The 2023 expansion of the BRICS to the BRICS+, to include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia, and then Indonesia in 2025, raises important questions about the future influence of the BRICS+ on global governance, as well as its internal dynamics. China, a pivotal member since the inception of the BRICs, has consistently demonstrated a strong commitment to the group’s development. This paper examines China’s role within the BRICS+ through the concept of policy experimentation, an analytical framework widely applied to understand China’s domestic policy-making strategies. This paper asks whether this concept can also help elucidate China’s foreign policy-making processes by exploring China’s interactions within the BRICS+, and specifically, in the context of this collection, its bilateral relationships with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. We ask whether the policy experimentation framework can be usefully expanded into analyses of China’s foreign policy.