Chinese leader Xi Jinping welcomed delegations from across the developing world to Beijing on Tuesday to celebrate his pet project, the Belt and Road Initiative. The forum, the third of its kind, is meant to display China’s influence in the global South and show that Washington’s efforts to isolate and pressure Beijing can’t succeed: China simply has too many friends.

But one very important person was absent. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government have steadfastly refused to join Xi’s infrastructure-building program and have promoted alternatives instead. Just last month, Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a joint project to connect India to Europe through the Middle East by rail and ship.

Modi’s absence from the Belt and Road forum is a sign that the rivalry between the United States and China is not the only one shaping global affairs. Another, between India and China, may have geopolitical consequences that are equally important. At stake are the shape of the global South and its role in international governance. Whose vision prevails—Xi’s or Modi’s—will help determine the future of the world order and American global power.

Xi’s goal is to build a bloc of supporters in the global South that he can use to expand Chinese influence and challenge American primacy. But New Delhi is not much more eager than Washington to usher in a China-centric world system. Modi has therefore intensified his diplomacy in the global South, so that India can serve as a counterweight to China.

For Washington, Modi’s new assertiveness presents an opportunity. With India by its side, the U.S. can make the case that the South will benefit less from joining forces with Beijing to upend the American-led global order than from participating in partnerships with the United States and India.

Still, Biden and Modi are playing from behind. Xi has long recognized the aspirations and frustrations of the global South, and his foreign policy is designed to capitalize on those sentiments for China’s own geopolitical benefit. The Belt and Road Initiative is the premier pillar of that effort. The program, launched a decade ago, provided an alternative source of development financing to that offered by the institutions of the West, such as the World Bank. Xi has also fostered forums to promote the interests of developing countries, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS group of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Ideologically, Xi introduced a framework of principles, called the Global Development Initiative, aimed at refocusing international discourse on economic inequality and more evenly spreading the benefits of growth. Earlier this year, Qin Gang, then China’s foreign minister, framed global affairs as an international class struggle. “The principal contradiction in today’s world is not at all a so-called ‘democracy versus autocracy’ played up by a handful of countries,” he argued, “but a struggle between development and containment of development.”

[Read: Xi Jinping is done with the established world order]

The money and attention have paid off. At a BRICS summit in August, Xi overcame Modi’s opposition and won agreement to invite six new members—most, if not all, likely to support China’s interests.

Indian policy makers are worried. They see China usurping the role that India has historically sought to play, as the champion of the postcolonial developing world. China has even intruded into South Asia in ways that undercut Indian primacy in its own neighborhood—particularly through Beijing’s heavy support for Pakistan, India’s arch nemesis.

China’s actions have fostered “a feeling in Delhi that we are being replaced, that we are getting pushed out of our traditional spheres of influence,” Happymon Jacob, a specialist in Indian foreign policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, told me. “That feeling is palpable when you talk to the policy makers in Delhi, and they want to do something about it.”

New Delhi, much like Washington, has come to fear that Chinese influence will shape a new world order hostile to its interests. Indian policy makers feel that “rather than China’s integration into the globalized world benefiting the globalized world, that globalized world is being used by China to advance its own national interests,” Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Washington-based think tank Observer Research Foundation America, told me. “On almost every issue of the global governance agenda, China and India are at odds with each other.”

Xi has further inflamed tensions with an ever more assertive foreign policy. Aggressively pressing territorial claims along its disputed border with India, China helped spark a deadly Himalayan brawl between Chinese and Indian soldiers in 2020. Just last month, Xi snubbed Modi by opting not to show at the latest Group of 20 summit that the Indian prime minister hosted in New Delhi.

Modi took advantage of Xi’s absence. He burnished his credentials as an advocate for the global South by pushing for the inclusion of the African Union in the G20. (Previously, South Africa was the continent’s sole representative.) In the days before the summit, Modi darted off to Indonesia to attend a conference of Southeast Asian nations (which Xi also skipped, instead sending his No. 2, Premier Li Qiang). Indonesian President Joko Widodo altered the meeting’s schedule to accommodate him. And New Delhi has attempted to capitalize on Xi’s missteps in other ways—most notably by calling out the Chinese government for its resistance to offering significant debt relief to economically troubled low-income countries.  

But however canny its appeal, New Delhi’s capacity to counterbalance Beijing is limited. With an economy one-fifth the size of China’s, Modi cannot match Xi in financial resources with which to woo wallets in the global South. He will need to work with partners that have deeper pockets, such as the United States.

By doing so, Modi is sending a message to the Global South: Poor and marginalized countries can attain greater sway in world affairs through cooperation rather than confrontation with the West. He made this case by deftly managing the G20, where he worked closely with Biden and other Western leaders to offer the prospect of inclusive partnership to countries of the global South within expanded and reformed institutions of the current order. By contrast, this week’s Belt and Road forum showcases Xi’s intention to build a different, competing order. The Communist Party–run news outlet Global Times, citing the conflict between Israel and Hamas, claimed that the Belt and Road is evidence that as the United States “fans the flames of war, China exports peace and development.”

Some 140 countries are sending delegations to Xi’s forum, suggesting that the Chinese leader’s vision for a new world order does have global appeal. But that vision is also China-centric, and therefore divisive. By expecting governments to repeatedly send high-level representatives to Beijing for such events, Xi is treating members of the global South more like supplicants than partners. And Modi isn’t alone in steering clear. Past forums attracted prominent representatives from the West, including Italy’s prime minister in 2017. This year’s event will include Russian President Vladimir Putin, as welcome in China as ever, and a representative from Afghanistan’s Taliban. But Western leaders have generally stayed away, and overall, the delegates at this forum are of lower stature. By the Chinese government’s count, 37 national leaders attended 2019’s forum; this year, roughly half that number showed up.

[Read: China doesn’t want to compete. It wants to win.]

Xi may attract crowds, but many countries remain wary of choosing sides in a great-power standoff, and Modi’s approach will likely appeal to them. Rama Yade, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and a former French secretary of state for foreign affairs and human rights, told me that “behind India, you have the Western allies, and that is something that is very important for Africans” because “they want to preserve or keep their partnerships with the West as well as the Chinese.” That, she continued, is why “the Indians seriously challenge the Chinese” in Africa.

With India in the mix, Xi can’t so easily claim that the future depends on conflict between the West and the rest. Not only are multiple centers of power emerging in the developing world, but they speak with diverse voices and promote different visions for a more balanced future. Xi, however, doesn’t seem interested in listening. He appears to believe that he can marshal the global South to isolate the West—but in pushing his partners to side against the United States, he might ultimately end up isolating China.