All the soaring rhetoric from Yekaterinburg on the solidarity of the second tier powers against Anglo-Saxon hegemony can’t hide one simple reality — that China is a cut above the rest of the BRICs.Unpack the impressive combined statistics of the BRICs and you will find an unmistakable hierarchy. Russia is a declining power and is on the way down. India and Brazil are on the way up, but have a long way to go. Among the BRICs, China is the number one.

When you are on top of a heap, you get a better perspective than when you are at its bottom. That is what probably separates China and India at this week’s talk-fest in Yekaterinburg. India has gone to Yekaterinburg because of its abiding sense of obligation to Russia. The Chinese, in contrast, are in the Urals to enjoy a free political ride. China has two reasons to encourage Russia’s anti-Western bravado. If someone has to bash the Americans, why not get the Russians to do it? The harder the Russians go at America, Beijing knows, the greater its own leverage with Washington.

This, indeed, is an old story. Russia’s confrontation with the West helped China get better terms from the British imperialists in the nineteenth century and the hegemonic Americans in the twentieth. The twenty-first century, however, is different with China ranked higher than Russia. The Obama administration has confirmed the new global pecking order when it declared that managing its bilateral relationship with China is the most important foreign policy priority. The idea of ‘Group of Two’ — America and China — jointly managing the world has steadily gained ground since Barack Obama took charge of Washington.

... contd.