You are selling China very short here. China is already the world’s second largest economy (largest by PPP), largest global manufacturing share, mostly technologically independent, with a robust financial sector and a vast market potential for consumers.

What China simply needs to do is to launch a Chinese-style Marshall Plan, which will weaponize the yuan and give the Global South countries the purchasing power to import goods from China. This will in turn raise the wages of the Chinese workers, and giving them the purchasing power to also import goods from the other Global South countries, and drive their economic development along the way. This will cause China to give up its net exporter status and give away some portions of its low value added manufacturing sector, but that will also free up labor and resource to be allocated for social welfare, improving living standards etc. Most importantly, this will allow the Global South countries to de-dollarize and permanently ending dollar hegemony.

The problem is that China is still very much stuck to IMF’s export-led growth strategy. This requires China to sell cheap goods to Westerners to earn currencies from high income countries, before they are allowed to invest in their own. A very regressive way of developing your own country.

Make no mistake, China isn’t the only one to employ this strategy. Before this, it was Taiwan and South Korea when GATT (later known as WTO) was formed. The Four Asian Tigers. Then it was Thailand and Indonesia and various Southeast Asian countries in the 1990s (The Tiger Cubs) before they were all wiped out by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. China came to the forefront when it joined the WTO in 2001 after the economic crisis during 1995-96 when Deng’s reform had reached its limit, leveraging its vast labor pool to turn itself into the world’s factory and destroyed the export advantage of every other developing country.

This is an ideological problem. China has fully bought into the IMF ideology. There is nothing that says you have to export cheap goods to foreign countries to accumulate large amount of foreign currencies before you are allowed to invest in yourself. The only advantage of doing so is that you can use your huge trade surplus to keep your budget deficit low (per IMF recommendation of under 3%) and show IMF how good of a student you are, how fiscally responsible you are, how good you are at “balancing the budget”.

Russia followed the same strategy and got wrecked. All the Eastern European countries that followed the IMF “balance the budget” strategy got wrecked. People don’t understand that China is the exception here because of its absolute advantage with its vast labor pool that no country could match. Look at any other country that attempts to emulate the same IMF export-led growth strategy and you will see that nobody could compete with China at all, and their economies all got wrecked as a result, or barely hanging with large amount of IMF bailout/foreign debt.

This is why an alternative framework for the Global South is necessary, one that is independent of Western imperialist countries and most importantly, one that is socialist and not neoliberal. Otherwise, at best, we are getting multipolar neoliberalism, which seems to be happening now.