China wants to strengthen the influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a growing group that includes India, Russia and Central Asian countries, with the ambition of making it a counterweight to the West.
Leaders of the member states of this bloc of nations, with sometimes divergent interests, met last week in Astana, Kazakhstan.
The opportunity for Chinese President Xi Jinping to call on Russia – its strategic partner – and the other participants to “firmly support each other”.
The SCO was founded in 2001 by Beijing and Moscow. It has gained new momentum in recent years under the leadership of its two founders and is designed as a platform for cooperation, with a security and economic focus.
The bloc recently welcomed two new members: Iran in 2023 and Belarus this year. They join China, India, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
The Astana summit took place a few days before the NATO summit, which is currently taking place in Washington, where the Western military alliance reaffirmed its strong support for Ukraine in the face of Russia, a member of the SCO.
China now holds the rotating presidency of the organization, and many analysts expect it to use the opportunity to encourage collaboration within the alliance, thereby strengthening its own influence.
“The SCO is increasingly defining itself as offering an alternative vision of the world order, to the traditional order that dates back to the post-war period and is led by the United States and other Western powers,” said Bates Gill, an analyst at the US-based National Bureau of Asian Research.
Xi and Putin
The expansion of the international organization to include new members can also be seen as responding to repeated calls from Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to resist Western influence.
The SCO claims to represent 40% of the world’s population and some 30% of global GDP. But its members have different political systems and sometimes disagree on issues.
China will want to speed up trade between member states, particularly because of its own economic slowdown, believes Zhang Xiaotong, director of the Center for China and Central Asian Studies at KIMEP University (Kazakhstan).
Beijing will likely “encourage peace on the Eurasian continent and put the economy at the center of the SCO agenda in order to stimulate its economic growth,” he told AFP.
China and Russia have regularly used the SCO to strengthen their own ties with Central Asian countries, and the two powers still compete for influence in the region.
At the same time, they increasingly present the organization as a competitor of the West.
The SCO’s final statement last week thus castigated the “unilateral and unrestricted construction” of missile defense systems – a thinly veiled criticism of Washington.
For his part, Xi Jinping called on the regional organization to “resist external interference” and Vladimir Putin welcomed the advent of a “multipolar world”, clear references to Western influence.
“Ineffective”
“China will try to use the next 12 months to […] “finding common ground between the 10 member states,” says Eva Seiwert, a researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
Abanti Bhattacharya, a professor of East Asian studies at the University of Delhi in India, says China has enabled the SCO to “gain momentum.”
“It boils down to a simple reality: (the) return of the Cold War (with) the world dividing into two blocs, one democratic and the other authoritarian,” says Mme Bhattacharya.
Other analysts are skeptical that the SCO can constitute a real counterweight to the West.
“The bloc sees itself as a way for its members to resist pressure from the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. But not all SCO members seem to be on the same page,” Ja-Ian Chong, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told AFP.
With China competing with Russia for influence in the region and harboring border disputes with India, it is unclear whether the organization can realize its grand ambitions.
The SCO is “ineffective” and has “no objective that could allow unity” between members, to whom it does not attribute any real responsibility, according to Temur Umarov, an analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Behind the “pompous rhetoric” it “doesn’t really have the power to generate change” […] “within or outside the borders of the SCO,” he judges.