Xi, Putin and Modi together at the SCO summit in China would be deeply symbolic

The world’s largest regional grouping will meet on Sunday in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin. The Shanghai Co-operation Organisation may not be quite a household name, but its 10 member states encompass 42 per cent of the global population and about a quarter of the global gross domestic product.

Formed originally in 1996 as the “Shanghai Five” – of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – it later became the SCO after it was joined by Uzbekistan, and then by India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus. It also has two observer states and 14 dialogue partners, including the UAE.

This weekend’s two-day summit will be not only the 25th Council of Heads of State meeting, but also the biggest so far, with Chinese President Xi Jinping welcoming more than 20 leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, making his first visit to China in seven years.

On the official agenda are the signing of a joint declaration, approving the SCO’s development strategy until 2035 and the adoption of documents on security and economic co-operation. But overshadowing all that will be the optics. Look at who will be there. And look at who won’t.

“Xi will want to use the summit as an opportunity to showcase what a post-American-led international order begins to look like and that all White House efforts since January to counter China, Iran, Russia, and now India have not had the intended effect,” Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of The China-Global South Project, told Reuters.

I suspect Mr Xi will be far from alone in praising the summit’s significance. Last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said: “The SCO, endowed with vast geopolitical, economic and human resources, is uniquely positioned to be a foundational pillar of the emerging multipolar world order. We must stand resolutely against unilateralism, warmongering and attempts to undermine national sovereignty. Our future lies in co-operation, synergy and mutual trust.” Other Global South leaders are likely to follow suit.

If the spectacle of a gathering of most of the world’s top non-western leaders is all-important – and if it is understood that that is an achievement and an outcome in itself – some will still be scratching their heads and asking: what does the SCO actually do?

First of all, it is important to know that it started as a security organisation; not a mutual defence alliance, like Nato. Originally it was to manage relations between China and the other four “new” countries that came into existence after the break-up of the Soviet Union. In 2001, when the SCO was formally founded, its members signed a convention on fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism, and subsequently opened a Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure in Tashkent.

This is one of the areas in which the SCO has been active. In the real world, as opposed to the glamourised version that appears in TV series, the success of anti-terrorism work is not obvious to the public – because it produces an absence, whether of bombings, cyber-disruptions or armed attacks. At the height of ISIS’s barbarities, I used to wonder if Malaysia, where I live, was lucky not to have suffered a major terrorist incident. Then I was invited to a private briefing by the country’s special branch, and I left all too aware of the many devastating attacks they had thwarted. Perhaps partly for operational reasons, and maybe to avoid scaring the socks off the general populace, they didn’t make their work public. Given the emphasis placed on anti-terrorism by the SCO, it is reasonable to assume that the organisation may have done much to keep its peoples safer, but they just won’t talk about it.

On a geopolitical level, the SCO is useful to its two leading lights.

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For Russia, the SCO helps it project influence and provides counter-evidence to the (western) charge that Moscow is increasingly isolated and marginalised. For China, the SCO can help Beijing pursue its objectives by framing them as the desired aims of a wider collective. The SCO – which has also become more and more active in the economic sphere – is a way to make China’s Belt and Road Initiative even more complementary with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. And it also serves as an advantageous forum for Russia and China to manage what could be contested interests, both military and economic, in Central Asia.

At this weekend’s summit, analysts will be closely watching India’s Mr Modi. Clashes between Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas five years ago had hardened relations between the two countries. Ties were already beginning to warm, but after this week’s imposition of 50 per cent tariffs on India by the administration of US President Donald Trump, there is much speculation that there could be a deeper strategic recalibration by New Delhi towards Beijing.

Such a course could support the vision Mr Putin presented at last year’s SCO summit in Astana, where he advocated “creating a new Eurasian architecture of co-operation, indivisible security and development … to replace the obsolete Europe-centric and Euro-Atlantic models that gave unilateral advantages only to individual states”.

Critics will complain that many of the SCO’s economic plans – such as a proposed free trade area – remain in the realms of aspiration, and that increasing integration is happening through other means. In a way, that is beside the point. If in Tianjin this Sunday and Monday it appears that “the SCO has become a platform promoting the economic and political integration of the Global South”, as former Kyrgyz prime minister Djoomart Otorbaev wrote this week; if it looks like “the SCO is emerging as a key political and economic group seeking to improve the world order”, then the summit will have succeeded.

For those two days, the optics are (nearly) everything.