The BRICS summit is taking place in South Africa this week. BRICS started out as BRIC for Brazil, Russia, India and China but has since added South Africa. The group of nations doesn’t have much in common except a generalized sense of grievance over the US being the most powerful country in the world.

The other BRICS nations have offered little to no protest of the Kremlin’s decision to rush to war. China and India stepped up purchases from Russia as Western sanctions started to bite. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested that the West was at least partially to blame for the conflict and has offered a vague proposal to help forge a truce between Kyiv and Moscow. South Africa’s government equivocated, too, refusing to outright condemn Putin’s regime while bemoaning the war’s ripple effects on supply chains critical to African societies.

In Johannesburg, a big topic of conversation will be the outsize influence of the U.S. dollar in the global economy. Talk of “de-dollarization” is rife among exponents of the BRICS, even though not formally on the summit’s agenda. Some have floated a rival BRICS-backed currency to challenge the greenback’s supremacy. But the invention of a new BRICS currency is wildly ambitious — and probably unfeasible — and the summit is expected to focus instead on options to expand the use of local currencies in trade between bloc members. Dollar-strapped countries like Argentina have already started dealing in the Chinese yuan in certain transactions.

“Why does Brazil need the dollar to trade with China or Argentina? We can trade in our currency,” Lula told reporters recently<, before casting the BRICS bank as a more just potential actor on the world stage than U.S.-led institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

So the general idea of this conference is for these countries to get together as a kind of vague rival to the G7 or the G20. What you don’t want at a meeting like this is signs of confusion or possible problems behind the scenes. But this week China is experiencing both. First, there was this incident in which a Chinese aide seen running after Xi Jinping was stopped by security who, it seems, didn’t know who he was. As you can see in this clip, Xi seems confused and stops and looks back.

At BRICS summit, South African security officers stop Chinese President Xi Jinping's officials who were trying to make their in. Literally had to close the doors prompting the Chinese President to look back several times. pic.twitter.com/EHhsd6IKEH

— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) August 23, 2023

It turns out the man who got body slammed into a door was Xi’s translator. You can see the same small guy with glasses in this earlier video shot upon Xi’s arrival.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attending the BRICS summit in South Africa

If you're wondering what small talk between national leaders sounds like:

Props to President Xi pulling out an appropriate ancient proverb, responding to President Ramaphosa's apartheid story at the end. pic.twitter.com/4H0PerqSEm

— Zhao DaShuai 无条件爱国🇨🇳 (@zhao_dashuai) August 23, 2023

But that was a relatively minor incident compared to what happened yesterday. Xi Jinping failed to show up for a planned speech.

Chinese President Xi Jinping failed to show up at the Brics Business Forum on Tuesday in South Africa, where he was expected to deliver a speech alongside his counterparts. In his place, Commerce Minister Wang Wentao read the speech that criticised the US over its tendency toward “hegemony”.

Xi, in the speech read by Wang at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, said the US tended to fight countries that threaten its dominance in global affairs and financial markets.

The speech said that every country has a right to development and that people should have the freedom to pursue a happy life. But one country, he said in a thinly veiled swipe at the US, is “obsessed with maintaining hegemony, has gone out of its way to cripple the emerging markets and developing countries”…

“This should be ‘stop the presses’ news!” Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China, said in response to Glaser’s post. “An unannounced absence, especially in a multilateral forum (which the PRC seldom misses), after all the ground work with India, is truly newsworthy. If true, something is certainly amiss.”

Again, the anti-US tone is standard fare for this event but the fact that Xi didn’t deliver his own speech is odd. Close watchers of China say this simply never happens without some extraordinary reason.

Xi later attended the summit dinner, but no reason was given for missing the speech. It appeared to be a last-minute decision, as state media articles and social media posts from China’s foreign ministry spokesperson were published as though he had delivered it himself…

The China Global South Project noted this was the second unexplained absence by a Chinese official after former foreign minister Qin Gang – who has not been seen in public for months – also missed last month’s foreign ministers Brics meeting.

“To say [Xi’s absence] is extraordinary is an understatement as Chinese leaders never miss highly choreographed events like this,” it said.

Did anything extraordinary happen yesterday that might have unavoidably pulled Xi away from his duties? Maybe?

Reports circulating online have claimed that one of China’s Type 093, or “Shang-class,” nuclear submarines had crashed in unknown circumstances at some point in the past few days. Some of the reports claimed the entire crew onboard the vessel had been killed…

There has been no official confirmation of a Chinese submarine running into difficulty in the contentious strait, and experts have been hesitant to speculate. The topic was not mentioned in a press briefing from China’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday and has not appeared in any state news agencies’ reports.

Two points about this. First, if a Chinese nuclear sub did sink in the Taiwan straight that would be a huge story. Second, this definitely seems like the kind of news China would deny and lie about because that’s just what they do anytime their prestige is on the line.

On the other hand, no one seems convinced this happened yet. Taiwan’s MOD put out a statement yesterday saying they hadn’t heard anything beyond the rumors.

“As per my understanding, this information is circulating on social media but I haven't received any official confirmation”- Spokesperson of Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense on the rumours regarding the Chinese submarine accident in the Taiwan Strait
pic.twitter.com/adlPZlphW4

— Sana Hashmi | 胡莎娜 (@sanahashmi1) August 22, 2023

Also there’s this:

Taiwan Atomic Energy Council spokesman Wang Chongde said that if a nuclear submarine sinks nuclear fuel could leak However, none of Taiwan's 63 radiation monitoring stations detected a change in bg radiation after reports of a Chinese submarine accident in the Taiwan Strait. pic.twitter.com/F3YhaYenWU

— JohneidpyM01 (@johneidpyM01) August 22, 2023

So at least for now this looks like a rumor with no confirmation at all. It probably didn’t happen. That still leaves the mystery of why Xi Jinping was suddenly unavailable for a scheduled speech yesterday without any notice. Something happened, we just don’t know what it was yet.