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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization convened for its 25th summit in Tianjin on Sept. 1, the largest gathering of leaders in the organization’s history. More than 20 state leaders and heads of 10 international organizations attended the summit, including an unprecedented four-day visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the participation by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which was not expected until the recent cooling of U.S.-Indian relations. The summit passed a number of documents and cooperative mechanisms, including a development strategy for the next decade and starting the process to create a development bank. Leaders from all member states except India attended the Sept. 3 military parade, making up one-third of the 26 heads of state who observed the Chinese show of force to the world.
Despite its high-profile events, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is often challenged within the policy community as a nothingburger. Popular assessments have focused on the organization being “ineffective,” “irrelevant,” and “a talking shop.” Judging from concrete cooperation mechanisms and deliverables, the organization’s strategic depth and utilities appear limited. However, from China’s perspective, the grouping serves two distinct strategic goals: Russia management and the presentation of an alternative international security order. Indeed, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s true value for China so far has not been the new multilateral cooperation it can create, but in Russian damage prevention and challenging the existing West-dominated narrative on international affairs.
How It Started…
The precursor of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the earlier grouping of “Shanghai Five,” was established in 1996 with a specific goal to settle the border disputes among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan after the collaspe of the Soviet Union. In 2001, the grouping incorporated Uzbekistan and formally established the current organization. Although the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017, Iran in 2023, and Belarus in 2024, the geographical focus has remained on Central Asia. As reiterated in the Tianjin Declaration, “Central Asia is the core region of SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization] and the organization supports the efforts by Central Asian countries to maintain their and regional peace, security and stability.”
In the beginning, the organization focused on “regional security challenges,” namely the issues of border demarcation and disarmament among the member states. Substantive cooperation has been primarily limited to counterterrorism. China settled its border demarcation with Kazakhstan in 2002, with Russia in 2005, with Kyrgyzstan in 2009, and with Tajikistan in 2011. Counter-terrorism cooperation within the grouping is particularly salient for China as Beijing sees itself as the victim of the spillover effect of Islamic fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism prevalent in Central Asia. The “Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure” coordinates the political, diplomatic, military, informational, and judicial aspects of this cooperation among the members.
…How It’s Going
If effectiveness and concrete cooperation mechanisms are the criteria, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s scope and achievements are limited as a regional organization. So far, the grouping has two formal institutions: a Secretariat in Beijing and the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure based in Uzbekistan. Through the years, the organization has passed a series of multilateral cooperation documents on countering arms trafficking, terrorism, narcotics, illegal immigration, and other transnational crimes. The highlight of such security cooperation is in regular joint counterterrorism military exercises held among the member states.
Despite the limited scope of substantive cooperation, the organization takes pride in symbolic and joint positions on mutual trust, good neighborly relations, and regional peace and stability. The members claim to share aspirations on international politics and have used the organization as a platform to articulate their collective views. As such, the bloc has focused on alignment of foreign policies and the promotion of such positions, while joint actions are less obvious.
While the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has focused on security and political alignment as core tasks, economic cooperation has lagged far behind. It created an interbank consortium to provide financial and banking services for investment projects among its member states. However, for the past 20 years, the consortium’s significance has been unclear. China proposed to establish a Shanghai Cooperation Organization Development Bank more than a decade ago, but only this year was the organization able to start the political process toward the bank’s establishment, attesting to the intricacy of the decision. Financial institutions, such as a development bank, are important due to regional underdevelopment and scarce financial institutions in Central Asia. Given China’s financial resources and the outsized influence such resources would afford China, the establishment of such a bank will presumably broaden the avenue for a more expansive, even dominant role for China to play in the region. In private conversations, many Chinese specialists have attributed the lack of economic cooperation within the organization to Russia’s rejection of Chinese influence in its backyard.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a regional bloc plays a relatively minor role in China’s economy, despite the diplomatic and political alignment. The total trade volume between China and the other member states was $512.4 billion in 2024, about 8 percent of China’s global total, falling behind China’s trade with the European Union ($785 billion), the United States ($688 billion), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ($982 billion). Half of China’s trade with Shanghai Cooperation Organization members is with Russia. The Chinese government has tried to beef up the number by including China’s trade with 2 observer states (Mongolia and Afghanistan) and 14 dialogue partners (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain, Maldives, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Myanmar), bringing the total to $890 billion. But that only brings the percentage to 14.4 percent of China’s global trade.
Another sign of the bloc’s limited effectiveness is the lack of a role in the domestic stability of its member states. In the organization’s 2015 development strategy, one of the top priorities for the next decade was to “maintain regional security and handle security threats and challenges faced by member states, including the prevention and elimination of emergencies.” However, the reality is far less gratifying. During the internal turmoil in Kazakhstan in January 2022, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure offered assistance to the Kazakh government. However, it was the Collective Security Treaty Organization that dispatched peacekeepers to Kazakhstan instead, pointing to a potentially competitive relationship between the two organizations as the leading regional security architecture.
