TIANJIN, China – Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Monday called on the leaders of countries including Russia, Iran and India to integrate their economies and build an “orderly multipolar world,” as he tried to unite them in their shared grievances with the U.S.-led global order and the policies of President Donald Trump.
Xi used the platform of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit here, 90 miles southeast of Beijing, to implicitly criticize Trump’s policies – without naming him or mentioning the United States.
He urged the 20 foreign leaders in attendance to “seek integration, not decoupling” and “unequivocally oppose power politics.”
Member countries should “serve as a cornerstone for the promotion of a multipolar world” and join a China-led “global governance initiative,” he said in closing remarks after a day in which leaders put on shows of chumminess and met for private talks on the sidelines of the mostly scripted event.
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The Chinese leader’s new initiative will help provide stability at a time of rising turbulence and end “the monopoly of global governance by some countries,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a news briefing Monday night after Xi’s remarks.
Xi held a bilateral meeting with India’s Narendra Modi Sunday and will hold a one-on-one with Vladimir Putin of Russia on Tuesday. The three were filmed holding hands and smiling as they chatted on Monday.
Xi also proposed deepening economic ties to take advantage of the group’s “mega-sized market,” including by establishing a SCO development bank. China has already invested $84 billion in member countries and would provide another $1.4 billion in loans over the next three years, he said.
The forum is a key part of China’s campaign to be seen as a reliable partner and a counterweight to U.S. unpredictability in an increasingly multipolar world. Modi’s attendance in particular – his first visit to the country in seven years – is a milestone in Beijing’s attempt to mend ties with an influential U.S. partner that has been alienated by Trump’s tariffs.
For now, the grouping is primarily “united in a sense of aggrievement with the U.S. rather than a sense of common purpose,” said Carla Freeman, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “These are big countries with their own agendas.”
But the ceremonies are as much about optics as about deals. Many of the dignitaries will stay on for a huge military parade in Beijing this week to mark the 80th anniversary of victory in World War II. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, despite not attending in Tianjin, is expected to join Putin and Xi on the rostrum overlooking Tiananmen Square for Wednesday’s parade.
Originally founded by China and Russia in 2001 to cooperate on Central Asian militant threats, the SCO has taken on a broader economic and security mandate in recent years. Attracting leaders from across Asia, its annual meetings have become an important venue for Beijing and Moscow to jointly reshape international norms.
Despite deep divisions among members, Trump’s unpredictable policies have helped create “a coalition of like-minded countries against the U.S.,” said Claus Soong, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a think tank based in Berlin.
Alongside the BRICS economic grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and others, the SCO has become central to Beijing’s message that “the West is not the dominating power or the sole answer,” Soong said. “It’s a highly political message.”
Even if the meeting in Tianjin achieves little, analysts said that simply attending can be valuable for autocratic governments and leaders – such as Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian – to show they are not isolated despite Western sanctions.
Putin used the summit to burnish Russia’s image as an important global power, blaming the West for the war in Ukraine and airing historically revisionist statements to explain the causes of the conflict. In a speech at the meeting of SCO member states on Monday, Putin repeated his claim that the “root causes of the crisis” must be removed – meaning turning Ukraine into a Russian client state – so that peace can be achieved.
The forum was not founded to oppose Washington, said Zhu Yongbiao, an international relations scholar at Lanzhou University in northwest China, but Trump’s trade and foreign policies have contributed to global instability that is driving the group closer together.
“There is significant instability in the region and internationally, whether it’s the Russia-Ukraine conflict or the situation in the Middle East. Virtually all nations now have more security concerns,” Zhu said.
The bloc has grown from its original six countries to 10 full members. The expansion began with countries on China’s borders – India and Pakistan joined in 2017 – but it has since shifted farther west: Belarus became a full member last year. Laos officially joined the SCO on Monday, bringing the number of states in the group to 27.
It has also shifted focus away from border security into broader economic dealmaking and visions of an alternative world order. Tianjin was chosen as host city this year in part because it pioneered the state-backed Luban workshops that have become a tool of Chinese influence under Xi’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure and investment initiative.
China likes to emphasize the SCO’s reach – state media has highlighted that the grouping accounts for about a quarter of the global economy and 40 percent of the world’s population – but its members remain divided by long-standing rivalries that the yearly confabs have made little progress toward resolving.
On Sunday, Xi endorsed the applications for full membership of South Caucasus neighbors Azerbaijan and Armenia, which last month at the White House signed a framework to normalize relations after a decades-long conflict.
In an act of careful diplomatic balancing, Modi visited Japan – another member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which also includes Australia and the United States – before coming to Tianjin. He will skip the parade and its display of Chinese-made weapons, some of which have been used by Pakistan in the conflict between the two rivals in May.
Xi and Modi hailed their countries’ warming ties in a meeting Sunday, but differences in the two sides’ readouts hinted at lingering disagreements.
While Xi said that border tensions – which eased last year after bloody clashes in 2020 – “should not define the overall relationship,” Modi stressed that “peace and tranquility” on the border was necessary for better relations. Modi also said that “the relationship should not be seen through a third country lens” – probably a reference to Beijing’s efforts to exploit tensions with Trump.
Afghanistan’s absence is another example of the group’s limits. It has been an observer member since 2012, and China was the first country to accept a Taliban-appointed ambassador. But the Taliban were left out of this year’s gathering, probably thanks to U.S. and United Nations sanctions that prevent its leaders from traveling internationally.
Beijing itself rejects the idea that the grouping should develop into a formal bloc. Instead, it casts the group as expanding the international influence of non-Western countries.
At the SCO meeting, Modi also said that he expects Putin to visit India in December. “I and 1.4 billion Indians are looking forward to your visit to India in December this year for our 23d annual summit,” Modi said at a meeting with Putin on the summit’s sidelines.
Zhu, the Lanzhou University scholar, described its function as more like a safe space for governments such as Iran to receive “moral support and public sympathy.”
But even if the organization is just a talk shop for now, it allows China to “be magnanimous and win friends and influence people,” said Freeman, the SAIS scholar: “Xi Jinping sees it as important opportunity to promote his vision for a different global order.”