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Diplomacy
OpinionComment
Zha Daojiong
Zha Daojiong

Opinion | How to better understand China’s development policies for the ‘Global South’

  • The West views with suspicion China’s engagement in development finance, and its global initiatives for development and security
  • But viewed through a Chinese prism, the nature of North-South relations does not have the postcolonial underpinnings in the Western sense of the term

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Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders stand under a giant portrait of Sun Yat-sen at a meeting commemorating the 110th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on October 9, 2021. In terms of China’s foreign relations, Sun’s idea that all nations are equal resonates with modern China’s “five principles of peaceful coexistence” and “a world community with a shared future”. Photo: Reuters
Zha Daojiong

Is the Global South a new arena for competition between China and the West? Developments such as the first US-Pacific Island Country summit in Washington last month are widely viewed as a sign that the contest has begun.

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The summit was a pointed reaction to China’s security agreement with the Solomon Islands in April, followed by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to eight Pacific countries.
But it is useful to note that “Global South” is not standard Chinese vocabulary in framing the world. The corresponding quanqiu nanfang can be sporadically found in Chinese publications but almost exclusively as a quotation of non-Chinese authors and speakers.

When used to discuss Chinese foreign policies, the geographical scope of the Global South is similar to yafeila (Asia, Africa and Latin America). Yafeila was used to express third-world solidarity, most prominently when China was campaigning for UN diplomatic recognition. But, since the early 1980s, the reference has virtually disappeared from Chinese commentary on world affairs.

What’s the significance of this gap in framing Chinese foreign relations? For international, particularly Western, analysts, the term “Global South” can help in seeing Chinese activities in one country as indicative of what is to come for other nation-states outside the conceptual Western world. But that approach can lead to undue alarm and even unwarranted geostrategic anxieties.

As I see it, the conceptual gap goes to the heart of competing understandings of international development and cooperation. Modern Chinese thinking is heavily affected – though not always acknowledged – by Sun Yat-sen’s prolific writings in the early 1920s.
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