The 18th BRICS Summit was held on September 12-13, local time, at the Bharat Mandapam convention centre in New Delhi, India, hosted by India under its 2026 BRICS chairmanship. During the summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping formally announced that China will take over the BRICS chairmanship in 2027 and will host the 19th BRICS Summit. The exact host city and dates have not yet been announced. The announcement marks the handover of the BRICS chairmanship baton back to China, and sets the tone for the next phase of this platform for cooperation among emerging markets and developing countries.

In handing the chairmanship over to China, Indian Prime Minister Modi extended his best wishes and called on BRICS to deliver "concrete results" as the grouping enters its third decade of cooperation. Modi's remarks were seen as reflecting expectations for the bloc's future direction: having completed a round of enlargement and expanded its influence, member states should now devote more effort to practical cooperation and the implementation of concrete projects, rather than statements of principle alone. The call also underscores that, as BRICS membership continues to grow, building consensus among diverse interests and improving execution have become key challenges for the mechanism going forward.

In his remarks, Xi Jinping described China's incoming chairmanship as a moment to jointly usher in the "third golden decade" of BRICS cooperation. The phrase reflects the trajectory of BRICS since its first leaders' meeting in 2009: from the original "BRIC" concept to today's multilateral mechanism spanning numerous emerging economies, the grouping has now existed for nearly two decades. The signal in Xi's framing is that China intends to use its chairmanship to further consolidate and raise BRICS' voice and influence within the global governance system, and to push the mechanism from a phase of expansion toward one of qualitative improvement.

Under BRICS' established practice, the chairing country takes on a range of specific responsibilities: hosting the annual leaders' summit, coordinating dozens of ministerial meetings and more than a hundred sherpa- and working-group-level consultations throughout the year, setting the year's cooperation agenda and priority issues, and drafting the summit's final declaration to reflect consensus among member states. Chairing countries often use the position to embed their own priorities into the BRICS framework — for example, promoting local-currency trade settlement, expanding the New Development Bank's operations, or deepening cooperation on the digital economy and green development. This means that during its 2027 chairmanship, China will have considerable latitude to set BRICS' priority direction for that year.

This is not the first time China has hosted a BRICS leaders' summit. From September 3-5, 2017, China hosted the 9th BRICS Summit in Xiamen, Fujian Province, chaired by Xi Jinping, under the theme "BRICS: Stronger Partnership for a Brighter Future" — commonly known as the "Xiamen Summit." At that time, BRICS still comprised only its five original members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — and the summit focused on deepening cooperation in trade, finance and people-to-people exchange, while introducing the "BRICS Plus" format for the first time, inviting leaders from several emerging-market and developing countries to join the dialogue. A decade later, as China takes on the chairmanship again, BRICS' membership, the scope of its agenda and its global influence have all changed significantly compared with 2017 — new realities that China will need to factor into its hosting of the 2027 summit.

In recent years, BRICS has undergone significant expansion. Beyond its five founding members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates formally joined in January 2024, and Indonesia became a full member in January 2025, bringing the grouping to ten full members; Saudi Arabia has also been invited to join, though its formal accession process has not yet been completed. Separately, ten countries — Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam — participate in the BRICS mechanism as "partner countries." Following this sustained expansion, BRICS now encompasses roughly half the world's population and about 40 percent of global economic output, making it a significant platform for multilateral cooperation among emerging markets and developing countries. China takes over the chairmanship against a backdrop of a more diverse membership and a broader agenda, which also means that coordinating differing interests and building consensus will likely be more difficult than in the past.

From a broader perspective, China's assumption of the 2027 BRICS chairmanship is also seen as a form of international recognition of China's leadership role in emerging-market cooperation. As BRICS' largest economy, China has in recent years continued to advance multilateral cooperation frameworks such as the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative, while maintaining close engagement with a wide range of emerging-market and developing countries on trade, investment and financing, and infrastructure development. Analysts say that China's hosting of the 2027 summit will provide a further opportunity to deepen its strategic cooperative ties with other emerging-market and developing nations, and will help China secure a more proactive role and greater voice in discussions on reforming the global governance system. China is also a major shareholder in the BRICS New Development Bank and has long been one of the bloc's largest economies by foreign trade volume and among its most active in outbound investment. Against this backdrop, China's hosting of the 2027 summit is widely seen as an important window for observing how China will use its chairmanship to further advance practical BRICS cooperation on local-currency trade settlement, development financing and technological innovation.

For now, the specific host city and dates for China's 19th BRICS Summit have not been officially announced, and observers generally expect the arrangements to become clear over the coming months. Following past practice, the host country typically begins building its year-long coordination mechanism shortly after taking over the chairmanship, holding a series of ministerial meetings — finance ministers, central bank governors, foreign ministers and others — to lay the groundwork for the year-end leaders' summit. As China formally takes over in 2027, how BRICS consolidates unity and advances practical cooperation under its newly expanded membership, and whether it can deliver the "concrete results" that Modi called for, will remain a focus of continued international attention.

Notably, this handover of the BRICS chairmanship comes against a backdrop of signs of thawing China-India relations. During the summit, Xi Jinping held talks with Modi, in which the two leaders had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on strategic, long-term and directional issues in bilateral ties. One key point of consensus reached was that China and India should be partners rather than rivals, and that the two countries should deepen cooperation in a spirit of mutual respect and mutual trust. Analysts say this positive signal in China-India relations has, in practical terms, created a relatively favourable external environment for China to coordinate positions within BRICS and build consensus among member states during its chairmanship — particularly given that BRICS has now expanded to ten full members with more diverse interests. Whether China and India, the bloc's two founding heavyweights, can maintain stable communication with each other is widely seen as important to the mechanism's future cohesion.