President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin skipped this week’s summit in Rio, Brazil. While President Putin’s absence is linked to the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, no specific reasons were given for President Xi’s absence by China’s foreign ministry. Absence of both President Xi and Putin, is likely to make the outcome of the summit less significant and low profile. BRICS grouping has come a long way since its establishment as an informal grouping of four major emerging economies in 2009, to now include South Africa (2010), Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE (2024), and Indonesia (2025).
Although significant, the BRICS grouping has remained inconsequential to matters related to geo-politics, with much of its attention focused on matters related to west-dominated institutions of global governance. BRICS, whose members represent more than half of world’s population, a quarter of world economy, and include three military superpowers, stopped short of outright criticism of Israel and the US for its airstrike on Iranian nuclear facility last month. Both Russia and China seek to shape BRICS as an anti-western bloc, and as an idea BRICS was initially carved out of a group formally initiated by Russia in 2002 – Russia-India-China (RIC) to address the challenges it faced after the break-up of Soviet Union. On 29 May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated, “I would like to confirm our genuine interest in the earliest resumption of the work within the format of the troika — Russia, India, China — which was established many years ago on the initiative of [ex-Russian Prime Minister] Yevgeny Primakov”, thus underscoring the importance of India which is both challenged and holds advantage through its foreign policy of multi-alignment. Experts in China have called out India as a reason for President Xi’s decision to skip the summit at Rio and criticized India’s close relations with the West in detriment to the strategic objectives that China wishes to achieve through the BRICS grouping.
China’s relegation of the summit is akin to soft-boycott in lieu of India’s palace-like strategy, a cold treatment of the current internal state of the BRICS. China believes, India has explicitly pressured countries – UAE, Egypt, Iran and others – to choose between the BRICS and the G-7 grouping citing values, incompatibility, and the impossibility of riding two boats. China argues, the BRICS mechanism is precisely inclusive, multilateral and non-confrontational. India’s actions are seen as, in effect, altering the basic nature of BRICS from an open, diverse platform of cooperation with an emphasis on complementarity to a geopolitical alliance of picking sides and attempting to build its own global third path. China believes India is playing a two-faced chess game, wherein externally, it wants to establish itself as the voice of the global south, and internally, it seeks to undermine China’s leadership in the BRICS mechanism. India’s push for expansion of BRICS membership, is seen as attempt to dilute China’s dominance within the mechanism through internal division. Brazil’s restrained position on China’s push for de-dollarization despite its support in principle is attributed to its need to not offend India with whom it shares deepening levels of cooperation in recent years, and not be drawn into the Sino-Indian warfare. With the need for member to a multilateral mechanism to achieve balance, the inability to reach consensus on major issue arises. With expansion of BRICS countries, the structural complexity within the mechanism increases dramatically and contradiction intensify making the cooperation fragile and lacking in purpose.
The original purpose of groupings such as RIC, SCO, and BRICS was to promote multipolar nature of global economic governance. The idea of multipolarity was first conceived by President Jiang Zemin who officially incorporated the concept of multi-polar world (duoji shijie) into Chinese foreign policy at the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1992 to support China’s stance that a fair, just and peaceful world is only possible through multi-polarity. It was in many ways a negative strategy, as it sought to avoid a unipolar world order under the US led west more than seeking a multipolar world order. In this regard, the New BRICS needs to become a de-dollarized alternative alliance and not be just another platform for discussion. India is not unified with this concept of de-dollarization, making the BRICS mechanism fragmented. In many ways this only reflects the painful transition from an old-world order to a new one, and in Chinese view India must reiterate the original intention and avoid political operation, or else the BRICS mechanism risks going extinct. India’s world view in this regard is clear in Foreign Minister S Jaishankar’s statement on 05 July, “we had this value-based Europe very upset with Trumpian America, and because they get upset, guess what, they turn to China, so there must be some great value connect between Europe and China”.
In recent days, reports on Xi’s health condition, possible coup within the Communist Party of China, factional in-fighting, and Xi’s loss of control over the PLA have been cited as the reason for Xi skipping the BRICS summit. With no one being in a position to substantiate such reports, it is safe to classify them as rumors. It is true, not all is fine in China both politically and economically, but the situation is nothing close to the brink and events must be analyzed in the context of Chinese culture. President Xi Jinping is skipping the summit as it is not worth his effort this time around. India stands out as a factor in this episode of China’s cold-diplomacy and the development of India-China relations is headed for some intense and sharp downturns.
