Transcript | The View from Everywhere Else: Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits

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Transcript courtesy of CadreScripts follows the podcast info. Image by Keya Zhou.

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.

Transcript

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week for really one of the very last times from my soon-to-be-on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. Please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations.

The last few weeks have given us an extraordinary stretch of summitry in the Chinese capital. Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing, his first as president since returning to the White House, was followed only four days later by the arrival of Vladimir Putin. Two visits back-to-back by the leaders of two of the world’s other major powers, arguably the other two major world powers, hosted by Xi Jinping in quick succession. Whatever one makes of the substance, the choreography alone has set off a great deal of interpretation in Washington, in European capitals, and in Moscow.

But the conversation I’ve been especially eager to have was about how all of this is landing somewhere else entirely, that is, in the capitals of the global south. And there are some big framing questions to put on the table. Are leaders in Lagos, and Brasília, and Jakarta, and Nairobi breathing a sigh of relief? Are they hopeful that a more stable U.S.-China modus vivendi means they won’t be forced to choose sides and that they can get on with the business of development in a less turbulent environment? Or is there foreboding, a sense that they’re watching, not stability forming but a consolidation instead of a G2 world, one in which the agency that middle powers and non-aligned states have painstakingly carved out over the last decade somehow gets squeezed back down?

Is China being seen as the indispensable convener, the one capital that can now host both Washington and Moscow within a single week or, conversely, as a power being pulled in two directions itself and forced to perform balancing acts of its own? And underneath all of it, what does this moment do to the kind of multi-alignment strategies that so many global south states have come to depend on? Well, to help me work through all of this, I am genuinely delighted to welcome back to the show someone I’ve collaborated with now for many years and whose work I admire enormously — Eric Olander, founder of the China Global South Project and host of the China Global South podcast.

Eric and his team have built what is truly the most indispensable English language resource for understanding China’s engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. He draws on a network of contributors in places that most Western China-watching outlets simply don’t cover. If you want to know how a Chinese-financed port is actually being received in coastal Kenya, or what Brazilian commentators are saying about a Lula-Xi exchange, or how Indonesian elites are reading Beijing’s South China Sea posture, Eric’s operation is where you go. It’s a model of what serious, on-the-ground, multi-vocal journalism about China can look like.

And over the years, our shows have leaned on one another often enough. I think that we’re now, I mean, he is a real intellectual partner in this work. Eric, welcome back to Sinica. Great to see you, my man.

Eric Olander: Great to be back, and you’re hired as the marketing chief for the China Global South Podcast.

Kaiser: Well, can you pay me? That’s the thing, as I’m hard up these days. Anyway, it’s just wonderful and a very good morning to you. And a very good morning to you.

Eric: Yeah.

Kaiser: I always want to borrow phraseology from your show.

Eric: It’s hot and rainy here in Southeast Asia this time of year. But yeah, but we’re excited the rains are finally here.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. Eric, let’s start with the big picture. So, in the days since these two visits, what have you and your team been hearing from your contributors and your contacts across the global south, this huge region that you cover? Is there a dominant mood? And it would be relief or opportunity, anxiety for boating, as I was saying. Or is it genuinely fragmented depending on where you’re listening? Give us the tour.

Eric: Interesting, because we spend a lot of time looking at the discussions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So, we have a site in Spanish that’s focused on Latin America, and then also a separate site in French that’s focused on Africa. And so, this conversation about the summits is very interesting by virtue of the fact that… and here in Vietnam, it was the same situation too. I mean, like it was the pro forma coverage that you saw, not a lot of discussion about it. Nowhere near the kind of intensity of the conversations that people have been having in the U.S. and Europe about it, about this kind of movement of great power politics. I think you have to understand the moment that we’re in right now. So, in Kenya, there’ve been, for the past week, massive riots over petrol prices and taxes going up. There’s been violence on the streets.

Here in many parts of Southeast Asia, the fuel shortages are pressing down on everything. So, I think people have a lot more things on their mind other than this. And everybody’s kind of a little bit exhausted of trying to figure out Donald Trump, and what does it mean? I think the performance that Donald Trump gave did not really reassure a lot of people. The groveling that he did with Xi, his apparent lack of understanding of things like the Thucydides trap and other things like that just kind of did not instill a lot of confidence. And so, I think a lot of people in Global South countries, from what we could see, were just kind of not really paying attention to the summit in the sense of what is every machination going on between, what did Xi do, what did Trump do, what were the body languages and all of that.

What we’re seeing, though, much more, in the same time the summit was going on, is rapid movements here in Asia in particular to accommodate for the new realities. And so, at the same time as the summit’s going on, President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines is preparing for a trip to Japan to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi and said something very interesting that triggered an enormous amount of buzz out here that in the event of a Taiwan conflict, the Philippines would invariably be drawn in because of the proximity to Taiwan and also the fact that there’s 200,000 Filipinos in Taiwan.

This captured the headlines a lot. China, of course, reacted furiously. And what was interesting was that, again, we did not see the United States come to the support of an ally partner on this, rhetorically speaking. And this is something that the Japanese have been complaining about for a long time, that when they made similar comments that they would be brought into a Taiwan conflict, the U.S. was nowhere to be found. So, all of this together sets a context of uncertainty. And people weren’t focusing as much on the summit as on the actions and what comes out of it. And I don’t think there was a lot of tangibles that people could really face decisions on. So, they’re just moving on now.

