NEW YORK, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- The 9th BRICS summit hosted by China was a "hugely impressive showing" of the future potential of the five emerging economies, namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as a group, a U.S. scholar said.
"I thought the BRICS summit was a hugely impressive showing," said Sourabh Gupta, a senior policy analyst at the Institute for China-America Studies, in an email interview with Xinhua on Tuesday.
Given that China had already hosted two significant summit-level events within the past 12 months -- the G20 summit in Hangzhou and the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, "there was a level of unease" that the BRICS summit would be overshadowed by them, Gupta said. "That certainly did not turn out to be the case, even though coverage in the western media may have been relatively limited."
The scholar noted there were "two big takeaways" out of the BRICS gathering in Xiamen.
First, he said, the BRICS countries "proved in their unified approach yet again" that they are "indeed a supple entente of independent-minded rising powers" which are organized as "a mutual support network and committed to assisting each other's rise within the international system."
"Bearing in mind the recent China-India differences over Doklam...in particular, the grouping showed that their common goals and aspirations easily outweigh their differences, and that those differences too are amenable to responsible management," Gupta said.
Second, the BRICS countries showed that "they are not willing to rest on their laurels", that "they are optimistic of the future and their future potential as a group," and that "they are already devising new pathways -- such as the 'BRICS Plus' model -- to broaden and institutionalize their cooperation over the next decade," he added.
To this end, the BRICS countries should ensure that they become "the premier developing country forum to discuss South-South cooperation and inclusive development" as well as "the premier emerging market forum to discuss the overhaul of the international monetary system" over the next decade, Gupta pointed out.
"Gradually, they should also ramp up political cooperation on the great security challenges of the day so that they become an alternative voice for a more multilateralized, conciliatory, and less-violent approach to the myriad global security challenges during the first half of this twenty first century," he said.
