Beijing has devoted ample resources to garnering support from the Global South, but China’s ambitions to lead the developing world are facing challenges.
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Ultimately, the battle for hearts and minds in the Global South will be about more than money. Values, too, will play a key role, and here, India and others may hold an advantage over China. Though the example of China’s historic economic rise is undeniably attractive to the leaders of other developing countries, its appeal may suffer as the economy slows under the burden of debt, excess capacity, poor policy, and deteriorating relations with the world’s advanced economies. Even more, whether Beijing’s political and social systems can woo adherents remains an open question.
There will always be authoritarian regimes in the Global South that envy the Chinese Communist Party’s methods of control and repression. But democratic ideals still capture the imagination and stir the hopes of many in the developing world.
Afrobarometer, a pan-African, nonpartisan research network, found in its 2019-2021 surveys across Africa that seven in ten respondents agreed that democracy is preferable to any other form of government.53 That proportion remained steady over the course of the preceding decade. “Africans remain committed to democracy,” the organization noted in a 2023 report. “We find that despite the many efforts to undermine democratic norms and freedoms, citizens continue to adhere to them.”
The report went on to note that “concerns that China’s active economic presence on the continent might undermine democracy are generally not supported by our survey findings. Africans who prefer the Chinese model of development are about equally likely to endorse democracy and democratic institutions as those who favor the US model.”54 Vanderbilt University polls also showed that support for democracy in Latin America remains relatively strong, at 61 percent in 2021.
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The widespread and enduring support for democracy flies in the face of Beijing’s claims to speak for the Global South and may act as a barrier to the expansion of Chinese influence.
In January, a new, democratically elected government in Fiji scrapped an agreement that the previous administration had made with China to train the Pacific island’s police force, citing a divergence of political values. “There’s no need for us to continue; our systems are different,” Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka explained to
The Fiji Times. “Our system of democracy and justice systems are different so we will go back to those that have similar systems with us,” by which he meant Australia and New Zealand.
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Such sentiment means that the emergence of a multipolar world creates as many challenges as opportunities for Xi’s ambitions in the Global South. China’s leaders seem to believe that they will be the big winners in a world shifting away from a global hegemon to one with multiple centers of power. Even though Modi participates in forums with China, including the BRICS group, it is not in his interests for China—a potential adversary—to become the dominant force in the Global South. The China-centric bloc of developing countries Xi is attempting to forge could just as easily be employed against India as against the United States.
Nor can Modi afford to see China gain global influence to the point that Beijing can dictate to New Delhi or shape global governance and institutions in ways contrary to India’s ideals or interests. The same can be said of other major players in the Global South, which are unlikely to find it in their interests to see one hegemon replaced by another. These new, emerging global influencers will multiply within the Global South itself, which will surely produce numerous voices, ideas, and programs that will offer its members a smorgasbord of options. China’s platter of proposals will only be one tray on the crowded buffet table, and the leaders of the Global South are likely to sample from them all.
In this we may find the true flaw in Xi’s strategy toward the Global South. Xi wishes to create a unified Global South that he can use to isolate the West and promote Chinese power. But such unity will be elusive, if not impossible. What is emerging instead is a multipolar Global South, with other significant powers that share some, but certainly not all, of Xi’s goals. Nor will they agree on the methods of achieving those goals. Xi, however, does not appear prepared for or interested in working within a multipolar Global South.
In this highly complex Global South, Xi’s attitude toward the West may be problematic for, and possibly even damaging to, his quest for leadership of the developing world. Xi sees the future global order as a struggle between the West and the rest, a struggle he wants to lead and control. But even though many leaders in the Global South are frustrated with Washington, its policies, and its attitude, they won’t see it in their interests to choose sides in the competition between the United States and China and burn their bridges to the West. The advanced democracies simply remain too important to many members of the Global South for them to take an oppositional stance. That reality may increase the appeal of other, less confrontational, approaches to global governance reform than what Xi is proposing. For instance, Modi, through his approach at the recent G20 summit, is offering a more inclusive vision, in which the voice of the Global South is heard and enhanced within the context of cooperation with the West and its institutions. That could well be a more appealing, and more pragmatic, strategy for other leaders in the developing world.
China’s political elite seem to recognize the vulnerability of their position in the Global South. Shortly after the G20 in September 2023, the state-run
China Daily insisted that Washington’s efforts to marginalize China “will hardly pull the wool over the eyes of most developing countries about the irreplaceable role China has been playing in defending the interests and rights of developing countries.”
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Global Times, run by the Chinese Communist Party, called the notion of a Global South without China a “pseudo-proposition.” It went on to argue that “some people in the West attempt to exclude China from the ‘Global South,’ but they cannot deny our close ties and cooperation with developing countries, nor can they deny the contributions China has made to the development of ‘the South’ countries and South-South cooperation.”
58 Such editorials offer a window into the discomfort some within the Chinese government feel about China’s position in the developing world.
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