This week I’m joined again by Eric Olander, founder of the China Global South Project, which runs the most indispensable English-language operation going for understanding China’s engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
I came in with a plan: map, region by region, how the capitals of the Global South were reading the back-to-back Trump and Putin visits to Beijing — relief at a steadier U.S.-China modus vivendi, or foreboding at a G2 condominium squeezing shut their room to maneuver. Eric dismantled the premise within ten minutes. The honest answer, he warned me, is that most of the Global South simply isn’t watching the way we are — and the disappointment turned out to be the most interesting thing in the room. What looked like the absence of a story was the story. I’d built my questions around one assumption about what mattered; Eric had built his answers around another, and I cop to being schooled.
Once you set the summit framing aside, what Eric’s contributors are actually seeing comes into focus: Japan racing to recenter an Asia-Pacific security architecture, a region quietly de-risking from an unreliable United States, fresh cracks in the BRICS, Justin Yifu Lin’s “three moves” for Chinese manufacturing, Latin America’s “find out” phase, and a Gulf where the Chinese setback so many in Washington insist must exist simply isn’t there. We get into all of it — and close on the summit as a remarkable piece of theater, the first since 1945 at which no one quite knew who the most powerful person in the room was.
04:27 — The dominant mood: pro forma coverage, exhaustion, and bigger problems at home
08:15 — Breaking news: the paused $14B Taiwan arms package and the canceled Colby trip
11:15 — The dog that caught the truck: China and the costs of a receding U.S. umbrella
13:00 — “Constructive strategic stability” — new equilibrium or just choreography?
28:23 — The snub: Beijing sends only an ambassador to the BRICS meeting in New Delhi
37:56 — Africa: tariff-free access, the trade imbalance, and Kenya’s “collapsed” exports
44:34 — Justin Yifu Lin’s “three moves”: move up-market, localize, move south
51:00 — Latin America’s “find out” phase in Panama, and very low China literacy
57:35 — The Gulf after the war on Iran: who really won?
Paying it Forward:
Boston University’s Global Development Policy (GDP) Research Center
Recommendations
Eric: A “rabbit hole” of books on Xi Jinping, currently Party of One by Chun Han Wong (after Kevin Rudd’s On Xi Jinping).
Kaiser: Angine de Poitrine, a “microtonal math rock” duo from Quebec — think Frank Zappa meets King Crimson — possibly the thing to breathe new life into progressive rock.
