The actual terms of debt restructuring under China’s opaque Belt & Road are draconian. This bank aspires to be the rival Bretton Woods lender for the global South, breaking the stranglehold of Washington, and free from the harsh lending conditions of the IMF, or so the applicants think. It has to pay 100 basis points above the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank rates to raise money on capital markets. The BRICS bank in Shanghai has been upgraded politically under Brazil’s ex-leader Dilma Rousseff, even as it is downgraded financially to AA by Fitch Ratings. Officials have variously named Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Argentina, Mexico, Nigeria, the Emirates, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and even Turkey. “There is huge interest worldwide,” says South Africa, host of the 15th BRICS summit this summer. Twelve countries have submitted applications to join and another six are putting out feelers. Yet for all the absurdities, the BRICS club is now expanding. Whether or not the Quad evolves over time into the Nato of the East, it is already viewed as a “military alliance aimed against China’s resurgence” by Xi Jinping. It holds to its post-colonial credo of non-alignment, but is implicitly aligned with the US, Japan, and Australia in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. One might ask why on earth India is still party to China's hegemonist agenda. Its own strategy documents aspire to dominance over the world’s economic and technological infrastructure, with Beijing setting the rules of a new global order. The BRICS share a vaguely stated aim of “multipolarity”, but China is not trying to achieve anything of the sort. It is China that has suffered a collapse in productivity growth and is sliding into the middle income trap. As a group, they have failed to sustain the promise of economic take-off, assumed to be inevitable 15 years ago. Some endured imperial rule within living memory: others are today’s imperialists. Some are democracies: others are one-party dictatorships at war with democracy. The BRICS idea has roared back to life, more fashionable than ever, dividing the world along an unnatural line of cleavage.īrazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have little in common. It never had any coherence, and should have disappeared from the media lexicon long ago. The BRICS brand of rising economic powers began as a marketing gimmick by China-worshippers at Goldman Sachs.
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