「Gゼロ」提唱者イアン・ブレマーと読み解く、グローバルサウスの正体

Potolicchio: Back to China. There is one of Lawrence Summer's quotes: "When we're engaged with the Chinese, we get an airport. And when we're engaged with you guys, we get a lecture." China and the Global South?

Bremmer: China is, as I mentioned, at the beginning, the largest creditor to the Global South, and Belt and Road has been a massive undertaking over the last couple of decades. For the first decade, they were doing it, the second decade, they branded it, but now it's slowing down. A lot of this is bad debt and a lot of it, they're just trying to extend for countries that are having a hard time servicing it. On the one hand, China is by far the most important trade partner to every one of these Global South countries, that gives them a lot of political influence. On the other hand, China is no longer seen as just writing checks and solving problems for these countries in a way that they were 5-10-15 years ago.

I think that a lot of the countries we're talking about are looking for more than just China. Some of them are looking for security relations with the United States, you see that across Southeast Asia. Some of them are looking for more Western investment to be able to balance and hedge, you certainly see that in Turkey and Brazil. Some of them are just worried that China itself, as an economy, is not a great bet, given that their economy is slowing down, given the challenges that they're facing demographically in terms of their own bad corporate debt and the economic slowdown, despite the end of COVID, zero-COVID. So, yes, the Chinese are very important and they'll continue to play an outsized role for most of these countries compared to the United States, but it's a very assertively hedged drill.