Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) gathered the leaders of Russia and India among dignitaries from about 20 Eurasian countries yesterday for a showpiece summit aimed at putting China front and center of regional relations.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit is being held in the northern port city of Tianjin today and yesterday, days before a massive military parade in Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners.”
Photo: Indian Prime Minister’s Office via AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin touched down in Tianjin yesterday with an entourage of senior politicians and business representatives.
Meanwhile, Xi held a flurry of bilateral meetings with leaders from the Maldives, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and one of Putin’s staunch allies, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Xi also met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday, who arrived the evening before, in his first visit to China since 2018.
Modi told Xi that India was committed to taking “forward our ties on the basis of mutual trust, dignity and sensitivity,” a video posted by Modi on X showed.
The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.
A thaw began in October last year, when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
“The interests of 2.8 billion people of both countries are linked to our cooperation. This will also pave the way for the welfare of the entire humanity,” Modi told Xi.
The bilateral talks were held at the Tianjin Guest House, an intimate venue surrounded by lush greenery.
Large sections of Tianjin were closed to traffic, with a significant police presence deployed around the city.
Official posters promoting the SCO lined the streets, displaying words such as “mutual benefit” and “equality” in Chinese and Russian.
China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to NATO. This year’s summit is the first since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the US and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms such as the SCO to curry favor.
“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh (駱明輝), an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
More than 20 leaders, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are attending the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
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