Beijing’s trade drive exposes Global South lie

Chinese propaganda has portrayed President Xi Jinping as the champion of the Global South. Nothing, it appears, could be further from the truth. Already, fears are growing that “China’s export strategy will keep poor countries poor.”

Last year, the economic superpower recorded an almost US$1.2 trillion trade surplus, despite rising protectionism in Western markets. It was fueled by a tsunami of exports washing up across nations in the developing world.

“China is pulling up the ladder behind it,” Shoumitro Chatterjee, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and Arvind Subramanian, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, pointed out in Foreign Affairs.

“Many [Global South] countries fear that China’s economic rise will not leave room for them to industrialize … [and keep them] poor,” they wrote earlier this month.

Matt Turpin, of the Hoover Institution, illustrated the duplicity of Beijing’s actions on his China Articles Substack site over the weekend. “The hypocrisy is that the Chinese Communist Party portrays itself as the champion and ally of the Global South,” he said.

A myth that has finally been exposed as a lie.

Win-win means lose-lose:

• A report released last year by S&P Global showed the extent of Beijing’s push into developing nations as trade tensions reverberated across Europe and the United States.
• China now exports over 50% more to the Global South, or $1.6 trillion, than to the US and Western Europe combined, the financial analytics group revealed.

Delve deeper: “The Global South has fundamentally transformed from being merely a source of raw materials to becoming China’s export lifeline,” Alicia García-Herrero, the chief economist for Asia-Pacific at the corporate and investment bank Natixis, stressed.

Between the lines: “Frankly, [it has become] Beijing’s economic insurance policy against Western containment,” she added.

Big picture: At the heart of the Foreign Affairs insight by Chatterjee and Subramanian is China’s “currency manipulation.” By weaponizing the yuan, it is “undermining the global trading system” across the planet.

Bottom line: “The most consequential victims of the [Chinese] squeeze are not workers in Detroit or Stuttgart, but future workers in places such as Addis Ababa, Dhaka, Lagos, Nairobi, Phnom Penh, Surat, and Tirupur … in terms of factories never built,” they said.

China Factor comment: Still, Comrade Xi has been quick to burnish his Global South credentials at BRICS+ summits. A myth that has finally been exposed as a lie.