China hosts a star-studded summit to showcase its glowing influence
In this photo provided by Indian Prime Minister's Office, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, hold a meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025. (Indian Prime Minister's Office via AFP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfDuPX3p9Y0
President Xi Jinping gathered the leaders of Russia and India among dignitaries from around 20 Eurasian countries for a showpiece summit aimed at putting China front and centre of regional relations.
Security was tight in the northern port city of Tianjin, where the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit is being held until today, days before a massive military parade in the capital Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus – with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin touched down in Tianjin yesterday with an entourage of senior politicians and business representatives.
Meanwhile, Xi held a flurry of bilateral meetings with leaders from the Maldives, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and one of Putin’s staunch allies, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
He also met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Xinhua news agency reported.
China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the Nato military alliance. This year’s summit is the first since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
In an interview published by Xinhua on Saturday, Putin said the summit will “strengthen the SCO’s capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space”.
“All this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” Putin said.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms such as the SCO to curry favour.
“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan are attending the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
“The large-scale participation indicates China’s growing influence and the SCO’s appeal as a platform for non-Western countries,” Loh added.
Beijing, through the SCO, will try to “project influence and signal that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game”, said Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It is framed as something different, built around sovereignty, non-interference, and multipolarity, which the Chinese tout as a model,” Lee said.
Putin needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage”, said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University. — AFP
The SCO has not only inherited and advanced the multilateral framework represented by the UN but has also innovated and reshaped its concepts and pathways under new circumstances. The SCO has become both a staunch defender and a benchmark practitioner of multilateralism at a time when this principle of international engagement is under severe erosion worldwide.
14 hours ago — The aircraft carrying the Prime Minister and his wife Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail landed at the Tianjin Binhai International Airport.
US’ so-called rule-based order means international gangsterism
The United States’ so-called rule-based order is gangsterism while its sanctions on other countries are illegal, a renowned Canadian lawyer has said a recent interview. Christopher Black, a veteran Canadian lawyer who has been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including defending former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, strongly condemned actions from the U.S. and the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which have repeatedly accused other countries of destroying postwar international orders, portraying themselves defenders of international order. The lawyer believes that U.S. sanctions on other countries are illegal and are a ploy to defend its economic wars against other countries.
China's challenge to the rules-based order
Top priority: The moral principle that we all should live peacefully on one planet should over-ride sovereign nations fighting over power and ego from turf to space, when humanity could be burned by climate warming or nuclear war. — AFP
EVERYDAY, we are told we must defend the rules-based order. But whose order? What rules? Why should we defend an order if we did not have a say in shaping?
All this is in the realm of politics and geo-politics. The biggest thinker who shaped the current neoliberal order was Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), whose ideas of classical liberalism of freedom, democracy and self-order of markets dominated global relations.
Neoliberalism was put into practice in the 1980s, when US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pushed through the free market philosophy that swept away Keynesian state intervention of the 1950-1970s.
The deeper thinker on the whole question of constitutional law, politics and international order was German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), whose influence on conservative political circles in almost all the Big Powers has been growing.
I only became aware of Schmitt’s work when Noema magazine wrote an editorial on Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth (1950).
Schmitt is controversial, because he essentially wrote the legal basis for Nazism in the 1920s, which accounts for his ostracisation (in today’s language “cancelled”) from academic circles for decades.
Main priority: A demonstration calling on the German government not to intervene in the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine, in Berlin. The moral principle that we all should live peacefully on one planet should over-ride sovereign nations fighting over power and ego from turf to space, when humanity could be burned by climate warming or nuclear war. — AFP
Schmitt was a brutally realist thinker who explored the legal foundations of European political theory. Schmitt argues that no order can function without a sovereign authority. A state is legally constituted when the politics distinguishes between friend and enemy and when the citizens are willing to fight and die for its identity. The state alone is given the power of violence (and enforcement) by the citizens to enforce the law.
Schmitt is considered an authoritarian supporter, because he saw sovereign power resting ultimately in the Executive (rather than the Legislature or Judiciary) because the sovereign (i.e. the President) decides on the exceptional situation, where he/she must suspend the law because of war or assume emergency powers in order to restore order.
Decisions by the Executive are either bound by law or bounded by his or her moral bearings.
The world is today watching on TV whether former President Trump is morally culpable for causing the Jan 6, 2021 riots, or legally culpable.
The Ukraine war is being supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or Nato on a matter of moral principle for a non-member, but if the war escalates to nuclear global destruction that kills all, how do we trade off the individual rights with the collective right of everyone else to survive?
Schmitt dissected the European constitutional laws and international order, dividing them into three phases: pre-1500, 1648 to 1919 (World War I) and thereafter.
Before the discovery of America, European powers fought each other under a religious cloak, since the Pope decided on disputes of rights on moral grounds.
Indeed, it was the Papal Bulls of 1455 and 1493 that authorised the Portuguese and Spaniards to conquer all lands and seize and enslave Saracens and non-Christians in the Americas, Africa and Asia.The religious rationales comprised the Domination Code whereby Christians can rule over non-Christians and possess their property, as well as the Discovery Code, whereby land owned by non-believers are treated as terra nullius (empty land), meaning non-Christian indigenous peoples do not have rights.
