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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. A humanitarian crisis on the scale of the one unfolding at the Nepal-Tibet border might have filled a leader’s entire agenda in any other country, but not in China. Instead of flying south, Xi Jinping has traveled west, to Kyrgyzstan, to stamp his authority on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The SCO turns 25 this year with its summit in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. Also in attendance are Vladimir Putin of Russia, Narendra Modi of India and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian. Xi is expected to meet them all, but China’s powerful leader isn’t there just to show his face.
After a year of hosting foreign dignitaries including the leaders of major Western powers and President Donald Trump himself, Xi is emerging from his shell in time for a high-profile state visit to the United States in late September.
Xi will use the SCO summit and an upcoming BRICS gathering in two weeks’ time—on top of his symbolic trip to North Korea in June—to convince the leader of the free world that China is the head of the rest .
The SCO was formerly known as the "Shanghai Five," created to manage border tensions after the Cold War. China 's periphery in Eurasia includes a long land border with Russia, which agreed to settle all territorial disputes in 2008, at least on paper.
Since its founding in 2001, the SCO has served as a forum for lofty grand strategy by its bigger, largely America-skeptic stakeholders. For Xi, it has become a platform to champion personal programs like the Global Security Initiative and to promote more use of the Chinese yuan globally.
Middle powers, such as this year’s host Kyrgyzstan , a former Soviet republic, have found utility in the SCO to hedge against Moscow’s lingering influence in Central Asia by inviting in Chinese strategic interests.
This is a subplot that worries Putin, according to some Kremlin watchers, but the Russian leader has other priorities at present.
Putin may find solidarity with his new authoritarian partners to be bittersweet, having once rubbed shoulders with the advanced economies of the former Group of Eight, now G7.
Then there’s India , among the biggest X factors of the 21 st century. The South Asian nuclear power is coveted by both East and West and may find its strategic autonomy a harder line to walk in what is becoming a more bifurcated world.
The latest high-level meeting between Indian and Chinese officials to cool their border dispute in the Himalayas—led by Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi—was a signal that neither New Delhi nor Beijing could use the distraction right now.
Collectively, the SCO’s 10 members represent over 40 percent of the world’s population and a quarter of its GDP. It may be the closest thing to an organized alternative to the West, although its political models are far more varied than those of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Pacific.
In many ways, that was the point: China’s Communist leaders never wanted to be part of the West ; they’ve only ever wanted to be treated as equals.
Today, they seek a plurality of systems in a new, multipolar world order, where its party state is more readily accepted as normal at the highest levels of global governance, especially in the United Nations system. It’s about legitimacy in the end.
Many doubt the SCO’s ability to act as an effective counterweight to what Russia and its closest allies call the "collective West."
After all, two of its members, Russia and Iran, are fighting separate wars; another two, India and Pakistan, fought each not 15 months ago, and Pakistan still clashes frequently with the group’s observer state Afghanistan.
However, there now remains little doubt that America’s adversaries are organizing against it, including by establishing trade bridges around the Caspian Sea to bypass sea lines put at risk by the U.S. Navy.
China has the biggest clout economically. It was the largest trading partner of eight of the other nine SCO members last year, and it remains the only one among them able to go blow for blow with the U.S. in a trade war.
This year’s SCO summit may be about reinforcing alternative narratives and providing rhetorical support to Iran , but Xi will be carrying with him the responsibility of the anti-Western bloc when he lands in the U.S. on September 24.
He also will show Trump that he has control , as Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, alluded to in an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper over the weekend.
Asked about the possibility that Putin might turn to nuclear weapons to escape the strategic quagmire that is his ongoing war in Ukraine, Stubb said Xi would deter him.
"We will never allow that to happen," Stubb said Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, told him in July.
Perhaps more worrying for leaders in Europe is that it suggested China was letting Russia get away with everything else short of crossing Beijing’s apparent red line.
Trump may yet need Xi’s help to end his monthslong Iran war , especially as his Republican Party heads toward an uncertain future after November’s midterm elections.
Xi, on the other hand, wants the world to see him as acting from a position of power, including by purging one of his closest allies from China’s highest military decision-making body just three days ago.
Xi’s message to Trump appears to be: "My house is in order. Is yours?"
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