How to Thwart China’s Bid to Lead the Global South

When India chaired the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September, Chinese President Xi Jinping skipped the meeting, sending the country’s premier, Li Qiang, in his place. The Chinese government did not account for Xi’s decision to miss such a high-profile event, but some observers suspected that it was the summit’s location that made Xi reluctant to attend. After all, the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was using the G-20 as an occasion to style India as a champion and potential leader of the global South. Xi was wary of lending his stature to such messaging. Undeterred, India organized a “voice of the global South” summit in November, the second such gathering in the year, to which China was not invited.

Many U.S. policymakers see India as a possible bulwark against an ambitious and aggressive China. In recent years, Chinese and Indian troops have sparred over the two countries’ disputed border, and the Indian public has grown increasingly hostile to its neighbor to the north. Officials in New Delhi worry about the economic and military inroads Beijing has made in India’s South Asian backyard, including in Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. As a result, the United States hopes to draw India, a country that has traditionally eschewed formal alliances and prized its autonomy, into a closer alignment.

But friction between India and China extends beyond their shared border and the region to a much bigger arena. The growing rivalry between the two countries includes a competition for influence and even leadership among the far-flung countries of the global South. It can be hard to pin down what exactly constitutes the global South, but the term typically refers to most countries outside traditionally industrialized economies (and often formerly colonial powers)—the countries of North America and western Europe and Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. A helpful guide can be found in the list of 125 countries that participated in the summits organized by India in 2023, a group mostly drawn from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but also including seven countries from eastern Europe. China has a head start and significant advantages in the tussle for clout among these states. Beijing has steadily built its empire of influence through infrastructure and investment deals and well-publicized diplomatic and cultural initiatives. For China, the global South has clear instrumental utility: the loyalty, or geopolitical goodwill, of over 100 countries from around the world could effectively undergird the country’s global ambitions.

New Delhi has realized this, too, but late in the day. For the last two decades, India has been busy courting the United States and other Western powers, allowing its solidarity with the global South—as exercised through ideological official rhetoric as well as high-level participation in the traditional forums of the global South, such as the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement—to wane. Now, however, New Delhi is once again invoking the global South, spurred in large part by China’s efforts. As president of the G-20 this year, India made repeated references to the group and highlighted the concerns of many developing countries, such as the sovereign debt crisis. The two global South summits organized by New Delhi in 2023 were also venues in which India could cast itself as a leader among developing countries. 

This battle between two Asian powers has wider implications for the United States and its allies. China seeks to turn the global South against the U.S.-led order and enlist these countries in a Chinese-led counterpart, making the global South the base for China’s rise. India, by contrast, expresses concerns about the current dominant U.S.-led order but wants to see that order reformed, not overthrown. Through diplomatic and economic engagement, the United States can help India achieve a bigger role in the global South, frustrating China’s advances in the process. Taking more seriously the grievances articulated by India and other global South countries about, for instance, the inequities of global institutions, such as the UN Security Council, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, will also weaken the appeal of a Chinese-led order. But without such proactive engagement, the global South could very well become China’s geopolitical backyard.

The rise of the “new global South”

In the wake of the Cold War, the global South seemed to fall off the geopolitical map. Institutions that once defined and united this broad grouping, such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77, became marginal. But now the global South is back. The disparate reactions to the ongoing Ukraine war and Israel’s war on Gaza, the growing sovereign debt crisis, and the general dysfunction of the international order have all shed light on how global South countries are charting their own paths in geopolitics, often in ways that frustrate both the United States and its chief great-power rival, China.

The new global South is, however, different from its Cold War–era avatar. Countries in the global South today are acutely aware that the revisionist rhetoric of the nonaligned era achieved little. Instead of cleaving to ideology and anticolonial solidarity, these countries have embraced a certain postcolonial realism and a desire to adapt to unfolding geopolitical realities. Global South states are becoming more agile in courting relations with great powers and even abandoning their old hesitation to take sides in larger geopolitical contests.

