The View from Everywhere Else: Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summits

Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light, and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gula coming to you this week for really one of the very last times from my soon-to-be-on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at Seneca Podcast.com. Please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations. The last few weeks have given us an extraordinary stretch of summitry in the Chinese capital. Donald Trump's visit to Beijing, his first as president since returning to the White House, was followed only four days later by the arrival of Vladimir Putin.

Two visits back to back by the leaders of two of the world's other major powers, arguably the other two major world powers, hosted by Xi Jinping in quick succession, whatever one makes of the substance, the choreography alone has set off a great deal of interpretation in Washington, in European capitals, and in Moscow. But the conversation I've been especially eager to have was about how all of this is landing somewhere else entirely, that is, in the capitals of the global south. And there are some big framing questions to put on the table. Are leaders in Lagos and Rosilia and Jakarta and Nairobi breathing a sigh of relief?

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