US President Donald Trump’s decision to snub the upcoming G20 Summit scheduled to be held in South Africa next month should not overshadow the significance of the gathering happening on African soil for the first time. This is the view of Prof Zhang Weiwei, a political scientist and Chinese scholar from Fudan University, who visited South Africa recently as the guest of the National School of Governance. Zhang has gained a reputation around the world as a staunch critic of Western-style democracies and a vocal advocate of what he calls the “superiority of the China model”.
He shot to prominence in the West in 2011 after his debate with liberal democracy advocate Francis Fukuyama, where he disputed Fukuyama’s prediction that China would experience an “Arab Spring” if it did not introduce democratic reforms to its political system. He was in South Africa recently as part of the National School of Governance’s preparations for the G20 Summit. The school, which focuses on policy training for senior civil servants, hosted the T20 Symposium on State Capacity & Institutional Transformation, and Zhang was a key speaker.
Talking to the Politics in Command podcast, on the sidelines of the symposium, Zhang dismissed suggestions the non-attendance by Trump at the G20 summit would somehow downgrade the significance of the gathering, even though most other member states are expected to be represented by their presidents and prime ministers. The G20 summit is a gathering of some of the world’s largest economies and boasts representations from such regional bodies as the AU and its European counterparts. However, Trump, whose country will take over the presidency of the G20 at the end of the summit in November, has made it clear he will not fly to Johannesburg for the summit and said vice-president JD Vance will represent the US.
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Zhang said this should not put a damper on South Africa’s preparations as the success of the summit is not entirely dependent on Trump and US participation. “My view is that put Donald Trump in the appropriate place, which is, in my view, not that high,” Zhang said. His central argument during the visit was that South Africa and the rest of the continent should rather focus on strengthening their trade ties with China and other countries in the global South, instead of the US, which, he argued, is an empire in decline.
“I have looked at the statistics, US trade with Africa last year was only $70bn (R1.2-trillion). China’s trade with the whole of Africa last year was close to $300bn (R5.2-trillion) billion and is growing quickly” he said. Though his views on Western democracy can be considered controversial in liberal democracies such as ours, Zhang appears to have attracted the attention of local academia and senior civil servants in recent years. He was first in the country in 2023 for public speaking engagements and has interacted with local academics virtually on several occasions.
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