These countries now mostly articulate their perception of their national interests through nonideological language, abandoning the rallying cries of an earlier era, such as calling for grassroots resistance to capitalism and globalization and decrying colonial and racist practices in global governance. They join crosscutting coalitions and initiatives, deprioritizing ideological solidarity (of which there is very little left). They still do highlight the areas of the international system that need to better accommodate the interests of the vast majority of the world’s population. Developing countries urge reforms in global governance and seek greater empowerment and representation in global forums. States pursue these goals unilaterally and multilaterally, with or without collaborating with other global South partners. These arrangements can be fluid, bound only by an acceptance of the pursuit of national interests. India and China, therefore, are jostling in new terrain, both seeking to take advantage of the rise of what is a new global South.

DIFFERENT STROKES

New Delhi’s and Beijing’s respective visions for the global South differ in important ways. Where China seeks to supplant the Western-led international order, India instead wants to reform it. India views itself as a bridge between the global South and the developed world, seeking to foster meaningful conversations and ensuring that the voice of the former reaches the high tables of global governance. By contrast, China sees itself at the top of an alternative world order—what it calls a “community of common destiny”—to that constructed by Western powers and seeks to enlist global South countries into the ranks of its coalition. Consider, for instance, its Global Civilization Initiative, which was launched in March. The initiative advances the idea that cultural values can be relative, an implicit rejection of the supposedly universal values espoused by the West. The right-wing government in India also seeks to project the ancient glory of the country’s civilization and has often been critical of the international human rights regime. But such posturing is mostly for domestic political purposes; Modi has little desire to create a new world order powered by Hindu civilizational ideas.

Beijing’s view of South-South cooperation revolves around its megaproject, the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast infrastructure investment program that has spent $1 trillion in the last decade. Western leaders have largely stopped attending the annual Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, but the summit is turning into a key networking space for leaders from across the global South—the forum hosted representatives of around 130 countries in October and focused discussions on issues pertaining to the global South. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and a host of other announced development and security programs, Chinese officials aim to deepen South-South cooperation and further hitch global South countries to China’s wagon.

India, on the other hand, wants to include countries outside the global South in its outreach to those within the global South. For instance, India and Japan are working together in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on development issues, with the broader aim of promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific. India and Germany are cooperating in Africa and Latin America to support countries in hitting their sustainable development goals and related climate targets. Such a cooperative and mediatory role was also evident at the G-20 summit in New Delhi, where India sought to promote itself as a major international player and to emphasize how it can help the global South. As Modi said, “If the global South has to make that high jump, India can be that shoulder to propel it ahead.” It would do so, according to the Indian prime minister, by serving as a “bridge, so that linkages between the North and South can become stronger and the global South can itself become stronger.”

Another key area of difference is India’s and China’s respective conceptualizations of the global South. India retains to some degree its nonaligned-era understanding of how racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation shaped the world order and account for disparities among countries and within global institutions. But New Delhi no longer intones the rote ideology of that earlier era to address these inequalities and historical injustices. Instead, New Delhi seeks an improved status quo, with the existing international system broadened to better include India and other global South countries. Today, India challenges the status quo not because it harbors deep anticolonial grievances but because it wants to be a bigger stakeholder in that status quo.

China’s claims to kinship with the global South are cynical and contrived.

China, on the other hand, has a somewhat ahistorical view of the global South. Clearly, China does not share the unique colonial experience of much of the global South—the Qing dynasty may have had to make many formal concessions to Western powers in the nineteenth century, and the country suffered under Japanese occupation in the twentieth century, but China was never conquered or colonized as so many other parts of the world were. Nor was China part of the Non-Aligned Movement. Chinese officials are fond of invoking rather ancient (and possibly legendary) historical connections to the global South, such as the voyage of a Chinese fleet to the east coast of Africa in the fourteenth century. In truth, China does not have a whole lot in common with many global South countries. At $16.8 trillion, China’s economy is today the second largest in the world; it is a middle-income country and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, very much part of the institutional status quo that the global South has had problems with. China benefits from the unequal world order of which it is one of the key custodians while preaching the virtues of an alternative world order. Its claims to kinship with global South countries are cynical and a touch contrived.

