Abstract
As the world undergoes profound geopolitical and cultural transformations, the Global South is emerging as a pivotal force in reshaping the international communication order and cultural narratives. Against this background, on 25 March 2025, Yuezhi Zhao invited Vijay Prashad to the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, for a wide-ranging dialogue with doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers on the potentials and challenges for communication and cultural awakening in the Global South. The following text is an edited version of the seminar and it consists of four parts. In Part 1 and Part 2, Yuezhi Zhao and Vijay Prashad overviewed the current state of communication in the Global South, critiqued its colonial cultural heritage, emphasized the continuing importance of decolonization in Global South communication. In Part 3, Vijay Prashad responded to a list of questions from the participants. In the conclusive discussion of Part 4, cultural awaking of the Global South is hoped to reconstruct the international communication order and world structure.
Foundations of Global South communication: control over information and infrastructure
Vijay, I’m extremely very happy to have you here, because way before I started teaching at Tsinghua University, I had already used your ideas to teach my students in Canada and the US. Today, the “Global South” has become a buzzword. For me, two scholars truly embody the spirit of the Global South: Samir Amin, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, and Vijay Prashad, the renowned author and the director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. You two share certain similarities, in that not only you both possess encyclopedic knowledge and a deep understanding of the real Global South, but also you communicate in a down-to-earth way, without academic jargon. That is very important. You are the “organic intellectual” of the Global South. What I also want to emphasize is that you both have a remarkable command of vast domains: history, geography, politics, economy, culture and other areas of social life in the world. Your work is not confined by traditional academic boundaries; instead, it is transdisciplinary, even post-disciplinary. In particular, Vijay, you are a world-famous communicator and a highly articulate voice of the Global South, which makes your presence here particularly historic.
In 2007, your book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World foregrounded a bottom-up narrative of the Third World project. You not only constructed a fascinating “people’s history” of the Third World, but made the poignant observation that this project, which embodied the aspirations of the decolonized peoples of the world, was “assassinated” by the trilateral force of the West, i.e., the ruling bloc of the United States, Europe, and Japan. Now, after the intermediate years of the high tide of neoliberal globalization, the Global South as a new aspirational project or a kind of new incarnation of the Third World, has come back with a vengeance. Of course, just as the world has changed a lot, the Global South is not the same as the Third World. During the earlier historical period, the Third World posited mostly a political-moral challenge to the West-dominated global capitalist order; now, not only the Global South in many ways inherits the Third World’s political-moral aspirations, but also possesses growing economic power, with China as an industrial powerhouse serving as its leading engine. In short, the current tide of the rise of the Global South is a continuation of the earlier wave, even though it also comes in different ways and different shapes. In fact, not only it is not quite right to see it as a coherent collective “project” but also the Global South faces formidable challenges in its common struggles.
In The Churning of The Global Order, a 2024 publication by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, you discussed how Amin identified five forms of control that lie at the heart of the neocolonial structure: control over natural resources, control over financial flows, control over science and technology, control over military power, and control over information. You argued that the first three controls are being challenged by the emergence of the Global South’s major economies, but the last two controls still remain. As far as I’m concerned, information covers not only the news agenda but also the infrastructure. I remember last time we were together in Barcelona for a conference, we were talking about digital sovereignty. This time, I hope we can continue to speak on the topic of “Communication and Cultural Awakening of the Global South,” and then open up for discussion.
Thank you Zhao. It’s my pleasure to be here. You know, I’ve worked as a journalist for many years. I can tell you, it’s a really difficult field of operations, because communication means a couple of things. It doesn’t just mean having good stories to tell, good ideas about the stories, good way of speaking, and good way of writing. These are important skills that one has to develop, but there’s no point having a good speaking voice or having a good writing style, if you don’t get published or broadcast. Nowadays, people think media is democratic, because there’s the Internet, and you can do whatever you want. It’s not true! You can do whatever you want, but maybe only three people listen to you. So, what’s the point? I’ve done live sessions where there’s like ten people watching. It’s ridiculous. Okay, so you develop a different theory. You say these are ten quality people. It’s like teaching a class, then they go and they’ll tell other people and so on. But you are going to understand that, the infrastructure of communication is actually much more important than anything else, which really proves the Marxist method that, in fact, if you don’t have control over the productive forces, there’s no point having an invention.
What’s the point of inventing something, if you can’t produce it? You know, I invented something, but I don’t have the money to produce it, sell it, and make it a commodity. It’s useless. It’s just an idea on a piece of paper. Leonardo da Vinci drew an aircraft during his lifetime, and you can see it in his notebooks, but he didn’t make the aircraft. So that’s just a dream. I could say that there’s a peasant in India who drew an aircraft on the dirt, but that doesn’t mean anything. What really matters is who is the first person to make the aircraft and to put it into the air, because that requires resources.
Even today, the west dominates almost all the infrastructure of communications. One is satellites. Elon Musk’s Starlink has more satellites than the Chinese government does. This should actually give you pause.
Another infrastructure is undersea cables. Most undersea cables are owned by western companies or western governments. That means when the internet leaves the Chinese shores and enters into a cable to go, let’s say to Singapore, 99% of the chance, it’s going through a cable owned by the US government, or owned by a western company, Google or somebody. Chinese barely own any cable, and Russians own almost none cable outside their respective territories. Satellites and undersea cables are the two main ways in which broadcast and internet information travels. These are over 80% controlled by the West. It’s pretty stunning.
We know the infrastructure and the data are all publicly available, but there’s a lot of debate and I don’t know if you read The Macbride Report, which was published by the United Nations in 1980. It’s a very important report. I really urge you if you didn’t bother to do the reading. Macbride himself is an Irish politician. And the report is really good. It’s trying to imagine a new international information order in the 1970s. The report says that we’ve got the new computer information system, why can’t this be publicly owned? Why can’t there be an international body that controls satellites for communication? Why should these be privatized or owned by one or two governments? Because they can block other countries, if they have an adversarial relationship. Why can’t this be an actual democratic clearinghouse under United Nations’ control? It’s an interesting policy suggestion, actually, not crazy.
Take the case of roads inside a country. In most countries in the world, who owns the roads, the highways, and the rail lines? The government owns the road, because they have to maintain the roads. In some countries, roads are private, and in some countries, some roads are private. In most countries, all roads are owned by the government, unless it’s an access road to your house, that could be private. But if it’s not on your property, it’s by and large a public road. If roads can be public, if domestic communications systems can be owned by the state, why can’t an international body on international communications system? Put that line down and think about it. It’s not impossible.
Colonial cultural heritage and decolonization of Global South communication: from news source preference to the importance of confidence, clarity and credibility
In a way, the culture of communication has been shaped by colonialism. I worked in newsrooms in India with Indian news reporters. Because they don’t have the money to go and report a story, say in Japan or wherever, they just take the stories coming off the wires from the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, Fox News and the like. When the computer came, people just went on websites and took the story. Very rarely are these reporters going to go to CGTN (China Global Television Network). Very rarely are they going to RT (Russia Today). Very rarely are they going to any websites in Africa to cover African stories. If they want to get a story from Africa, they go to bbc.com, that’s where they go. They do that in India. They do that in China. I’ve talked to reporters at the big outlets here, when they have to get a story from Africa, they don’t have somebody there, they see what BBC has said. That’s just the way it happens. This is the culture of colonialism. They don’t believe CGTN and RT, particularly RT.
One of the reasons is that RT is very militant and political in its reporting. So, you see, that’s not credible, because for a journalist and for me as well, credibility is very important. It’s the highest value. I don’t want to be out there screaming and shouting. I want the facts to be true. You have to live with the facts. When you watch channels where the channel itself feels like it’s not confident, the colonial channels are treated more seriously, these channels start to yell and scream, because they feel like nobody is listening to them, and they want to say “those guys are biased!,” so they become noisier. And that actually doesn’t earn you credibility; that sometimes makes you seem even more marginal. So, we end up marginalizing ourselves.
People talk about independent media or alternative media, but I don’t use any of those terms. I’m a journalist and I work in the media, but I don’t work in the independent media or alternative media, I don’t work in some side show. I’m as good a journalist as anybody. I don’t need to marginalize myself. Why would you do that? Why would you say, “I’m a left-wing journalist” or “I’m a post-colonial journalist”? I’m none of those things. I’m a journalist. I don’t want to conceive that, but we do all the time. So, when it comes to credibility, these places have an advantage. I mean, it is incredible how influential CNN continues to be. It is incredible for years how influential the Voice of America was. It’s called the Voice of America. It’s funded by the US government. And yet in Europe, Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America were where people drew their stories from. Of course, sometimes they actually did good stories.
When I write stories about the US military, the first place I go is Stars and Stripes. It is the newspaper of the US military. Those journalists are actually better sometimes. Then the CNN or Fox News journalists, because they would say, “Yesterday, off the coast of the Philippines, we did the military exercise. There were so many ships and people, and The General said A, the naval commander said B, the head of the Filipino military said C . . .” This is a great story, because they are just reporting what the military is doing. They don’t have to fool around, but just tell you what’s going on. They have the facts which is underrated. And when you check the facts, it’s almost 100% true, because they get a press release. This is the best place to get stories about the US military. If I want to learn something about Goldman Sachs, I don’t go to The Wall Street Journal, I just go to their website. They have press releases and so on, because they don’t want to lie to you. They want to tell you what they’re doing, but so many of our colleagues trust these sources, and that’s the colonial hangover. We just can’t get it out of our heads.
A journalist has to cultivate the 3Cs: Confidence, Clarity, and Credibility.
Confidence is the first thing. You have to be confident that you are a journalist. You cannot apologize. I think CGTN is very good. Obviously, all its things are funded partly or only by the Chinese government. That’s true, but we know that most foreign broadcasting channels are funded partly or only by a government. USAID gives grants to World Economic Forum, US$68 million a year, just for a meeting. It’s a lot of money, right? The thing is, that shouldn’t make you lose confidence. Your confidence should be at a high level, because everybody at your level is at your level. Don’t allow lack of confidence to come in; this is especially so for communicators. If you’re not confident as a communicator, nobody trusts you. I tell you that frankly, if you come on a TV channel and you start saying, “Well, I’ve heard . . .” Nobody trusts you. You can say, “We are not sure about this issue. It’s complicated.” But you have to say that confidently. Confidence is the most important thing in communication. It’s actually something I don’t think we teach enough.
Then, clarity is very important, clarity of exposition. Whatever you do, you are going to tell a story. People like to hear a story, and they only remember things if it’s a story. But I don’t mean, “Once upon a time, there were three little bears, and they were living in a forest.” I mean you produce a narrative, for instance, I started by talking about infrastructure. I gave you a fact, “Musk’s Starlink has more satellites than the Chinese government does.” That should stay in your head. So, you have to have clarity of storytelling. You have to think about things very hard and take notes and write down your ideas and not allow yourself to be confused before you speak. Don’t do anything without preparing. You don’t get clarity from inspiration.
The third one is credibility. People have to learn to respect you, and respect is interesting. Respect is never ever given to somebody, especially somebody like us. You have to take it, you have to seize it. You have to be credible if it comes your time to speak. You have to speak in a way that people say “That’s interesting!”
So, communication is these three things, that’s all it is. It’s not skill of writing or skill of broadcasting. Those are easy and anybody can learn that. Anybody can learn to be a good communicator, and everybody has a form of communication. You can draw, you can speak, you can write, you’ll all find your way. But these “3Cs”: Clarity, Confidence and Credibility, are the most important, for us particularly, because we have to claim seriousness. They don’t give it to you. That’s part of the legacy of colonialism. You have to really fight for it.
Sure. Right now, given that the western media are losing their credibility, I want to ask you, what kind of opportunities are there for the Global South voices to gain the credibility or the “3Cs” you talked about?
The thing is, I don’t know how much credibility the western media are losing, and I don’t know how we would judge that. Let’s say, if I am interested in seeing what happened in North Africa yesterday, where do I go to get the news? In the world, most people will end up going to some western media. If I type in anywhere in the world in Google in English, 99% I’ll get BBC. And most people click on something on the first page. So, the algorithm is not going to pick up some young, little and tiny website that is doing interesting reporting. They are not going to take you there. I agree with you that in some places the western media’s credibility is dying, but I don’t know how to measure that.
Right, and the important thing is how people change their media use behavior and habit.
Besides that, I can tell you I’m surprised that 50% of CGTN English is watched in India. And the biggest growing segments is 24- to 35-year-old young people. Partly I think because there’s just so little foreign news in the Indian channels.
Another reason is there’s so little serious news in India, and CGTN is really serious and credible to cover the world. Also, given my understanding, Indian news has become too commercial, too sensationalist, partisan, entertainment-oriented and lack of substantive serious news. I guess that’s precisely why your young and upcoming audience want real news and CGTN is delivering just that. That’s a good sign and there’s a lot to be researched. Anyway, I think we should open for questions.
Interactive Q&A session
Global South infrastructure construction and Global China
You talked about infrastructure earlier on. My question is, in the area of development studies, technology and knowledge transfer have long caught much of the academic attentions. Many critics suspect the extent to which China shares its core digital technologies and intellectual properties with African or Southeast Asian countries, considering Chinese companies’ need of profit-making and realist calculations in geopolitical competition. China’s state-owned companies may be less profit-oriented in this respect, but some observers still criticized that many of the infrastructural projects in the Global South in fact flowed to Chinese contractors rather than the local one. What do you think of these critiques, or the tension between pragmatic profit-making, capital accumulation on the one hand, and the altruistic and internationalist cooperation on the other hand?
There’s a lot of scholarship that’s now coming out. They are actually doing a lot of empirical research on the situation in the Belt and Road and so on. There’s a lot of work in all languages on this. The technology transfer business is actually very complicated, because it depends on what you’re talking about. Where China is encouraging industrialization, it’s obviously transferring technology. So, it’s a kind of mix story. And also, there’s a lot of private companies. They’re going to these countries where there’s little technology transfer. If you want China to do technology transfer, then those countries have to do it. For example, if you’re talking about Botswana, Botswana has to say, “You can’t come in unless you transfer technology.” Of course, the Chinese government can’t tell a private Chinese company, “If you go abroad, you have to transfer technology.” These are jurisdictional problems. It’s very complicated.
But on this point, I do want to say something, which is that I would hope now that the Chinese government is or rather the Chinese revolution is moving in a slightly more leftward direction. I would hope that people like you put pressure that it’s not just economic sorts of cooperation, it’s not enough to have a bureau of CGTN in Africa, but journalism schools at different Chinese universities should come together and create a project to actually assist journalists in Africa to set up their own independent media. And maybe they could work with CGTN, rather than CGTN set up a bureau there. That would be very democratic to help these countries set up domestic journalism schools. In 1991, there was a meeting held in Namibia where African journalists met to release The Windhoek Declaration. It’s a very good text and I think you should all read it. It’s a declaration of basically the inequality of journalism. It’s interesting. It’s out of that declaration that comes the World Journalism Day from the United Nations, they created this day. Anyway, if South-South cooperation will also be about communication, then it shouldn’t just CGTN going there, right?
Second, education. Right now, you see US universities setting up shop around the world, NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai, Northwestern Qatar. . .They’re all over the place. Why don’t Chinese universities partner with the universities in Botswana or Uganda? I’m not saying have Chinese universities in Uganda; it doesn’t have to be like Americans, putting your name everywhere, but to partner to build maybe a journalism school, because Chinese government has a very close relationship with African countries. Do it as how the Tanzania railroad was built, just with that history, and we will go for 2 years as faculty to help build the African School of Journalism. That would be astoundingly interesting.
In class today, a Brazilian student raised an interesting point about China’s role in global governance. He mentioned that while China promotes “a human community with a shared future” and South-South cooperation through global infrastructure, he noticed some Chinese factories in Brazil violating local labor laws. He questioned why China’s actions don’t always align with its rhetoric. My question is: China aims to create a new global system distinct from U.S. hegemony, but some Chinese practices abroad seem to contradict its original intentions. What can journalists do to address this, and what steps can China take to better align its actions with its stated principles?
It’s certainly important. Firstly, the value of “win-win” and “a human community with a shared future” is an aspiration, but you can’t pretend that’s enough. You can’t exaggerate the aspiration of values and compare it to reality. Secondly, the labor laws are quite bad in many of the countries, they don’t have good political control of factories. So, Chinese overseas factories get away with all kinds of things which they’ll never get away within China. Then, it’s a question: Should the Chinese government say, if Chinese capital goes abroad, they have to abide by Chinese labor laws? That’s an interesting political decision, but you don’t have that now. And this is a problem for the Chinese revolution. You have private companies, they are going abroad, but they are not abiding by Chinese labor laws abroad. There are no Chinese labor inspectors going there. You may want to rethink this way of doing things. It’s a question of when you play with capitalism, you get burned by capitalism. Capitalism does the most they can be allowed to do, capitalists always want to exploit workers to the maximum, and it’s very difficult to manage capitalism. In fact, I think the best thing the Chinese government can do is to make a statement, saying all Chinese private companies outside must abide by local laws and by these other things. If the local laws don’t have sufficient labor protection, they must do this and that. In other words, we agree to your laws, but we’ll even go further.
I just would add a concrete example, because you mentioned Brazil. Maybe you’ve all heard about the story of the BYD factories in Brazil. I don’t know how much the news came here, but it became a national headline story in Brazil about the worker conditions in the BYD factories in Brazil. The thing is, we are living in a new Cold War era. Right before Biden left office, there was an approval of $1.6 billion in countering the CPC propaganda fund. This means that every single strategic project that China has abroad, including BYD, even though it’s a private company, it’s not a safe thing. In many ways, even much of the left is pro-China people in Brazil, they want to defend on this BYD issue, but the slowness of response on the communicational side was a losing battle. So, what was really good? One example was two years ago, when six Chinese mining companies were found to be doing illegal mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the local Chinese envoy for Africa came out, saying no, we will send these companies home. So, these kinds of things are really important. I think what China does in Niger, for example, will be really important, because Niger just expelled several Chinese mining companies. It will be a great example to make a statement.
How to make “3Cs” come true in the Global South
You said earlier that one should simply assume “to be a journalist,” instead of an “independent” journalist or some other kind of journalist. What comes to my mind is that we have different opinions about journalism and about what role it should play in our society. In China, we learn journalism theories from the Marxism perspective; however, neo-liberal thought still exists in our society, not to mention in other Global South countries. Another thing is, media in different countries are all influenced by their own economies or politics. How can media in different countries realize the “3Cs” that you proposed?
It’s an interesting thing about studying when you’re in college, especially when you encounter Marxist scholars, because what Marxism does is to provide a critique of the system of the totality. Sometimes the critique of the totality can feel overwhelming, because you feel there’s nothing you can do. And a lot of Marxists then retreat into analysis of the whole, because they feel they just can’t intervene anywhere. My feeling is, you have to have a split personality. You have to at the same time analyze the whole, in order to have a realistic and a real understanding of the world as it is; then you have to keep finding places for yourself with your personality, your skills, your character to intervene. Both things have to be done simultaneously. For instance, I know I can’t change the whole media landscape alone, I need like 1,000 people out there fighting to create a better media landscape. What that means is as there are more of us writing the better stories, the more careful stories, encouraging each other, talking to each other and so on, we can be out there pushing our views forward.
I’ll give you an example. One of my real heroes as a journalist was an Australian man. His name is Wilfred Burchett, and he is a Marxist. Wilfred Burchett was the first non-Japanese to go to Hiroshima on the 8 August 1945, 2 days after the bomb fell. He went illegally, he first broke the Japanese restriction and later on, when the United States came into Tokyo, and he disobeyed them. He wrote an amazing story from the ground which was published around the world. It broke the story of Hiroshima, because the Americans were saying the civilian damage wasn’t so bad. He came and he said this is hard, he had never seen anything like this. When the United States entered the Korean Conflict, on the so-called “UN Mission,” Wilfred Burchett made the decision to go to the North. He reported the bombing of the northern fields and dams and so on. Later we found out the US Air Force said there was no other target to hit. We got that fact 25 years later through a Freedom of Information Act release, but Burchett had already described it. During the war in Vietnam, he reported from the North. He interviewed Ho Chi Minh. He lived and wrote several books in the North. He was a real journalist. I admire him. His writing is admirable. He’s just an Australian guy, but he made a choice to dedicate his life to telling amazing stories. He went to places in the front line with American bombers overhead. Now the question is who published him. Because he took so many risks, he was published in all the big newspapers.
When I was reporting from Iraq, I wrote for the most important Indian newspaper and they used to give me lots of space. Why? Because there was no other Indian journalist in Iraq. See, you can’t immediately become a commentator. This is the problem of the TikTok generation, who want to immediately become a superstar. You have to go and make a name for yourself doing crazy things as a journalist. And then people will run your work, because nobody else is like you. Right now, people in China are very interested in Africa, Chinese journalists going to Africa will be fascinating. It would be interesting for students to gather together and write a letter somewhere and say, we are very interested and we have created the China-Africa Student Journalists Association.
Transnational solidarity and communication network in the Global South
I have another question about transnational solidarity in the Global South. What’s the possible impact of the emerging far-right populism on the transnational and transregional solidarity of the Global South? Given the fact that the rightists are seemingly dominating the hegemony of the “people” and seizing power in both Global South and Global North countries, would it be possible nowadays to reimagine the leftist internationalist reunion, and rebuild the internal solidarity of the Global South as an ideological and institutional project as you have mentioned in your book The Darker Nations?
We tend to put things in containers, the far-right is growing, but it’s not identical in every country. The far-right in India is actually not exactly the same as the far-right in Argentina, because the Indian far-right has a serious problem. Its serious problem is the 600 million people who are poor. For instance, whatever government is there in India, it can’t allow mass starvation. It’s just not possible. It’s possible to have a right-wing policy where one million people starve to death. Almost one million farmers have committed suicide since1994. But if one million people die in one or two years of starvation, that government will never be able to come back to power. That’s a huge block to the right-wing ambition, which they don’t have in Argentina; Argentina doesn’t have so many people so close to starving. So, the right in India is constrained, they have to continue some welfare policies. That means there is no far-right in the Global South that is all in sort of communication with each other.
I’m considering a new direction on the transnational communication network among the Global South during the Cold War era for my next project. And I’m in the process of identifying historical cases. Currently I have found two cases, one is the Afro-Asian Journalist Association which was built up after the Bandung Conference. Another is the Voice of the Malayan Revolution, a radio station targeting listeners in Malaysia and the broader Southeast Asian Region, yet based in and supported by China. I’m requesting your expertise in suggesting what other interesting historical cases can be researched?
The interesting case outside China is really the Cuban case, which is called the Prensa Latina. It was set up as a Latin American media network by the Cuban government during the Cuban Revolution and it still exists. It has office, and still publishes online. What’s interesting is that right from 1959, the Cubans have tried to build an international network like Prensa Latina. It was the first non-Western media bureau on the western hemisphere, and it was really important in establishing all of the cultural diplomacy between China and Latin America. It opened a huge channel to access basically all the revolutionaries and all the leftist forces in the Americas.
If I were you, I would start with the research of Afro-Asian Journalist Association and Prensa Latina, because the similarities between them will be very interesting, those are countries where they were also a range of politics. But the Voice of the Malayan Revolution is a completely different case, I think that’s a Chinese overseas party project.
I’m very interested in what kind of institutes are doing the reconnection among the Global South, and I think the most distinguished one is your Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Actually, my questions are very straightforward: I’m curious about who funds your institution, how your institution works, who your target audience are, how you get to these audience, and how you evaluate whether your publications have influence on those audience?
I’m happy to answer the question in order, because it’s a very important question. This institution is strange, because it was not created by an academic institution or a foundation. What happens is about in 2014 or 2015, there was a meeting in Brazil of the International People’s Assembly, which was created in a way to say that the World Social Forum had failed. People gathered together and they said to each other, we don’t understand what’s happening in the world, we need better internationalism, and we need better media, we need better political connections with each other. But as much as anything, we need to have better research on what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in our own countries. They did need a full-time person, and when they approached me to do it, I was quite happy and we came up with the name “Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research,” doing reports, making conferences and so on.
We were very lucky that a very close friend of us who’s an absolutely Marxist and Leninist sold his company. He kept 5% of the earnings for his own life, and gave away 95% of the earnings to build political schools and media projects, and he gave us money to start Tricontinental. So, it was a startup money. But it is the most unbelievable event in history that somebody who makes a lot of money decides to give it all the way to build Marxist institutions. He is an incredible person, an internet genius and a very good mathematician. He still works in Tricontinental doing research, and he has put his skills for our big data work. He comes from a very left-wing family, he grew up in Jamaica, and his father is from Sri Lanka. His father was the adviser to the African National Congress and the Southwest African People’s Organization. But this kind of funding thing is accidental, contingent and lucky. Then, the subsequent funding comes from other people. I just got a nice grant from a musician.
And you were talking about influence. We don’t actually measure influence in terms of likes, clicks and so on. We produce material to send to political movements, and then they distribute it to their people. So, I judge whether we’re doing well, if a movement tells me, “This text has worked well in our schools.” If you read our material and some of it, I’m happy, but you’re not the target audience. The target audience are the teachers in trade unions, and the people who organize peasants. We don’t write texts for the masses, because they’re a little too complicated. You have to have some secondary education, but that means the organizer can read it, learn from it and summarize things when they are teaching a class and so on. So, we have a very specific target, we write for people who had about a year of college. That’s roughly the limit.
You mentioned the International People’s Assembly. Just to have a sense, it’s over the past 10 years or so, this platform brings together about 400 mass organizations from mostly the Global South, including the trade unions and the political parties. In many realities, this is what the function of political organizations does. It’s always been a concern around detachment of intellectuals from real struggles and real grassroots. In a way, Tricontinental emerges from the bottom up. It doesn’t emerge from the universities down, but it makes some bridges with some intellectuals that are interested and actually contributing work for the mass organizations, but not the other way around.
Future leadership and sustainability in the Global South
My question is about the future leadership and sustainability in the Global South. When Global South countries gather together, there will be competition and complex relationships. I’d like to know your opinion on this and how to make the relationships among Global South countries more durable and resilient.
The world leadership is very complicated. You are reflecting on a couple of things. One is national leadership, which countries will take leadership in the Global South, but also in that is the question: are we cultivating leaders in our educational system? Are we giving people enough tools and confidence to become leaders? A country cannot lead if the country doesn’t produce leaders, leadership doesn’t come from the scale of a country. Why Lula is probably going to have to run again for election in Brazil? They just don’t have leaders, and there’s no substitute. This is not a general question at the level of nations, it’s the level of you. Are we creating young people who are capable of leadership? I actually worry about your generation a lot for a couple of reasons. One is I just don’t see the motivation and serious determined workers in general, I think some of it is that the Internet has become a drug. We know what leadership is, but when we say leadership, we think it’s somebody else. You all have grown up in a period where things are easy, but you’ve forgotten what your ancestors went through, including the whole Chinese revolution, the struggle and so on. I think you should put yourself through the test as individuals, that’s an education in my opinion. That’s when you create a leader, you develop confidence and clarity, because you’ve seen the world.
I see the world now, and I think Brazil is a great example. Lula just had a brain tumor. He should retire, but the movement has not produced leaders. They produce a lot of followers. In China, you need maybe 20 million leaders at every level. You guys have to be leaders and not in an arrogant way. What I mean by leadership, leaders don’t lead from the front, leaders lead from the side, they have the people with them. So, the answer to your question on leadership is, putting it back on you in a way.
To answer your second question, it’s very hard to predict how these things move. One thing is very clear, our countries are not going to go back to colonialism. I was born in 1967, 20 years after Indian independence. I didn’t experience colonialism, but still in the 1970s as a child, I could feel colonialism and its impact. Now in India, you don’t feel the impact. India does not feel like a country that has been colonized. People are super confident, the middle class in particular. And you see young Chinese walking around the streets of all the cities, they don’t need to be told what to do from Washington. You’re pretty confident in China, like you still eat with chopsticks, you have your own way of doing things. That’s important and you have something that many colonized countries don’t have, for example, the integrity of language.
Most colonized countries don’t have integrity of language. I tell you something interesting. Nigeria has huge population. You think it’s an English-speaking country, right? Not true. Less than 10% of Nigerians speak English, most just speak their own. There are 20 languages. Same in India. You think all Indians speak English? Not true. Under 10% of Indians speak English. About 50% of Indians can speak some English words, like “Hello,” “Nice to meet you,” but that’s not speaking the English language. In fact, as I’m saying, that is actually the case in most of the Global South countries. This means that whatever happens, whether it goes to the right or the left, these countries do not want to return to colonialism. So, I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take and what the fight is going to look like, but I do know for a fact that colonialism is over culturally, and the culture awakening is done.
In our political class, we were told about leadership-making. It’s generational and you create a core, then the circle extends. So, it’s never individualistic. It comes from a very organized structure, actually from the bottom up, which is my understanding. So, could you please explain how can communication with independent organizations, journalists and leadership-making mechanisms engage with each other?
There are two different ideas of leadership. One is leadership as leadership in a political organization, that’s what you’re talking about. It requires you to be in an organization, to be in a way recognized by your connectivity as the person of respect, knowledge, and sacrifice that they want as their leader. The other is leadership in society, which is actually a different kind of leadership. When I said go somewhere and experience things for yourself, that’s social leadership. Last year, Rongjiang people have built a kind of social leadership to play football games. You see it here and there where people build this immense charisma. It’s built by their own work, doing something in society. Charisma is built from your intervention and it’s a two-sided beast. You can have a light inside you, but somebody else should turn the switch on. If you did something on the campus, for instance, you help students who couldn’t afford to do something. You ran a project and people then looked up to you and said, this person is a leader, because you solved a problem and then you brought people together, you engage them to solve a problem. That’s in a sense of social leadership, different from political leadership, which is within the confines of institution. When you see a problem, you should want to solve it and you can’t solve it alone. In the process of building the social group to solve the problem, you actually create leadership. That is what you should be doing.
Conclusive discussion: cultural awaking of the Global South and the reconstruction of international communication order and world structure
Ultimately, we hope the cultural awaking of the Global South can promote the reconstruction of the international communication order, and even the world structure. Speaking of the world structure, you use the terms “rings” to describe the Global North and “groupings” to describe the Global South in The Churning of The Global Order. You observed that the Global North operates as a bloc, and the Global South is an emerging project. This is very insightful. How do you see the transformation of the world structure from the historical “three worlds” to your current description of the Global North and Global South? What’s the difference between them? To what extent has the world structure changed?
My own assessment is that they are completely different frameworks, because there was a gap of considerable time between the collapse of the Third World and the emergence of the Global South. The Third World really collapsed in the1980s. The debt crisis led countries like Mexico went bankrupt, and were in a sense in receivership. They received a lot of aid, and one country after the other had to go to the IMF to prevent completely disappearing. The debt crisis had catastrophic political impact, because countries then were desperate for aid and were not able to stand up for their sovereignty. And the aid mechanisms split the poorer countries from the richer countries of the Third World, broke their unity. So, the political project of the Third World collapsed.
But then, the Global South idea has really come back. I wrote a book in 2013 called The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. In my opinion, the Global South really came back after what we call the Third Great Depression of 2007 and 2008. When the financial crisis happened, the North Atlantic economies basically went to zero growth rate. Meanwhile, countries such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, were booming, growing superfast. There is no way that they would have been able to articulate its independence, had it not made breakthroughs in the new productive forces. Many of them are Belt and Road countries, so the Global South as an actual historical force emerged after the Third Great Depression as a real entity, not as just an idea.
I really like the fact that you point out that there was a gap between the Third World and the Global South. That was a period when countries that were once identified as the “Third World” were called the “developing countries,” while certain countries were called “the emerging economies” or other names. Among other things, some of the important factors that created that gap were the spread of neoliberal globalization and the failure of the socialist project in the Soviet Union and East Europe, which in one version of the “three worlds,” made up the “Second World.” Now, an ambiguous issue in the Global North-Global South dichotomy is the status of Russia, which a BRICS country, and perhaps the eastern European countries.
I think the eastern part of Europe is in a major place of flux. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and in the first 15 years, there was a kind of Europhile; they were very keen to get involved in the West. Then when the Third Great Depression started in 2007 onward, almost all these eastern European countries lining up to join the Belt and Road. Why? Because they were getting two things, one is Russian natural gas, which is very cheap; another is investments from China, so they were getting incorporated into Eurasia. We think of this as the kind of integration of Eurasia, for the first time in world history, because Eurasia has never been integrated. So, right now in my opinion, the Second World is in flux.
There’s also a racial dimension. Your first book is called The Darker Nations. Now much of the Global South is still made of the darker nations in many ways, while Russia and some other countries in the geographical North are being compelled to be clear about their national identities in the ongoing complex geopolitical and ethno-cultural struggles. Leaving aside this dimension, to the extent that the Global South can be seen as an emerging project from an institution-building perspective, I do see a lot potentials in the BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and similar initiatives.
I wanted to put another term “regionalism” in our research group, although it was overruled then, I think actually regionalism is the bridge between national and global projects. For instance, there are lots of regional projects on the African continent, Latin America and Caribbean.
I understand why. Because “regionalism” has got a bad connotation, not as fancy as globalism, which is not true. I agree with you. If you truly commit to regional integration, then you won’t have US military bases all over the different regions in the world. For example, you will be thinking of East Asian regional integration and the end of US hegemony in the region.
Well, I think we had very enlightened discussions and addressed many big questions from everybody. Vijay has many leading ideas, and we will follow your leadership! Thank you, Vijay, and thank you all!
