Beijing raised its profile at the annual Shanghai Cooperation Council summit of non-Western countries just by providing a forum.
London (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – China hosted the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO) last week at its port of Tianjin, drawing a crowd of world leaders from 20 non-Western countries. The visitors included India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as heads of states from the former Soviet Union, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The focus of Western reporting was often on the summit as a declaration of a China-Russia axis to overturn the Western-led global order; or at least as a demonstration of a Chinese-led alternative to it. But the SCO is not a close military and economic alliance like NATO or the G7 and many of the heads of state attending were there to talk business, not challenge the status quo.
A Meeting for the Rest, Not the West
Governments attended the SCO summit for a multitude of different reasons. Some, like Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Belarus’ President Aleksandr Lukashenko, or Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, the summit was a chance to demonstrate the limits of Western sanctions against them and their home countries. Both Russia and Iran have relied on China to buy their hydrocarbon exports as their relations with the West have plummeted, and Beijing buys around 90% of Iran’s heavily sanctioned oil shipments. But Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian also met on the sidelines of the summit to discuss Iran’s nuclear programme, independent of the SCO agenda both, demonstrating the event’s use as a diplomatic forum to member and observer states.
Other countries attended despite maintaining open diplomatic channels to the West. India’s Modi held his first meeting at the summit with China’s President Xi Jinping on Chinese soil in seven years. He was also pictured with both Xi and Putin there, likely a signal to Washington that New Delhi intends to continue buying Russian oil, despite its traditional security and economic reservations about China. The White House has imposed an additional tariff on Indian exports to the US of 25% due to India’s Russian oil purchases. Modi said after the SCO summit last week that India and the US “have a very positive and forward-looking comprehensive and global strategic partnership.” But the pictures from Tianjin demonstrate that New Delhi is keeping its options open.
Not Everything Is About the U.S.
However, SCO members like India (and observer states there too) also attended the summit for reasons completely unrelated to the US tug-of-war with Russia and China. India’s arch-rival Pakistan is also an SCO member state and joined the same year New Delhi did. The two countries compete for influence within the SCO, as they do outside it. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev blaming India last week for blocking his country’s bid for full membership of the group as “revenge” for Baku’s close diplomatic ties to Islamabad. India has been concerned about Pakistan’s influential army chief Asim Munir’s visit to Washington in August, his second, and will not have been keen to strengthen Pakistan’s influence inside a geopolitical bloc India wants for itself.
One Hand Washes the Other
For most of the South Asia and Middle Eastern countries attending, the SCO summit also represented a valuable chance to institutionalise technological cooperation and financial aid. Since this also aligns with Chinese ambitions to create alternative global institutions under its influence rather than Western governments’, the summit made some modest announcements towards these goals. These included plans to establish an SCO Development Bank to finance economic and infrastructure programmes that Russia had blocked for over a decade (preferring to channel aid to clients in Central Asia through institutions it controlled). Moscow’s need for Chinese diplomatic, material and economic support for its war in Ukraine forced it to concede, however.
File. Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People. Public Domain. Via Picryl.
China also pushed for recognition of its World AI Cooperation Organization (WICO) at the summit, indicating the ways Beijing is weaving Chinese technology designs and standards into development agreements with participating SCO countries. The SCO later issued a joint statement that “all countries have equal rights to develop and use artificial intelligence,” giving Beijing tactic support in its technology competition with the US in exchange for its development assistance. Beijing announced six new platforms for China-SCO collaboration in energy, green industry, the digital economy, technological innovation, higher education, and vocational and technical education. While it is not clear how President Xi intends to finance these initiatives, his focus on technological and green initiatives will have pleased SCO members and dialogue partners like Egypt.
Conclusion
President Xi made a speech at the SCO summit that contained plenty of coded criticisms of the US and other Western countries. China’s complains about unnamed parties’ “Cold War mentality, hegemonism and protectionism” and how these “continue to haunt the world” was not the main focus of the event for most of the attendees, however. Often Eurasian states were attending for their own bilateral diplomatic reasons, such as Iran’s nuclear discussions with Russia, or India’s geopolitical rivalry with Pakistan. Highlighting that Western countries could not control their foreign policies was one aspect, but securing access to funding and deepening technology cooperation were often more important. As has been true of most of its history since the group’s founding in 1996, the SCO is too diverse to function as a top-down Chinese controlled geopolitical bloc. It will however, remain an important tool in the projection of Chinese soft power into parts of the world like the Middle East and South Asia, which often feel attacked or neglected by Western governments.
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