world’s population and a quarter of global gross domestic product.

Beijing views its deteriorating relations with Washington, as well as heightened global tensions resulting from the Ukraine war, as adding urgency to the enlargement project.

“The world is undergoing major shifts, division and regrouping... it has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation,” Mr Xi said.

“We, the Brics countries, should always bear in mind our founding purpose of strengthening ourselves through unity.”

Brics countries have economies that are vastly different in scale and governments that often seem to have few foreign policy goals in common, complicating decision-making.

The economy of China, for example, is more than 40 times larger than that of South Africa, which is Africa’s most developed country.

Addressing the bloc’s leaders in Johannesburg, Mr Xi said he was glad to see that developing countries had shown great enthusiasm in participating in Brics, with many of them having applied to join.

“We should let more countries join the Brics family to pool wisdom and efforts to make global governance more just and equitable,” he said.

South Africa said in July that more than 40 other nations had expressed interest in joining the organisation, which aims to offset the perceived hegemony of the United States-led West in global affairs. Of those, 22 had formally asked to join, it said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa voiced support for the idea at a bilateral meeting with Mr Xi on Tuesday.

But pushback has come from Brazil and India, which have both forged closer ties with the West.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday rejected the idea that the bloc should seek to rival the US and Group of Seven wealthy economies.

While he is pushing for neighbour Argentina to join, he said any new members would need to meet certain conditions, so that the group does not become a “Tower of Babel”.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that his country, which is wary of Chinese dominance, fully supported expansion.

However, an Indian official familiar with discussions late on Tuesday between the leaders said Mr Modi had indicated “there have to be ground rules about how it should happen and who can join”.

India and China periodically clash over their disputed Himalayan border.

Russia, isolated by the US and Europe over its invasion of Ukraine, is also pushing to quickly grow Brics and forge it into a counterweight to the West.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is wanted under an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, sees Brics membership as a way of showing the West he still has friends.

He did not travel to South Africa but used a video address to attack Western powers.

“I want to note that it was the desire to maintain their hegemony in the world, the desire of some countries to maintain this hegemony that led to the severe crisis in Ukraine,” he said.

Beyond the enlargement question, boosting the use of member states’ local currencies in trade and financial transactions to lessen dependency on the US dollar is also on the summit agenda.

South African organisers had said there would be no discussions on a common Brics currency, an idea floated by Brazil as an alternative to dollar-dependence.

At least 15 potential new member countries – including Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Argentina – are under consideration to join the bloc’s New Development Bank, said its chief financial officer on Wednesday.

Mr Xi also said that Brics countries have agreed to launch a study group on artificial intelligence (AI) and further expand cooperation on AI, including by strengthening information exchange and technical cooperation. REUTERS