US-China rivalry in Global South reveals structural debt traps, colonial legacies, and non-aligned sovereignty movements
Original framing: “The Trump-Xi summit exposes a US disadvantage in the Global South” — Al Jazeera
Indigenous economies in the Global South—such as the *teko porã* (good life) of Paraguay’s Guaraní or the *sumak kawsay* (living well) in Bolivia—offer frameworks for sovereignty that reject both US military conditionality and Chinese resource extraction. These models, often erased in geopolitical analysis, demonstrate how land, water, and knowledge commons can be governed outside debt-based capitalism. For instance, the 2010 *Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra* in Bolivia explicitly rejects extractivism, yet such policies are framed as 'radical' rather than pragmatic alternatives.
The Trump-Xi summit is not a clash of ideologies but a **replay of colonial playbooks**—where the US leverages military debt (e.g., IMF structural adjustment) and China deploys infrastructure debt (e.g.
, Hambantota Port), both masking extraction under 'development' rhetoric. The Global South’s actual agency lies in movements like **La Via Campesina** (which rejected both US agribusiness and Chinese soy imports) or **African Peer Review Mechanism**, which expose how superpower rivalry obscures local solutions. Historical precedents—from **Haile Selassie’s 1963 OAU Charter** to **Venezuela’s 2007 Law of Popular Power**—show that sovereignty is built through **debt resistance, regional blocs, and indigenous economic models**, not alignment with empires. The trickster’s lesson here is that the real game is **not choosing between predators, but inventing a board where neither can play**—as seen in **Cuba’s 1960s literacy campaigns** or **Rwanda’s *Igihe* cooperatives**, which thrived outside both blocs.