What Do We Talk About When We Say "Global South"? A Situated Perspective from the Latin American South

The Re-emergence of a Contested Signifier 

Few expressions have colonized multilateral forums, diplomatic chancery documents, and contemporary academic debate as rapidly as that of the "Global South" 全球南方 quánqiú nánfāng. In an international arena marked by the fragmentation of the unipolar order and the reconfiguration of supply chains, this notion has come to displace both the vocabulary of the "Third World" and the teleological condescension implicit in the formula "developing countries." Yet this displacement does not constitute a mere terminological substitution. As Nour Dados and Raewyn Connell have pointed out, the term "Global South" shifts the emphasis from categories of development and cultural difference toward geopolitical power relations (Dados and Connell, 2012). Hence, beneath its apparent descriptive consensus, the concept operates today as a genuinely contested signifier, laden with divergent political and historical densities depending on the coordinates from which it is enunciated.

Classification by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

In the strategic discourse of the People's Republic of China, affiliation with this space is neither a matter of mere conjunctural convenience nor a strict geographical categorization. Instead, it represents a core component of its diplomatic and doctrinal identity. By repeatedly defining itself as "the largest developing country" 最大的发展中国家 zuìdà de fāzhǎnzhōng guójiā and as a natural member of this space, 北京 Běijīng asserts a historical belonging linked to the twentieth-century decolonization struggles, while articulating a narrative of resistance against the hierarchies of the international order. In forums where issues ranging from climate governance to the reform of the international financial system are debated, the Global South functions for Chinese diplomacy as a legitimizing framework for demands aimed at a more representative and multipolar international order. It is crucial, however, not to confuse this political identification with material equivalence: China's position within the Global South is unique due to the size of its population, its industrial capacity, its commercial weight, and its growing technological prowess.

Seen from our own geography, the appeal of this political grammar is undeniable. For Latin America, any conceptual framework that fractures Eurocentric hegemony, denounces postcolonial inertias, and opens margins of maneuver vis-à-vis traditional centers of power possesses undeniable decolonial potential. Aníbal Quijano's critique of the coloniality of power and, from another perspective, Boaventura de Sousa Santos's proposals for the epistemologies of the South allow us to understand that the issue relates not only to the material distribution of power, but also to the ability to define the categories through which we interpret the international system. Nevertheless, it is precisely at this point of apparent convergence that critical theory must sharpen its tools and resist the temptation of homogenization. 

If the Global South is conceived as a compact, uniform, and monolithic bloc, we run the epistemic risk of dissolving under a single label material realities that are far from equivalent. Is the position occupied in the international system by a continental power that has consolidated a formidable manufacturing base and is competing at the forefront of numerous technologies comparable to the situation of peripheral economies such as those in Latin America or Africa, historically marked by external volatility and primary-export specialization? 

Recent literature on the concept of the Global South has warned precisely against this tendency to turn a political-historical category into a homogeneous entity. Interrogating this constitutive asymmetry does not seek to invalidate the category nor weaken political solidarity among countries of the South; on the contrary, it seeks to rescue the concept from rhetorical abstraction to endow it with historical depth and material grounding from our own circumstance.

The Shared Genealogy: From the Spirit of Bandung to the Harmonization of Differences

To understand the political density that the Global South embodies today, it is essential to retrace the path back to its twentieth-century roots. The contemporary notion did not emerge from the technocratic laboratories of multilateral organizations, but rather sinks part of its genealogy into post-war decolonization processes and the political articulation of the so-called Third World. One of its most significant foundational milestones was the Bandung Conference (1955), where twenty-nine Asian and African countries proclaimed that recently emancipated peoples should not become expendable pawns on the chessboard of Bretton Woods plans in a new Cold War. From that gathering and the subsequent emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), a principle emerged that would continue to structure much of the postcolonial world's demands: the defense of state sovereignty, self-determination, and non-interference in internal affairs against the diverse forms of subordination exerted by the great powers. 

It was precisely in Bandung where Chinese diplomacy, embodied in the figure of 周恩来 Zhōu Ēnlái, made the search for points of convergence amidst differences one of the key tenets of its intervention. In his supplementary speech on April 19, 1955, he insisted that the Chinese delegation had come to the conference "to seek unity" and that existing ideological and political differences among participants should not prevent cooperation. The expression 求同存异 qiútóng cúnyì, "seeking common ground while preserving differences," thus became associated with Chinese diplomacy and subsequently turned into one of the recurring principles of its international discourse. 

However, it is necessary to distinguish the diplomatic history of the modern expression from a far more ancient philosophical genealogy. The formula 和而不同 hé ér bù tóng appears in 《论语》Lúnyǔ, 13.23: 

君子和而不同，小人同而不和。 

Jūnzǐ hé ér bùtóng, xiǎo rén tóng ér bù hé. 

The noble person harmonizes without assimilating, whereas the petty person assimilates without harmonizing. 

In classical Chinese thought, 和 hé, harmony, does not designate merely an absence of conflict, but rather an articulation of disparate elements that retain their specificity; 同 tóng, assimilation, by contrast, refers to the reduction of differences to a common sameness. Therefore, rather than asserting a direct lineage between classical philosophy and the 1955 diplomatic formula, it is more precise to point out that it could later be interpreted within a Chinese conceptual repertoire in which harmony does not demand uniformity. 

Transposed to the international order, this principle contains an intuition of considerable fertility: political solidarity and convergence do not require the elimination of particularities nor subordination to a univocal model of development. Precisely for this reason, the contemporary retrieval of Bandung should involve not only seeking what countries of the South have in common, but also the capacity to recognize the differences in position, interests, and capacities that exist within that space. 

In the contemporary arena, this shared genealogy retains unquestionable vitality. Latin America, even with its own historical specificities and without having formally belonged to the Afro-Asian core of 1955, converges with China and other countries of the South on various demands associated with the Bandung legacy: greater representation of developing countries in global governance institutions, the defense of state sovereignty, and the critique of certain forms of unilateralism and economic coercion. In areas such as the reform of international financial institutions, climate governance, or trade architecture, these convergences constitute a real basis for cooperation. 

There is, therefore, a genuine community of strategic interests in specific realms vis-à-vis the inherited hierarchies of the international order. Nonetheless, the power of respecting differences takes on an inverse yet complementary critical valence today: just as in 1955 the imperative was to find common ground in the face of geopolitical fractures, today we must not confuse the search for common ground with the obfuscation of the structural divergences that run through the constituent parts of this global construct.

The Gordian Knot: Material Asymmetries and the Risk of a New Periphery 

While at the level of international politics and the critique of certain forms of Northern hegemony convergence among members of the Global South is significant, within the strict domain of productive structures and trade flows particularly eloquent fractures emerge. It is here that the concept risks becoming an abstraction devoid of meaning if it is not examined under the light of real material conditions of existence.

Over the past four decades, China has undergone an economic-productive transformation of extraordinary magnitude. It has transitioned from a predominantly agrarian economy to become not only one of the world's leading manufacturing hubs, but an industrial power endowed with an extraordinary diversity of productive and technological capacities. In contrast, much of Latin America has experienced processes of premature deindustrialization and persistent specialization in primary commodities. Competition from Chinese manufactures has indeed been cited as one of the factors contributing to pressure on certain Latin American industries, particularly in countries like Brazil (Jenkins and de Freitas Barbosa, 2012). 

This structural divergence engenders a profound paradox for South-South cooperation. When we observe the matrix of bilateral trade between China and the countries of our region, a pattern resurfaces—albeit under new historical conditions—that Latin American structuralist thought, led by Raúl Prebisch and ECLAC, unraveled in the mid-twentieth century: the logic of the center-periphery dichotomy. The export basket of numerous Latin American countries to China is heavily concentrated in raw materials and goods with relatively low processing—soybeans, iron ore, copper, crude oil, beef, and lithium, among others—while imports from China include a high proportion of manufactured goods, machinery, and equipment. Studies on the economic relationship between both regions have noted that this composition exhibits several characteristic features of center-periphery relations (Jenkins, 2012). 

Nevertheless, describing this structure as an asymmetrical relationship is not equivalent to asserting automatically that China has replaced the former hegemonic powers as a new imperial center. Jenkins himself cautions that, despite the asymmetrical nature of the exchanges, China was far from constituting a new hegemonic power in Latin America and that the region's ties with the United States and Europe remained of greater importance in numerous spheres. The issue, therefore, should not be framed in terms of a simple substitution of one center by another, but in terms of economic structures that can reproduce themselves independently of the political intentions of the actors. 

It is essential to underline this distinction. China's insertion into Latin America does not automatically replicate the coercive mechanisms or ideological conditioning that historically characterized the tutelage of North Atlantic powers and Washington-based financial institutions. There is no equivalence between contemporary relations with China and historical forms of colonial or imperial domination. However, market logic can crystallize asymmetrical exchanges even in the absence of a deliberate policy of subordination. If economic complementarity is understood merely as the reciprocal fulfillment of static comparative advantages (supplying natural resources in exchange for manufactured goods), the relationship risks ending up reinforcing Latin American primary-export specialization. 

The question, therefore, does not consist in determining whether China is "good" or "bad" for Latin America, but in asking under what conditions an asymmetrical economic relationship can become an instrument for structural transformation. The very same trade relationship can produce different effects depending on the industrial, technological, and institutional capacities of the Latin American partner. The problem does not lie solely in who occupies the position of buyer or seller, but in what type of productive structure the exchange generates. 

For this reason, strictly addressing internal differentiation within the Global South is neither a gesture of distrust toward China nor a concession to containment narratives emanating from the Global North. It is, on the contrary, the indispensable warning that political solidarity does not, by itself, compensate for material asymmetry. For the Global South to be a genuinely transformative space, complementarity must move beyond a mere primary-exchange scheme and translate into strategic agreements on technology transfer, co-investment in productive infrastructure, local supplier development, and industrial capacity integration that allow Latin America to alter its international insertion. Nor do we mean to assert that this depends entirely on China: doing so would mean reproducing, in another register, the very same relationship of dependency we aim to overcome.

Beyond the Binary Dilemma 

Faced with the evidence of these structural asymmetries, Latin American thought risks becoming trapped in a false theoretical crossroad. On the one hand lurks uncritical complacency: assuming that shared membership in the Global South de facto dissolves conflicting national interests and guarantees, through mere rhetorical inertia, harmonious development. On the other looms the regressive temptation: succumbing to the disciplinary discourse of traditional power centers, whose warnings about an alleged "Chinese debt-trap dependency" may serve not so much as a Latin American industrialization agenda as an instrument of geopolitical competition. 

To break this binary trap, Latin America needs to dust off and update one of its most fertile intellectual traditions: the theory of autonomy in international relations. The concept of relational autonomy, formulated by Roberto Russell and Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, is particularly relevant because it abandons the idea of autonomy as isolation or permanent confrontation and understands it as an agency built within complex international relations (Russell and Tokatlian, 2003). Along complementary lines, contemporary proposals for active non-alignment have insisted on the need for Latin American countries to broaden their margins of maneuver without being trapped in the binary logic of a new Cold War. 

Autonomy in the twenty-first century should not be conceived as autarky, isolation, or reactive confrontation, but as a state's sovereign capacity to maximize its margins of maneuver, diversify its strategic alliances, and manage its ties with the great powers without being subordinated to any of them. Precisely for this reason, relational autonomy does not require choosing between Washington and 北京 Běijīng, but rather building the capacity to negotiate with both and, when necessary, with other centers of power, grounded in our own definition of national and regional interests. 

Within the framework of ties with China, exercising relational autonomy entails negotiating not from fragmented weakness or protocol complacency, but from a vision of endogenous development. China's substantial state capacity for long-term planning constitutes a reality that Latin American countries must take into account; yet that capacity does not by itself determine the outcomes of the relationship. The greater the institutional thickness, regional coordination, technical competence, and clarity of development goals in Latin American countries, the greater will also be their capacity to steer cooperation toward outcomes that transcend the mere export of natural resources. Conditioning specific investments in lithium or energy on the development of technological capabilities, establishing local content mechanisms in infrastructure projects, or demanding better access conditions for agro-industrial goods with higher added value are, in the end, decisions that belong to Latin American societies and states themselves.

From Univocal Rhetoric to Polycentric Dialogue 

The Global South will be a fertile and emancipatory theoretical tool to the extent that it does not turn into a new homogenizing orthodoxy. Its historical vitality does not reside in the illusion of a monolithic, tension-free bloc, but in its potential as a polycentric space of articulation capable of harboring the heterogeneity of its members under the prism of complementarity and non-subordination. Revitalizing the spirit of Bandung and critically reinterpreting the maxim of "seeking common ground while preserving differences" demands redoubled analytical maturity today. Seeking common ground does not mean erasing differences; preserving differences does not mean relinquishing cooperation. Applied to the relationship between China and Latin America, this logic implies cultivating strategic closeness wherever shared interests exist, while rigorously recognizing the material, technological, and institutional gaps separating their economies. From this perspective, the Global South should not be understood as a community founded on the likeness of its members, but as a political community that can be built precisely upon their differences. Its challenge lies in transforming that heterogeneity into negotiating and cooperative capacity, rather than reproducing within the South the very hierarchies it seeks to overcome. Only through this exercise of situated lucidity, in which the peripheral South asserts its own voice and its legitimate imperatives for industrialization, can the oft-cited "win-win cooperation" 合作共赢 hézuò gòngyíng cease to be a merely declarative aspiration and become a truly plural, just, and sovereign architecture.

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This article was originally published in Spanish: ¿De qué hablamos cuando decimos "Sur Global"? Una mirada situada desde el Sur latinoamericano