China's Role in the G20 and Beyond

The following interview was originally conducted and released by Global Times on November 20, 2024.

Global Times (GT) Editor’s Note:
The leaders of the G20 met in Rio de Janeiro on Monday and Tuesday to address major global challenges and crises and promote strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth. Why is the G20 embracing a “Global South moment”? In light of the current challenges facing globalization, what role is China playing within the G20? Global Times (GT) reporter Qian Jiayin interviewed Sourabh Gupta (Gupta), a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies, to discuss these issues.

GT: With the G20 rotating presidency held by Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa from 2022 to 2025, observers say this marks a “Global South moment” for the G20. What impact do you think this will have on the global economy and order?

Gupta: The successive rotating presidencies – what could be termed as a “Global South moment” – have stamped the Global South’s agenda-setting authority within the G20 framework. Be it accelerating progress on the sustainable development goals, scaling up climate financing, better leveraging the balance sheets of the multilateral development banks, combating global food insecurity or digitizing the global health architecture, the most important contribution of the G20’s “Global South moment” has been the consolidation of the principle that the solution to today’s challenges must be found in universal, equitable and inclusive mechanisms.

These solutions must work for all, and especially the poorest, and not just for a select subset of chosen or favored countries. “Us vs. them” bloc-based mentality, and divisions, have no place in the search for solutions to the development challenges of the day. And moreover, there can be no turning back the clock to the time when a subset of states could decide the agenda and content of global action and take the Global South countries into confidence only thereafter to validate and roll out their self-anointed measures. This is no longer acceptable at the G20.

GT: Before the G20 Summit began, the BRICS Summit had just concluded less than a month earlier. Some Western scholars argue that a revitalized G20 can act as a counterweight to BRICS. What is your view on this perspective?

Gupta: These Western scholars are utterly misguided and wrong. The G20 did serve as a counterweight to the G7 in its initial years but, today, it does not serve as a counterweight to the G7 grouping either. Rather, the advanced economies and the major emerging economies use the G7 and BRICS frameworks to advance their respective global priorities, and thereafter utilize the G20 as a platform to work out advantageous compromises – even low common denominator ones – that can benefit the widest set of nations. In that sense, the G20 serves as a platform to broker a consensus on important global challenges. As such, neither BRICS nor the G7 can be excluded from the G20’s governance mechanisms.

Besides, the BRICS countries have intelligently positioned themselves as purveyors of pragmatic cooperation in areas that the G7 and Western countries have either failed to resource, such as infrastructure financing (via their New Development Bank) and the tattered global financial safety net (via their contingent reserve arrangement), or where the West’s supply of global public goods is now being semi-privatized within a minilateral club and weaponized against adversaries (such as the dollar-denominated global payments system). The deepening of such pragmatic cooperation has many non-Western advocates, both inside and outside the G20. As such, the G20 can never be a counterweight – much less weaponized – against BRICS.

GT: Currently, protectionism is on the rise, and trade barriers are frequently appearing around the world. In this context, what role can the G20, as a forum for international economic cooperation, play?

Gupta: I’m afraid the G20 is not the best suited to tear down the barriers of populism and protectionism that have sprung up in the multilateral trading arena. Exhortations to allow trade to flow freely simply won’t suffice, especially when a major economic actor is determined to defy the pro-trade consensus. Even the specific multilateral organization dedicated to regulating trade flows, which is the World Trade Organization, is facing many challenges today.

The way forward lies with the other major economic actors that are in principle committed to liberalized trade and investment flows, such as the European Union, China and Japan. These countries must continue to deepen their bilateral, regional and multilaterally framed exchanges. This means unfreezing and resurrecting the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, deepening the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement to which China, Japan and South Korea are signatories, and thereafter connecting Asia-wide trading networks such as RCEP to European collective action frameworks on trade, investment, cross-border data flows and climate change mitigation.

GT: China has consistently supported multilateralism and global cooperation. In light of the current challenges facing globalization, how do you think China’s stance on promoting multilateralism at the G20 Summit will play a role?

Gupta: China’s insistence on tethering its rise to the pillars of regionalism, multilateralism and global cooperation is highly commendable. The Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative are important contributions in this regard.

Going forward, it is essential to preserve the outward orientation of China’s structural reform pathway and deepen its provision of global public goods. Be it the supply of timely vaccines to protect global public health, offering innovative, clean and green products to facilitate the global climate transition, providing yuan-denominated safe assets to advance global monetary system reserve asset diversification, authoring new rules to expand global trade, investment and digital interdependencies, or deepening global science and technology exchanges to incubate Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, China has an immense role to play within the G20 framework and beyond during this decade and many to come. China should continue to seize this co-leadership opportunity for global collaboration with willing stakeholders, no matter how adverse the climate for global cooperation might turn out in the future. By sheer size and capabilities, China is in a position to reframe the terms of the global debate and facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation.