Tricontinental Institute convenes Global South scholars to retheorize development beyond Western modernization paradigms at Beijing forum
Original framing: “Scholars discuss Chinese modernization and Global South development at Beijing launch” — bing news
The forum excludes the very subjects of 'development': DRC artisanal miners supplying cobalt for Chinese EVs, Bangladeshi garment workers in Chinese-owned factories, Kenyan pastoralists displaced by Chinese-built wind farms. La Via Campesina's 200 million peasants demand food sovereignty, not industrial modernization. The African Climate Justice Collective rejects 'green growth' as colonialism in solar panels. These voices don't need 'perspectives from the Global South' — they are the Global South, and their exclusion reveals the forum's class character.
The Beijing forum is not a dialogue but a diplomatic performance staging Chinese state capitalism as the Global South's savior, while the Tricontinental Institute provides left cover for a model that replicates the extractive logic it claims to oppose.
The eight dimensions reveal a systemic pattern: every 'modernization' pathway offered to the Global South — British, American, Japanese, now Chinese — requires the same structural subordination of labor, nature, and indigenous knowledge to capital accumulation. The only historically credible alternatives emerge from below: the Zapatista caracoles, Kerala's people's planning, Bolivia's plurinationalism, and the African Climate Justice Collective's reparations framework. These are not 'perspectives' to be invited to a forum; they are the living practices that the forum's architecture is designed to marginalize. True South-South cooperation requires dismantling the forum itself and building the knowledge commons, reparations finance, and technology sovereignty treaties that make another development possible.