Even as China’s economy enters what’s probably a long-term slowdown, the Western press is warning about China’s attempt to build world influence — and maybe world domination? — via new international organizations that it controls. Here’s James Kynge in the Financial Times:

The key to China’s blueprint is to steadily institutionalise its leadership over the developing world by creating, expanding and funding a raft of China-led groupings of countries…[T]he aims of this strategy are largely two-fold: to ensure that a broad swath of the world remains open to Chinese trade and investment and to use the voting power of developing countries at the UN and in other forums to project Chinese power and values.

The most important such grouping — or at least, the one that has received the most attention and been met with the most alarm in the West — is the BRICS. This somewhat odd organization began life 22 years ago as an investment strategy created by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill — basically, a grouping of large developing countries he thought would grow rapidly. “BRICs” was an acronym for that list of countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China. Later, the four countries actually got together and decided to turn the Goldman Sachs acronym into an actual economic forum, where they’d meet periodically and talk about how to speed economic development, create new financial institutions, and increase developing countries’ general influence in the world. In 2010 South Africa joined, and BRICs became BRICS.