BRICS 2017: Assessing the achievements in Xiamen

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By CGTN's Dialogue

The 2017 BRICS Summit finished in the southeastern Chinese city of Xiamen on Tuesday. Leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa celebrated the first decade of the bloc and made plans for the future.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said he hoped the port of Xiamen would see the launch of a second “golden decade” for BRICS.

He Weiwen, Senior Fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, said emerging markets and developing countries need to get together to coordinate how they deal with the dominance of the developed world.

He said this year’s BRICS Plus feature, where five countries – Egypt, Mexico, Thailand, Tajikistan and Guinea – were invited to expand the impact of the BRICS mechanism, was an important step forward.

“BRICS Plus is a good platform for advancing the interests of emerging markets and developing economies,” he said.

He Weiping, a Senior Research Fellow with the China Academy of Social Sciences, agreed that BRICS can provide an alternative to the Bretton Woods institutions, without attempting to replace it.

She said the G7 allows developed countries to discuss their issues, while the G20 is a gathering of a mixture of developed and developing countries so BRICS doesn’t need to copy that. She said the unique feature of BRICS is it allows emerging markets and developing countries to lead the way.

Charles Tang, chairman of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce & Industry, said that for BRICS, “the dividing line came when the New Development Bank was announced, which gave a practical instrument to implement a lot of the wishes and hopes of emerging markets.”

He said their interests are not always comprehended by the developed world, but BRICS is a group which understands what it means to be an emerging market in today’s world.

He Weiping also said that interactions between President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been warm, despite the recent standoff between the two countries’ armies at the Donglang area of the border coming to an end shortly before the summit took place.

She said this shows the BRICS mechanism is developing already. “The BRICS summit can not only focus on economic and cooperation issues, but will have to embrace other issues like peace-building, security cooperation and people-to-people exchanges.”

Dialogue with Yang Rui is a 30-minute current affairs talk show on CGTN. It airs daily at 7.30 p.m. BJT (1130GMT), with rebroadcasts at 3.30 a.m. (1930GMT) and 11.30 a.m. (0330GMT).