A Russia-Management Tool…
While policy observers have dismissed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a key and effective international organization, the value of the grouping for China goes far beyond merely a façade of regional alignment and solidarity. This is an angle Western observers tend to neglect and dismiss. But for Chinese specialists, the central value of the organization for China has been a regional security architecture to manage Russian reactions to Chinese engagement in the region. According to this narrative, China and Europe indeed face the same security problem: how to manage Russia as an aggressive and insecure neighbor, both bilaterally and, as important, through a multilateral structure.
In the Chinese view, China and Europe have developed entirely different strategies on how to enhance security and mitigate Russian aggressiveness. For them, Russia’s war on Ukraine is essentially the manifestation of the unresolved conflict over the regional security architecture in Europe. China sees Europe as having opted for a conventional military alliance, NATO, and the introduction of the United States as an external security guarantor in a collective defense arrangement. The result, however, is the exclusion of Russia as an opponent/adversary of Europe and the division of Europe into two opposite camps. That is why China sees the expansion of NATO as the product of Europe’s pursuit of security, which has exacerbated the security anxiety of Russia and eventually led to the war in Ukraine.
China sees itself as having taken a different path on Russia. Having lost three million square kilometers of territory to the Russian Empire, and having lived under the Soviet nuclear threat for a good portion of the Cold War, Beijing’s fundamental lesson from the past four centuries is not to make itself an enemy of an aggressive, impulsive, insecure, and militarily capable Russia. This is reflected not only in Chinese accommodation, cooperation, and alignment of interests on the bilateral level, such as in tolerance of and financial support for Russia’s war on Ukraine. Furthermore, it is also manifested in using the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a mechanism to reassure Russia of China’s regional footprint. The hope is that by including Russia in China’s primary regional engagement tool and offering Russia de facto veto power over Chinese initiatives such as the organization’s development bank, China would not trigger Russia’s exclusion anxiety and its destructive behavior. In the words of a senior Chinese Russia specialist in a track-two dialogue with European interlocutors, “had China tried to exclude Russia in its own backyard and poach Russia’s traditional partners, Russia will immediately turn its turret to target Beijing.”
The effectiveness of this approach, from China’s perspective, lies in the lack of Russian pushback against growing Chinese influence in the region. This also suggests that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not prioritize effectiveness in advancing regional integration or cooperation. Rather, it is primarily designed to incorporate and manage Russian reactions. This captures how China understands the usefulness of the organization as a Russia-management instrument. Even if the grouping has only limited substantive cooperation and focuses on symbolic statements and alignment of positions, it serves China’s purpose well when it is viewed through the lens of a management strategy on Russia.
The Chinese comparison between NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization obviously misses fundamental differences between Europe and Central Asia, even if they share a similar Russia challenge. The two regions had entirely different historical relations with Russia, as Russia has traditionally played a much more dominant role in Central Asia than in Western or Central Europe. All five present-day Central Asian countries were absorbed into the Soviet Union, and three of them have remained in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Europe is also significantly more prosperous, militarily capable, and politically cohesive than Central Asia, which enables Europe to pursue a more advanced regional security agenda. But from Beijing’s crude and superficial estimation, Europe’s regional security architecture has missed the opportunity to better manage the Russia problem.
…And a Challenge To The Western-Led International Order
In recent years, and especially at the Tianjin summit, the Chinese narrative about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has increasingly shifted toward framing the bloc as representative of a new model of global governance and an alternative international order. It is no coincidence that a global governance initiative was introduced at Tianjin. The initiative advocates for the broader representation of developing countries, the central role of the United Nations, and multilateralism in world affairs. The global governance initiative aligns with General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative, proclaiming that security must be common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable. This essentially calls for accommodating the security interests of the likes of Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
For those who dismiss the grouping as a nothingburger, this is the most important aspect they have missed: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has not been and is unlikely to be an effective regional security organization modeled after NATO. In Eurasia, the Collective Security Treaty Organization plays a bigger role in this regard. Rather, as argued above, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is primarily a Russia-management instrument for China. But the value of a regional organization not only manifests through the new and concrete deliverables it can create, but also the impact — whether constructive or destructive — it has over an existing regional security architecture and the broader global order. In other words, the significance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is not just about what it can or cannot produce, but also what it can undermine.
Based on its current membership and articulation of missions, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization represents a vision for an alternative global order, as well as governance values and structures. With China and Russia as its co-leaders and an expanding base within the developing world, the organization’s growing prominence underlines a distinct challenge to the existing international order among those states that aspire to play by a different set of rules and norms. While the bloc may not be able to create many concrete deliverables, the shared grievances toward the West, and especially the United States, among its members, as well as the amplification of their voices and positions through active campaigning, present a different set of challenges that are no less problematic.
Yun Sun is the director of the China program at the Stimson Center.
Image: Midjourney