Indian and Chinese strategies for engaging the global South differ, too. India seeks to use existing platforms such as the G-20, the Non-Aligned Movement, the UN’s climate change conferences, the G-77, and the UN General Assembly to assert the positions of the global South. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, India, along with South Africa, went to the World Trade Organization to seek a suspension of intellectual property rights around COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests so that low- and middle-income countries could better access this potentially life-saving material. China, by contrast, seeks to create alternative, China-led forums such as the Belt and Road Forum, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative, and so on. In their rhetoric, Chinese officials also make a point of using language that is implicitly anti-Western and anti-American, rejecting hegemony and the U.S.-led international order—a far cry from India’s more moderate, reformist position.

The problem for New Delhi is that both China’s rhetorical posture and its material largesse may win it more friends in the global South than India’s gentler criticism of the international order. Chinese revisionism, backed by Beijing’s ability to cater to the global South’s economic needs, could be more appealing to a lot of countries. On its own, India does not have the resources to match China’s economic overtures to the global South. Moreover, India’s emphasis on global institutional reform is unlikely to produce meaningful results any time soon. Indeed, China has proved more adept at exploiting the deep unhappiness in many global South countries over the foreign policies of the United States and the EU. China’s official statements criticize global institutions, express impatience with both the war in Ukraine and the ongoing war in Gaza, stress the need for a more equitable form of globalization, and profess respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity (even when its own forces are nibbling away at the territories of its neighbors). Much of this is music to the ears of the global South coming at a time when many people see double standards in the West’s response to the Ukraine war and Israel’s war on Gaza. New Delhi often fails to match Beijing’s strident positions. Countries appreciate pointed rhetoric over careful posturing when emotions run high. 

India also has to make up for its decision over the past decade to scale back its engagement with the global South. An increasing focus on India’s relationship with the United States and the West led to a concurrent diminishing of interest in South-South cooperation in New Delhi. India was once at the forefront of global South activism. That is no longer the case. India’s prime minister no longer attends the summits of the Non-Aligned Movement. Senior Indian leaders also skipped this year’s G-77 summit in Havana. India may belong in the global South in more ways than one, but that is not where it sees its future: it wants to be in the club of powerful states managing global governance. But China’s drive for influence and leadership in the global South, which has become more zealous and effective of late, has shaken India and spurred a change in rhetoric, diplomacy, and policy.

THE FOLLY OF NEGLECT

This contest should not appear remote or marginal to policymakers in the West. It is, in fact, pivotal. Neglecting the global South will be counterproductive to the United States’ larger geopolitical goals. The absence of positive engagement could further deepen the sense of exclusion and unease among many global South countries, making it harder to find solutions to common global challenges such as climate change. But what is more certain is that Western inaction could drive global South countries toward becoming handmaidens for China’s global ambitions. The rise of China as a self-styled southern superpower demands that Western powers pay more attention to the political narratives circulating in the global South.

Abetting India’s efforts in the global South will help foil China’s grand ambitions. The United States and the West must work with India to facilitate economic and infrastructural assistance for developing countries. They must also listen to India’s sober arguments about the challenges confronting the global South when it comes to the restructuring of sovereign debt, waiving patents for vaccines, and reforming global institutions. Washington must realize that reforming the current global institutional order is far better than contemplating an expanding, rival China-led world order.

The United States, for instance, should take the lead in lessening the debt burden of global South states—after all, for all the talk in the West about the nefariousness of China’s “debt trap diplomacy,” much sovereign debt in the global South is held by Western creditors. Washington could also help speed up reforms of the UN Security Council so that the body includes more permanent members from the global South. This will not only bring about some much-needed stability to the global order but, more important, expose Beijing’s hypocrisy considering that China is unlikely to agree to opening up the permanent membership of the council even as it preaches greater inclusion in global institutions.

A global South led by Beijing will be far more antagonistic to the United States and the West than one in which India plays a larger role. Despite New Delhi’s increasingly instrumental view of the global South, its nonideological approach to the developing world could also help bridge the gap between poorer countries and the developed world. As a powerful global South country and an aspirant for great-power status in the prevailing order, India has the ability to traverse major fault lines in the international system. Washington must make use of this unique role that New Delhi can play in world politics. Treat the new global South like a geopolitical opportunity, not a cantankerous old pest.