China’s President Xi Jinping called for unity among his BRICS counterparts at a summit in South Africa on Wednesday as he pushed the case for expanding the grouping to face a global “period of turbulence and transformation”. Leaders of the bloc of leading developing nations Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are meeting in Johannesburg with discussions around establishing a framework and criteria for admitting new members topping the agenda. While all BRICS members have publicly expressed support for growing the bloc, divisions remain over how much and how quickly. Addressing the summit of the bloc’s leaders, Xi said he was glad to see that developing countries had shown great enthusiasm in participating in BRICS and many of them have applied to join. “We should let more countries join the BRICS family to pool wisdom and efforts to make global governance more just and equitable,” Xi said. Xi also said the BRICS countries have agreed to launch a study group on artificial intelligence (AI) and further expand cooperation on AI, including by strengthening information exchange and technical cooperation. “The world is undergoing major shifts, division and regrouping … it has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation,” Xi said. “We, the BRICS countries, should always bear in mind our founding purpose of strengthening ourselves through unity.” BRICS group countries have economies that are vastly different in scale and governments that often seem to have few foreign policy goals in common, complicating decision-making. The economy of China, for example, is more than 40 times larger than South Africa’s, Africa’s most developed country. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Tuesday that he and Xi had similar positions on BRICS expansion.