Still reeling from the just-passed financial maelstrom, the global economy is now, at best, in poorly charted waters, and needs both good engines and good steering to navigate ahead.

This perception is particularly true as markets across the world are also feeling the shock waves of, among others, the political unrest sweeping North Africa and the Middle East -- a major source of global oil supply -- and the recent massive earthquake and tsunami and the still-unfolding nuclear crisis bedeviling Japan -- the world's third largest economy.

It is in such a challenging context that leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a quintuplet of major global economic engines known as BRICS, gather Thursday in the southern Chinese city of Sanya not only to chart the course forward for the young and promising operation mechanism but to explore ways of reinforcing the still fragile world economic recovery.

High on the agenda of the gathering, themed "Looking into the Future, Sharing prosperity" and to be chaired by Chinese President Hu Jintao, are the international situation, global economic and financial affairs, development issues and cooperation within BRICS, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Wu Hailong said at a press briefing earlier this month.

The conference, the first for South Africa as a full member and the third for the others, "will convey to the international community a message of confidence, solidarity, cooperation and common benefit," Wu said. "We hope that through the concerted efforts of all parties, this meeting will be an important milestone in the cooperation process among the BRICS countries."

A more efficient and productive cooperation regime accords with the interests of both the BRICS and the whole world, as it will not only bring substantial benefits to the peoples of the five member countries but help boost global economic growth and contribute to world peace and development, said the assistant minister.

This cooperative spirit strikes exactly the right note in the struggling post-crisis era. In a recent speech entitled "Global Challenges, Global Solutions," Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said among the core needs of the global economic recovery are new approaches to economic policy, to social inclusion and to cooperation and multilateralism.

In the same vein of thinking, Park Cyn-Yong, a senior economist at Asian Development Bank, said in a recent interview with Xinhua that the latest international financial wipeout and economic meltdown "really showed us that the world needs multiple engines of growth for very strong and balanced growth" and that emerging-market economies should diminish their economic reliance on advanced economies.

During the Great Depression-scale crisis, which first erupted in 2008 in the United States, developed countries failed to function as the desperately needed engines to pull the world economy through, and it was, to a great extent, the emerging economies that rushed to the rescue, noted Liu Youfa, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS).

The fact that past rescuees have now become rescuers embodies an overarching trend coursing through the international arena, namely the collective rise of developing countries, which equips the world with alternative economic powerhouses and helps steer the international order toward a more balanced future. The BRICS framework is just the bellwether in this megatrend of the times.

Given the believably rough voyage ahead for the post-crisis world economy, the clear signal from these stellar powerhouses will serve as nothing short of a lighthouse. The keynote of the BRICS economies is the keynote of the world economy, Jim O'Neill, a senior Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term BRIC (without South Africa) in 2001, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Observing through a different prism, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua ahead of her departure for China that the BRICS quintuplet is an "extremely healthy" presence on the world stage and has become one of the levers of multilateralism, as it not only pioneers the vision of a more balanced international order that does not deny the game-changing reality of the rise of developing countries, but also spearheads a cooperative endeavor for world peace and development.

Citing the increasingly important and constructive roles of BRICS countries in world affairs, such as containing worldwide financial woes, promoting international financial reforms and taming the increasingly unruly climate, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said last month that cooperation within the BRICS framework "is an important part of the South-South cooperation and an important bridge for North-South cooperation."