And you’re seeing the movement. We can talk about Japan and South Korea as well. There’s really a growing sense of alienation from the United States that they’re going to follow through on their security in Asia.

Kaiser: Indeed. Let’s focus on Asia right now. And I need to timestamp this. We are speaking here on the East Coast of the United States at a little past 9:00 in the evening on May 21st. It’s the morning of May 22nd, where you are. And we’ve just seen the news that the United States has paused the delivery fulfillment of a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan. This has just been announced by the Secretary of War. And that in addition to that, the undersecretary of what used to be called the Department of Defense, Elbridge Colby, will not be, as had originally been announced, visiting China in advance of Pete Hegseth’s trip there.

Now, this is all, of course, a lot of people were afraid that this was going to happen. Trump had signaled his hesitation about approving the arms sales. He sort of talked about the arms sales being in abeyance in interviews that he did. So, now I think Taipei’s worst fear is confirmed. But, you know, we’re here to talk about the reaction in the global south. How is this news likely going to impact other countries of the region?

Eric: So what Trump has been able to do is remarkable in a historical context. When you see South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, you know, smiling together, being so close together, I mean, this is one of the most strained geopolitical and historically strained relationships in the modern era. And they are recognizing that they need each other. And since Takaichi’s come into power, she’s leaned heavily into rebuilding relations with South Korea. And this week, we saw a summit between those two, and it was all smiles. And this is a reflection of the new realities that Trump has brought them together. And that is something that we saw it a little bit under Biden, but this is so strained.

And at the same time, we’re seeing the Japanese prime minister was just in Vietnam. She was just in Australia. Marcos is on his way to Tokyo. And there is a sense among some analysts in this region now that Japan wants to put itself back at the center of an Asia-Pacific security architecture. And again, this is where China has to be very concerned because pushing the United States out of the Western Pacific doesn’t necessarily mean life gets easier for the Chinese in Asia. And I don’t think there’s an appreciation of that in a lot of the Chinese discourse. They’re so focused on the U.S. right now. But the movements that Japan is making is tremendous.

Kaiser: Let me push back on you a little bit there because I do hear it a lot when I talk to people who are sort of in the Chinese strategic class. They’re not unaware that China has benefited from –

Eric: They’re not unaware. No, no. To be sure. Absolutely. But I think the focus is far more on the US. But I do agree. I mean there’s certainly sensitivities in China, obviously, about Japan. I mean –

Kaiser: Right. I mean it’s not just Japan. I mean China understands that it had benefited from the fact that the public good of security and balancing in the Western Pacific had been something that the United States had provided. And when that was a pillar of stability, it was a useful thing for China. Of course, they had nurtured the theory, but they’re a little bit like the dog that caught the truck right now, and getting what they wished for.

Eric: That’s right. And so, the concern the Chinese need to have right now is that, you know, their defense spending has been stable for much of the past 10, 15 years. And that may not be the case going forward. If the security architecture breaks down in this part of the world, they’re going to have to start spending a lot more on defense. And that’s not something that the Chinese economy in its current state is well positioned to do. So, I think, again, we’re resetting the board out here in very profound ways. And maybe I don’t know if it’s fair to put that all at the doorstep of Donald Trump. Remember, the whole pivot to Asia never fell through with the United States.

They never followed through on that. And so maybe this was bound to happen at some point anyway, and Trump is just accelerating that trend. But I can tell you it’s happening right now. And it’s really happening in quite dramatic ways, which is fascinating to watch, but it’s happened.

Kaiser: It’s interesting to hear you describe the result of the summit being sort of increased instability when, in Washington and in Beijing, I think many people are sort of celebrating and sort of letting out a sigh of relief at what now promises to be a couple of years at least of relative stability. This new framework that not only that Beijing has proposed evidently and that the Trump administration in its fact statement following the summit has agreed to of constructive strategic stability, right?

The Chinese readout leaned very heavily on that phrase. Trump characterized it as that he added, you know, of course, with reciprocity, and there was an additional framing in the American readout, but the fact that he used the same construction about constructive strategic stability. How is that landing in, let’s start with, and move out concentrically, let’s start in Southeast Asia where you are. Is it being taken seriously as a description of a new equilibrium or is it read more cynically as just mere choreography?

Eric: I talked to a Philippine scholar this week to ask that question and I got a very bland answer. And this is why I think you’re going to be disappointed by my answers here, which is that I just don’t think that people in these countries are putting that much weight in the kind of stability you’re talking about, because I think the sentiment is there may be stability between the U.S. and China, but if you’re in Panama or if you’re in Vietnam or if you’re in Angola or any of these countries, the tensions are going to keep coming. I mean, the U.S. ambassadors that have been sent around the world aren’t going to start pulling back their punches on China anytime soon simply because that there was a summit.

And we see this playing out right now in Central and South America, where U.S. ambassadors in Peru and Panama and others have just been, you know, just unstoppable in their criticisms of the Chinese. And so, I think if you’re sitting in these countries, you’re much more pragmatic. I mean, remember the context of this, this narrative that, well, the post-Cold War era was one of the most peaceful and stable eras in history. And that’s why the rules-based international order is something that we should cherish, right? Well, if you’re sitting in Vietnam or Angola or Nicaragua, you’re thinking to yourself, no, the Cold War was not a peaceful era. The war was fought in the global South. The tensions were waged in the global South, not between