The Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), in its 24th year, in China’s Tianjin city could not have come at a better time. With US President Donald Trump’s actions spreading chaos across global economic, political and security structures, the SCO, with a formidable handholding by its three prominent members – Russia, China and India – has indicated its capability and intent to be an alternate pole in global affairs. Of all, the Tianjin Summit showcased the SCO’s ability to transcend from a security and regional cooperation forum to a credible voice of the Global South besides being a pillar of Eurasian integration, says Professor Swaran Singh, in the 7th edition of the Asia Watch.
The Tianjin summit of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on 1st September 2025 will be remembered for further layering of its institution-building (finance, technology, culture) onto its original limited security cooperation bandwidth of energy security and fighting the three evils of extremism, separatism and terrorism.
In the backdrop of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs becoming the common concern for all its ten members, 14 Dialogue Partners, Observers and the special invitees, the 23 paragraph Tianjin Declaration, the optics and outcomes of the summit, all spoke of the bloc’s accelerating evolution from the world’s largest regional security arrangement into a multipurpose organisation with global ambitions in the making.
Originally called the ‘Shanghai Five’ from 1996, the SCO formally came into being in June 2001 when China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan added Uzbekistan as its sixth member. The Organisation has, since, expanded to include India, Pakistan (2017), Iran (2023), and Belarus (2024).
Today, the SCO represents over 43 percent of the world’s population and nearly 23 percent of global GDP.
The growing bonhomie of the three prominent leaders – Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – on copious display at what was the SCO’s largest gathering ever, signalled their intent to be an alternative pole in world politics. With India and China visibly normalising their ties, after five years of border tensions, having high-level bilateral interactions on the sidelines of the summit also marked the Organisation’s institutional maturity and ability to foster closer engagements among member-states.
Institution-building, even if piecemeal
The SCO had begun as the ‘Shanghai Five’ to resolve border disputes and build trust among China, Russia and the three newly independent Central Asia republics. Its membership and mandate have since widened considerably.
The creation of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) in Tashkent in 2004 gave it operational substance in counterterrorism. The SCO Interbank Consortium (2005) and the Business Council (2006) laid economic foundations.
The entry of India and Pakistan in 2017 transformed it into the largest regional organisation in Eurasia, with the accession of Iran (2023) and Belarus (2024) further extending its boundaries. Proactive participation of the NATO-member Turkey — a dialogue partner since 2012 that wishes to become full member — pushes the SCO’s footprint further west.
But the most significant institutional transformation at the Tianjin summit was the SCO’s self-identification as a voice of the Global South. By building shared prosperity and security through inclusive partnerships instead of alliances and by presenting alternative finance, opposing unilateral sanctions, and calling for reforms of global institutions, the SCO now situates itself in the company of the Group of 77 or G77 and BRICS.
If the proposed SCO Development Bank materialises, and initiatives in Artificial Intelligence and space cooperation gain traction, the organisation could soon begin its transition from a regional security bloc into a global actor.
The SCO, expressively, does not seek to replace existing Western-led structures. However, it is already providing an alternate platform for Global South nations seeking autonomy from the West-led, fragmented international order.
This is where the Tianjin summit demonstrated the SCO pushing beyond its limited bandwidth of security cooperation to institutionalise new financial and scientific pursuits and developmental capacities.
President Putin’s proposal to create an SCO Investment Bank and issue joint bonds signalled intent to build independent financial instruments, insulating members from Western sanctions. This was endorsed by President Xi, pledging 2 billion yuan in aid and 10 billion yuan in loans through the SCO Interbank Consortium.
China’s trade with SCO nations, in fact, has already crossed USD 500 billion and most of them today are partners in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
China’s global ambitions
As part of its global ambitions, the evolution of SCO’s institutional apparatus has been undergirded primarily by China’s ever-expanding leverage. From a modest SCO Secretariat in Beijing in the early 2000s, it now maintains specialised councils on economy, energy, education, and culture. Furthermore, the Tianjin summit has now opened new tracks in artificial intelligence and lunar research, strengthening cross-country collaborative constituencies.
The significance of the SCO thus no longer rests only in aggregate GDP — estimated at USD 26.8 trillion in 2024 — but in its role as a platform for intra-Eurasian “security, connectivity and opportunity” to use Prime Minister Modi’s words.
For President Putin, SCO presents one of the few international forums where he is not on the defensive, underscoring Moscow’s enduring ties with a large number of Eurasian countries. Facing Western sanctions since 2014 and further isolation after its Ukraine war since February 2022, Russia views the SCO as an indispensable forum for alternative finance and trade.
Within the SCO, China–Russia trade hit a record USD 240 billion in 2023 when India–Russia trade also crossed USD 67 billion, thus ensuring Russia’s survivability. With China and India being the world’s largest and second largest importers of energy and Russia being the world’s second largest producer of gas and oil makes their partnerships are not just sustainable but critical for their growth trajectories.
This is where the Tianjin summit has reinforced this troika as the central axis of the SCO, emerging as an economic multiplier, complementing national strategies with a collective institutional building.
