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 21st 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.
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