The Big BRICS: China Finds Its Place
As Xi arrives in Durban, the BRICS summit will announce the formation of a BRICS Development Bank with a $50 billion capital chest (China has a surplus of $3.31 trillion, a vault that will be likely be recycled through this kind of bank). But there are grave doubts about the model of the investment, coming in to promote resource extraction rather than social development. There is worry too that the new BRICS Bank, which is likely to be housed in Shanghai, will be a well-capitalized Southern version of the World Bank rather than the kind of development bank envisaged by BancoSur (before its radicalism was tempered by the Brazilian government – as pointed by Oscar Ugarteche and Eric Toussaint). The kind of regimes that now control the BRICS process are constrained by their own class projects – they favor neo-liberal policies as long as these do not discriminatorily favor the North.