Shaping BRICS: China’s discourse power and the making of a global governance agenda

How does China affect BRICS’s Global Governance Agenda? The enlargement of BRICS intensified debates on the emergence of alternative centres of power in global governance. The group is often portrayed as a unified voice of the Global South, yet the internal dynamics that shape its normative agenda remain underexplored. This article examines China’s discourse power (huayuquan) in structuring BRICS’s Global Governance agenda drawing on the Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA) approach. It analyses a corpus of BRICS summit declarations, leaders’ official statements, and Chinese state-affiliated media to trace how key discursive elements are constructed and recontextualized across different communicative arenas at the BRICS level. The findings show that China’s discourse resonates widely among member states by tapping into shared historical experiences of marginalization and aspirations for a more inclusive international order. By foregrounding discourse as a site of power, the article argues that BRICS should be understood not only as an institutional platform but also as a discursive arena through which alternative visions of global governance are articulated and disseminated.