China Is Not the Global South

October 10, 2024

Is China a part of the global south?

Beijing certainly thinks so. For instance, at the recently concluded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, a conference held every three years between China and African leaders, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke of the global south’s “shared path toward modernization.” China has set up a development fund containing the term “South-South.” And Foreign Minister Wang Yi has also explicitly stated more than once that China is and will always be a member of the global south.

Though the terms used have changed over time, China’s rhetorical embrace of the developing world is not exactly new. Its roots go back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. After the revolutionary fervor of the early 1950s subsided somewhat, China participated in the historic 1955 Bandung Conference that brought Asian and African leaders from recently decolonized countries together in a common front against global inequities. In 1964, Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s righthand man, formulated China’s Eight Principles for Economic Aid and Technical Assistance to Other Countries. Mao’s own worldview defined two “intermediate zones” between the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter zone comprising Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The intermediate zones framing later morphed into the Three Worlds theory in 1974. In a conversation with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, Mao defined the “Third World” as including Africa, Latin America, and all of Asia, except Japan. This brief reference was elaborated on at length in a famous speech by Deng Xiaoping to the U.N. General Assembly in the same year, in which he said: “China belongs to the Third World.”

Full piece in Foreign Policy