China Research

A discussion forum on emerging markets, mainly China – from a macro, micro, institutional and corporate angle.

BRICS countries in trouble

August 15, 2025

Originally, BRIC was started as a financial investment idea in promising emerging markets. In other words, BRIC was in the beginning a financial construction for investing in well-growing emerging markets. B stood for Brazil, R for Russia, I for India and C for China. Later, also South Africa – representing the S in BRICS – was enabled to join.

New conditions

What initially seemed to be an interesting innovation, has in the meanwhile developed into a completely different and in many (financial) aspects into a financially obsolete product.

Growth and other economic conditions have changed profoundly since the start of BRICS. Chinese growth has been slowing down considerably, Russia suffers from burdening war effects, Brazil is economically unstable though recently improving somewhat and India, on the other hand, has more strongly moved in the right direction.

In other words: We have seen that the BRIC(S) countries did not have a homogeneous development in recent years. Rather the opposite – but not as a positive contribution in a diversification sense.   

More lately, BRICS countries have also suffered from President Trump’s tariffs and increasing global uncertainty about particularly emerging markets. These tendencies should lead to the question what may happen to BRICS in the future. Will BRICS recover as an important but not very powerful group of emerging markets or move into a different direction with China as an increasingly active driving force, favoring its own political interest and influence?

Conclusion:  My own guess is that the latter alternative seems to be the most probable one since China already since a number of years ago has demonstrated an increasing strategic political interest in modernizing emerging and less developed countries. These countries may be particularly relevant when they can provide China with important commodities.

We know by now that Chinese decision makers are excellent strategist both when it comes to short-term and long-term strategies.

BRICS fits well into this specific context.

Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University

BRICS II – another BRICK in China’s global strategy

August 31, 2023

We recently noticed the BRICS summit in South Africa. Expectations in our part of the world were not hopeful before the summit in a sense that decisions from Johannesburg would mean an encouraging injection for the global economy. However, it was recognizable that China managed to launch another brick in its global political economic strategy by establishing its de facto leadership for the new and enlarged BRICS II organization.

Democracy clearly underrepresented …

I have been watching BRIC(S) from its start in the early days of this century – i.e. before South Africa was invited to join – as quite an unnecessary organization. BRIC(S) was initially launched as a smart financial marketing idea of an American investment bank without any other logical unifying argument than putting together Brazil, Russia, India and China as the four largest emerging markets with – then – potentially good economic prospects.

Then, two of these four founding countries were not democratic (China -and at least partly – Russia), and two others could be described as democratic (India and Brazil, plus joining South Africa some years later).

Now, when BRICS II will come into force in a few months time, this previously quite balanced democratic participation in BRICS will not be maintained when the six invited new members will become part of BRICS II as well.

These six new BRICS countries are:

Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Ethiopia and Argentina.

It is indeed very obvious that none of these invited six countries can offer democratic standards and/or economic strength. There is all reason to believe that democracy in the new BRICS II will become clearly underrepresented.

… and weak economies totally overrepresented

Another angle may be a pure economic one. Also in this context there is nothing encouraging to find – apart from currently more or less healthy macroeconomic stability in India, Brazil and the oil producers of Saudi Arabia and UAE.

So what can the 11-nation BRICS II finally offer themselves and the rest of the world? In my view not very much. There are too many internal imbalances.  May be some increase of intra-trade (mainly for oil and other commodities) could show up. An obvious disadvantage is the missing positive homogeneity between the countries.

However, one more aspect still remains to be considered in the BRICS II context: China’s global political and trade economic strategy with BRICS II as perfect tool.

Application of the old and new Chinese diversification efforts

As I have written before in this blog, China has been starting to work more ambitiously on its intensified and revised geopolitical strategy. I have followed China’s internationalization and globalization for many years and have to admit that China since the start of the opening-up reform policy by the prominent reformer Deng Xiaoping had a logical strategy in their search for enlarged international partnership through all the years.

The international reform steps in the opening-up context were during the years about FDI and more foreign investment in China, the move of Western labor force (experts) to China, increasing exchange of students with abroad both from and to China, mutual cooperation in research –> altogether different steps to improve skills, technology, products and productivity with ideas from outside China. So far about the traditional diversification objectives.

Gradually after China’s important WTO entry, Chinese political leaders also announced objectives for developing China into a technological superpower and for increasing its global political power, more lately very much by focusing on (emerging) countries that appreciate incoming Chinese investments and (expensive) financial support (https://blogg.lnu.se/china-research/?paged=3, from February 17, 2023). Thus, we also have some examples of China’s modern diversification strategy, happening to a high extent geographically.

When summing up some international/global organizations below with obvious strategic interest, you can find some obvious examples where China already is or will become the dominant player, such as:

BRICS II – certainly an organization ready for increasing Chinese influence

Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) – infrastructure projects, fully led by China

RCEP (The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership RCEP) includes 14/15 East Asian and Pacific nations working for free trade among each others in a longer perspective (without having the U.S. in the organization). It is quite easy to imagine that China at some point will become more active within RCEP as well.

Looking at these examples clarifies well that China wants to expand its global influence. This will happen via bilateral action or via international organizations. Strengthened global platforms will become even more important to President Xi Jinping and the CP, since China nowadays domestically performs insufficiently after many years of boom.

Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University
Editorial board

 

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The foreign image of Russia and China

September 16, 2022

Most countries in the world care about their international image. But how do Russia and China think in this respect? 

Russia is looking for more international recognition

There is no easy answer to the question above. However, my feeling is that at least Russia currently is looking for better international participation and recognition. For this reason, the SCO conference – more exactly the conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a quite unknown regional Eurasian political, economic and security organization – in Samarkand/Uzbekistan this week served as an excellent occasion for Russia to meet a number of other countries,. Russia got the opportunity to show up internationally at a major meeting together with seven other Asian SCO-member countries (China, India, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan and ten Observer States and Dialogue Partners).

The most important event during the SCO conference was without doubt the summit with Russia and China – i.e. the meeting of President Putin and President Xi Jinping. Certain experts even think that the enlarging cooperation between Russia and China – or in reality rather vice versa – in the longer run may lead to a visible empowerment of a changing political world order and, consequently, declining global influence of the U.S. and the EU. This is exactly what China and Russia finally want to achieve – with China as the stronger partner.

Altogether, we should not neglect that Russia may find ways that will lead to less international isolation both in the short and in the medium run. Russia certainly wants to get there, in my view particularly for economic and national development reasons.

China does not care about its international image when against the CP

It always strikes me when Western interpreters of China’s politics come to conclusions that are set in line with their own Western logic. However, Chinese logic is often unlike Western logic. My experience from many years of China observation is certainly that Chinese political decision-makers do not care about their domestic or international image when the political system at home or certain Chinese political objectives and decisions are questioned or attacked by other governments.

For example, the common Western view that China may improve its environment for pure image reasons in a more determined way than many observers in our part of the world believe, is simply naïve or incomplete. One should at least add that China’s fight for an improved environment only will be favored when such policy decisions are not counteracting even more important political priorities. China’s (foreign) image does not play a role in such a context.

Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University
Editorial board

 

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