If realised, the proposed SCO Development Bank can emerge as the third major non-Western development bank to be located in China, after the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (2016) and the BRICS New Development Bank (2015).
This can also be read as a shift from Washington DC to Beijing, given that both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are located in the US, to now new development banks getting located in China. This could not just provide great leverage to Beijing but also create avenues for its long-term financing for transnational projects in energy, transport corridors, pipelines, and digital infrastructure.
Is that why President Xi’s economic pledges at Tianjin were accompanied by his calls to reduce dependence on the US dollar, building on similar Chinese moves in the BRICS? Russia and China have, in the recent past, been campaigning for de-dollarisation, which also creates angst and anxieties amongst the American power elite.
Counterweight to Western dominance
The hosts at the Tianjin summit were intent on underscoring the SCO as a counterweight to Western dominance. Xi’s denunciation of ‘bullying behaviour’ and ‘Cold War mentality’ was a thinly veiled critique of Trump’s tariffs. Putin, for his part, framed the SCO as the nucleus of a multipolar order.
This Sino-Russian call for multilateralism, supported by most SCO nations, becomes interesting in the face of President Trump disrupting much of the post-war international norms, institutions and arrangements that undergird the American global leadership. The symbolism was also unmistakable, given that the SCO summit coincided with China’s commemorations of the 80th anniversary of victory in the Second World War, complete with a spectacular military parade attended by 26 foreign national leaders, including those from this SCO summit.
Again, this parade by 12,000 soldiers overseen by 26 national leaders — that to in the face of a clear boycott by western leaders — will also weigh in all the post-mortems of this SCO summit at Tianjin.
Amongst the SCO members, India was also absent from these once-in-a-decade ceremonies in Beijing. India, instead, used the Tianjin summit to highlight its bilateral red lines on sovereignty and terrorism, vis-à-vis Islamabad and Beijing.
Prime Minister Modi warned against cross-border terrorism — an indirect but pointed reference to both China and Pakistan — but he also proposed a Civilisational Dialogue Forum to highlight the shared soft-power heritage of Eurasia. India also offered to host the SCO think-tanks meeting for 2026.
But above all, in the backdrop of ‘no-limits’ partnership between China and Russia, Prime Minister Modi’s bilateral meetings with President Xi and President Putin on the sidelines reaffirmed India’s role as a pivotal actor in shaping the SCO’s internal dynamics, despite ongoing border frictions with China.
From an Indian perspective, three areas stand out as markers of the SCO’s geopolitical consolidation in the making:
1. Security Cooperation: The bloc continues to conduct joint anti-terror drills, most recently ‘Peace Mission 2023’ in Russia, and plans expanded exercises under the RATS framework.
2. Diplomatic Signalling: By hosting Myanmar’s acting leader in discussions, the SCO positioned itself as an inclusive forum for countries marginalised in Western-led settings.
3. Narrative Framing: By promoting terms like ‘multipolarity,’ ‘civilisational dialogue,’ and ‘non-interference,’ the SCO projects an ideational challenge to liberal internationalism.
Limits and leverages
The SCO has been a potent platform for trilateral dialogue between India, China, and Russia and in mediating confidence-building among Central Asian republics, reducing the likelihood of their contests becoming conflicts. Their counterterrorism database under RATS is one of the largest in Eurasia, credited with preventing several planned attacks.
Economically, though less visible than security initiatives, the SCO has facilitated billions in project financing through its interbank consortium and continues to support infrastructure connectivity. At Tianjin, the announcements on Artificial Intelligence, lunar research, and financial integration promise to broaden its portfolio into high-tech and development frontiers.
But SCO also has its share of institutional limits. For instance, the SCO has no binding enforcement mechanisms and its declarations are largely consensual, where divergent national interests — especially between India and China — can blunt their ambitious pledges as also their collective follow-up initiatives.
Nonetheless, the Tianjin summit did indicate the intent of member states on incremental deepening, leveraging shared interests where possible, without forcing consensus where fault lines persist. From this perspective, the 2025 Tianjin SCO Summit will be remembered for crystallising the SCO’s future trajectories, though proof of the pudding will lie in their ability to collectively carry through these initiatives.
From its modest beginnings as a security grouping in mid-1990s and as six-nation SCO from 2001, it has today grown into an institution representing almost half of humanity.
And now, by proposing financial innovations, advancing high-tech cooperation, and reinforcing multipolar rhetoric, the SCO appears to be positioning itself as more than a regional forum; it is projecting itself as a pillar of Eurasian integration or even a symbol of the shifting world order.
As it approaches its 25th anniversary in 2026, the SCO’s challenge will be to convert promising, yet challenging, proposals — like the SCO Development Bank and cooperation in AI and Lunar sciences — into concrete institutions.
If it manages to accomplish that feat, the Tianjin summit will be remembered not just as another meeting of Eurasian leaders, but as the moment when the SCO crossed a threshold from aspiration to institution-building with system-shaping capabilities.
