China’s awkward power play at the BRICS summit
1 min read
For a bloc that is often seen as a counterweight to the Western-led international order, the BRICS has a somewhat awkward origin story. In 2001, Jim O’Neill, a British economist at U.S. megafirm Goldman Sachs, came up with the acronym “BRIC” — Brazil, Russia, India and China — to capture the collective power of these major economies on the world stage. No matter their differences in history, geography and political systems, the four nations represented more than a third of the world’s population and a growing proportion of global GDP.
The term caught on, morphing from Western marketing jargon into a genuine geopolitical project. The first BRIC summit involving all four nations was held in Russia in 2009. By 2011, South Africa was a full-fledged member, too, adding the S in BRICS. But the bloc in the past decade has muddled along. Its constituent economies have performed unevenly, and its member states have occasionally locked horns, with India and China violently skirmishing along their rugged, contested border.
