China’s global south dilemma: Ally, leader or outsider?

The notion of a “global south” is increasingly central to discussions about China’s role in the world today — and in the years ahead. A key aspect of this discourse concerns how the global south fits into the ongoing competition between Washington and Beijing for global influence and strategic alignment.

Against the backdrop of seemingly ceaseless announcements of tariffs by the second Trump administration, some see the intensification of superpower competition over the global south. Countries in this grouping, in turn, are viewed as either being caught in the crossfire or charting their own paths of independence and non-alignment.

As a term for discussing world politics, “global south” has a much longer and diverse history of usage in English than in Chinese. In one strand of English-language literature, the term is almost invariably framed as an entity that operates in opposition to a global north or global west, in either a material or behavioural sense, or even both.

Built into the term itself is an implicit hierarchy — one that places the global south at the lower, receiving end of global provision and performance assessment. As a choice of vocabulary, “global south” evolved from such references as “backwards”, “developing”, “third world” countries or civilisations.

In another strand, which is a self-identification by countries/entities in the context of multilateral negotiations, emphasis on the “global-ness” and the diplomatic/geopolitical “southern-ness” of a position is often associated with a bargaining position. (Continuation of) poverty, inequality, lack of impact in international agenda-setting, etc, come readily to mind. 

The above observation does risk oversimplification. But my purpose here is to use it to help highlight a contention: is China part of the category? 

The question is pertinent, in part, as the use of quanqiu nanfang (全球南方), a Chinese transliteration of “global south” in English, is very recent. In China, the very wording was virtually absent in academic and journalistic deliberations on world affairs until 2023, in part as a response to foreign questioning about Chinese positions on the Russia-Ukraine war. The first time the People’s Daily used the term to frame a discussion was in September 2023, in relation to Chinese participation in an annual summit of the Group of 77.

As a measure to project an official position, in July 2023, Foreign Minister Wang Yi observed that “as the largest developing country in the world, China is naturally a member of the ‘Global South’” (emphasis added). This can be read as an indirect commentary on India’s hosting of the Voice of Global South summit in January, and its offer to serve as a bridge between the two proverbial blocs of the world: the South and the West. Those events featured no Chinese participation.

At the “BRICS Plus” Dialogue held in October 2024, President Xi Jinping observed that the world was witnessing a “collective rise of the Global South”. The reference to “collective” can be read as a subtle reply to the uncertainty or even scepticism among those countries that identify themselves as part of the global south, but view China as too distant in terms of the aggregate size of its economy and areas of technology such as 5G and artificial intelligence. The China Development Research Council’s Global South Research Centre, set up in March 2025, serves as a “research and exchange hub” for knowledge exchange on the subject matter.  

As scholars scrutinising the notion of a “global China” have pointed out, there is an “underlying assumption of China’s inherent separation and difference, and its status as an external agent of change, [which] cuts across political and ideological spectrums”.

However, from a relational perspective, China’s views and its policies on global affairs — like those of any other country — are both shaped by and help shape broader international dynamics. In this light, any claims about China’s consistent or perpetual behaviour must be understood within a specific historical and geopolitical context.

During the 1950s to 1970s, as south-south cooperation and the Non-Aligned Movement drew in much of what is now referred to as the “global south”, China developed its own categorisation of the “south”: Asia, Africa and Latin America — collectively abbreviated as Ya Fei La (亚非拉).

Societal and market connectivity between China and these countries was scant. Nevertheless, from an international studies perspective, the Ya Fei La framing served a domestic agenda: it signalled to the populace the government’s commitment to breaking out of diplomatic isolation. This projection — including the transliteration of performative arts into Chinese — helped lay the groundwork for the public to perceive these societies as culturally relatable peers.

In the mid-1990s, China reformed its foreign aid system by moving away from a focus on (geo)political solidarity and grant-only aid as the primary modality. This reformulation, known as dajingmao (大经贸), or comprehensive economic and trade ties, positioned international development cooperation (commonly referred to as “foreign aid”) as one part of a trinity alongside investment and trade — often intra-industry or even intra-firm trade — to follow.

This shift reflected China’s own experience as a recipient of government-to-government loans, particularly from Japan in the preceding decade. In this sense, the reform served as a prelude to the Belt and Road Initiative launched two decades later.

Today and into the future, the real match between China and many of the global south polities is, arguably, concurrence over this philosophy: “The essence of governance is livelihood; and the essence of livelihood is adequacy.”

Put it in another way, China is “a metaphor for ‘doing it your own way”, and the belief “each country is free to do what it wants within its sovereign territory”.

In a culturally/intellectually Chinese sense, visions for engaging the world and the global south therein were laid out in Sun Yat-sen’s The International Development of China (1922), including the creation of an international development bank, which became a reality with the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank in 2014. But, in the larger world, the heuristic question of China in the global south versus China and the global south will continue to be unsettled.

The question of a with/against choice involving China, the US and a global south country is by nature an essentialist one — reducing complex relations to abstractions of influence or dominance. With the American consumer market being the buyer of last resort across many product categories, and with economies in the global south competing with one another to trade with the US, the foundations are weak for collective action toward challenging or unsettling the current world economic order, certainly not in major or structural ways.  

Related: Southbound: China’s new growth strategy beyond the West | Can China lead the global south without changing its economic model?