On June 22, NSA Ajit Doval met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS NSA meeting in New Delhi. The divergences in worldviews were hard to miss. Delhi spoke of “stable, predictable and constructive bilateral relations” and “gradual normalisation” since Galwan. Beijing, by contrast, scaled the same meeting up to a “Global South” moment: Wang declared that “the Global South, including China and India, is collectively rising”, and that the two countries must “accelerate the modernisation process of the Global South” together. Five days earlier, that exact vocabulary had been packaged into China’s new White Paper on global governance.

The White Paper articulates three approaches to the Global South. First is its revitalisation of an idea that a Global South that excludes China........

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