“Bharat Should Stay In BRICS, And Stop Explaining Why”, Swarajya, 21 Sep 2026.
“Beijing joined a US-dominated APEC while under tariff pressure. Twenty years later, the US could not sustain leadership there. In a seemingly Beijing-dominated BRICS, the lesson for India is neither to walk out nor to seek Washington’s approval, but to learn to compete in contested spaces.
In October 1993, China’s ambassador to a young Asian grouping called APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) woke up to an alarming development. The region’s leading economies were due to convene in Seattle in a few weeks for the first leaders’ summit. Ambassador Wang Yusheng came across a Japanese newspaper report on recommendations said to have been made by a US-led expert group on the organisation’s future.
The report’s title, Towards an Asia Pacific Economic Community, startled him. He later recorded his first reaction in his memoir: “How did this come about? Could this really be? Can we agree with it? What should we do?”
The prominent American scholar Rush Doshi, who later served on President Biden’s National Security Council, recalled in his book The Long Game that for Wang and the Chinese leadership the word ‘Community’ was essentially a call to arms. The source of that anxiety over something so apparently trivial, and what Chinese leaders subsequently took from it, holds some lessons for Indian planners today……….”
Read the full article at Swarajya.
