China’s leader Xi Jinping will lay out Beijing’s ambitions for an alternative international order when he welcomes his counterparts from Russia, India and Iran to a security forum where he will seek to offer a contrast to US President Donald Trump’s global stewardship.
The summit will also mark the first visit to China by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in seven years — a signal of New Delhi’s deep frustration with Washington over Trump’s tariff war. Modi and Xi are due to meet on Sunday.
“This is a group of countries that have been significantly antagonised by the west, especially by the US,” said Yun Sun, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington think-tank.
“China is bringing them together and making a statement about global governance and the global order . . . It will be saying that we, the SCO, have a very different vision.”
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a forum that originated in post-cold war efforts to resolve border and security disputes between China, Russia and central Asian countries — is not a defence alliance, but its members co-operate on anti-terrorism and some hold joint military exercises.
Beijing, which holds the SCO’s rotating presidency this year, aims to use that position to “demonstrate to the rest of the world that if there’s a China-led world, it won’t be led in conjunction with Europe or the United States”, said Yu Jie, senior research fellow on China in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House.
“China is emerging politically as a clear winner at the moment,” said Yu.
In addition to Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Xi will be joined by about 20 other leaders at this year’s summit, which will be the SCO’s biggest yet, according to Chinese Communist party media outlet Qiushi.
They include Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well as UN secretary-general António Guterres.
Chinese state media said Xi would host a banquet for the leaders and bilateral meetings. The participants will also issue a joint declaration.
Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said on Friday the Russian president would meet Xi with ministers and officials “over a cup of tea” and was also expected to hold talks with other leaders including Modi, Pezeshkian, Erdoğan and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.
The summit comes days after Washington raised tariffs on India to 50 per cent this week over its purchases of Russian oil. Analysts also pointed t0.o robust attendance this year from south-east Asia, where export-dependent economies have been shaken by Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
But Xi’s vision of global relations — in which the west plays a diminished role — will have to paper over deep distrust between participants such as India and Pakistan, which fought a brief armed conflict in May.
Analysts will be watching for the resurrection of a trilateral dialogue between the leaders of China, Russia and India that stalled after Chinese and Indian troops clashed along their shared border in 2020.
Amit Ranjan, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies, said repairing relations with Beijing would be a challenging balancing act for Modi, given deep distrust between the longtime strategic rivals.
“It’s not very easy to just settle all these issues in just a few days’ time,” Ranjan said.
China and India have been at loggerheads since a war in 1962. Relations hit a low five years ago following deadly clashes along their disputed Himalayan border. Tensions rose again in May over China’s supplies of weapons, including fighter jets, to Pakistan.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi said that “the timing of Modi’s China visit could hardly be worse”, after Trump’s tariffs and China’s recent military support for Pakistan. Modi would be seen as “travelling to China with a weakened hand” as he seeks “rapprochement” with Xi, he said.
There has been a flurry of recent diplomacy. Modi welcomed China’s foreign minister Wang Yi last week, and the countries agreed to revive travel and trade ties, notably Chinese supplies of rare earths, fertiliser and tunnel-boring machines. Beijing and New Delhi agreed last year on patrols of their 3,500km border, and Modi and Xi met at the Brics summit in Kazan, Russia.
India’s foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has played down the “causality” of Trump’s tariffs in the timing of Modi’s visit. But analysts noted that the US president’s trade policies contravened Washington’s previous efforts to cultivate New Delhi as a hedge against a more assertive China.
“India was putting too many eggs in the American basket considering its geostrategic and political interests,” said Sanjay K Bhardwaj, professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “It is now, after Trump’s tariffs, trying to balance that out by putting more eggs on the Chinese basket.”
Others cautioned that Xi could be reluctant to give Modi too much of the limelight. China would see the visit as “an opportunity to teach India a lesson”, said Stimson’s Sun.
“It’s possible that Xi Jinping will have a side meeting with Modi, but I don’t think the Chinese will be highlighting the India presence.”
Additional reporting by Anastasia Stognei in Berlin
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