But when the Dutch and English started fighting with the Portuguese and Spaniards over overseas territories, what was the legal justification?
Dutch jurist Grotius (1583-1645) provided the secular rationalisation that discovery alone is not enough, but since there was freedom in the seas, occupation by a sovereign state confirms rights seized through war.Schmitt argued that Jus Publicum Europaeum (European Public Law) emerged after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia to allow sovereign countries to have the right to go to war based on their own judgement of justice and necessity without interference in each other’s domestic affairs.
This changed after the end of the First World War, when the 1919 Treaty of Versailles treated the losing side as criminals, with their rights cancelled or confiscated.
While the Europeans were busily fighting each other, the United States rose in global power and imposed its 1823 Monroe Doctrine that asserted that it has its own sphere of influence, with the right to intervene in Central and South American states.That sphere of influence would spatially cover cultural, economic, military, political and today technology exclusivity beyond legal sovereign borders.
Schmitt was prescient in seeing that where war is fought on the basis of “good versus evil”, in which all rights of the other side are “cancelled” (like the foreign exchange assets of Afghanistan and Russia are frozen or seized), the situation may be an unstable equilibrium.
The unstable European security architecture was settled decisively by the United States in two World Wars because of her overwhelming military, economic and industrial power.
But in today’s multipolar situation, who decides on the rules of the international order? If both sides accuse the other side as evil and illegitimate, who decides other than the use of arms?
To cut a complex story short, the Nato military alliance, comprising nearly one billion people and 47.3% of the world’s gross domestic product or GDP (2020) assumes its status quo role as the final arbiter of the “rules-based order”.
The problem is that BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), plus Indonesia have 3.5 billion population with one quarter of world GDP in market terms (25.6%).
However, on GDP PPP terms, they are near parity with Nato and therefore may have their own views on the international order. What if the larger non-Western countries want their own version of the Monroe Doctrine?
The moral principle that we all should live peacefully on one planet should over-ride sovereign nations fighting over power and ego from turf to space, when humanity could be burned by climate warming or nuclear war.
For Nomos (or order) of the Planet, rather than the Earth, we should all rationally cooperate. If we truly believe in democracy, can the eight billion people in the world vote on the rules-based order, or do we still leave it to G-7?
No order is stable without true legitimacy on democratic principles. How to achieve that order remains a truly open question.
Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
Europe will certainly not become more secure after this round of NATO expansion
There is a lack of mutual understanding and compromise in European culture, where countries are focused on maximizing their own security
interests without regard for others. The US is certainly glad to see Europe in this state.
Editor's Note:
NATO, which is constantly looking for imaginary enemies and justifying its existence by inciting confrontation, is holding a summit from Tuesday to Thursday, and it also plans to extend its tentacles to the Asia-Pacific region. Behind its aggressive narrative, contradictions and divisions within NATO have become increasingly prominent. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is not going according to NATO's playbook. This series of articles will provide some clues regarding NATO's predicament. This is the fifth piece.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was established in 1949, but to this day it remains an important tool for suppressing the opponents of the West. The initiative to unite 12 countries originally belonged to the United States, which became the most powerful world leader after the end of World War II. The US was the foundation of the organization's military power, a source of economic and financial assistance to member countries. It goes without saying that not only the highest command posts belonged to the Americans, but they also defined strategic objectives at all stages of NATO's activities. The main mission of this organization from the very beginning was the unification of military and economic resources under the command of the US to prepare an all-out war against the Soviet Union. The countries of another military bloc, the Warsaw Pact Organization (ATS), led by the USSR, also became enemies. It was created only six years after NATO - in 1955.
NATO played an important role in weakening the USSR and its allies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the question arose about the feasibility of continuing the existence of NATO. But the US, which really ruled the bloc, set a new task for it - to involve former ATS member countries and post-Soviet republics in its structure. This was considered necessary to expand the zone of America's strict control over Europe as the most important part of the world at that time. NATO was also used to "sweep" the European space during the war against Yugoslavia. NATO and its de facto twin in the field of economics and politics - the European Union - were used in organizing the "color revolution" in Kiev and provoking the current Ukrainian crisis. In these situations, the US uses NATO as a tool for dirty work, saving the US from the loss of "precious American lives" and the risk of retaliatory strikes on the territory of the US.
NATO's successful fulfillment of its tasks in Europe led Washington to think about using the potential and experience of the bloc in another part of the world. Having recently identified China as the most serious threat to the international order, Washington is faced with a lack of resources to contain and suppress the growing Chinese power.
In order to mobilize the existing resources, the Biden administration has developed a concept of Indo-Pacific security, strongly resembling a similar concept for the North Atlantic. The concept has already been reinforced by the creation of the Indo-Pacific Command of the US Armed Forces. Already available resources were activated - military alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia. The AUKUS military group was created. The activity of the QUAD military-diplomatic group is stimulated. The creation of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework was recently announced. But even these actions are not enough for Washington.
Therefore, it is urgently necessary to extend the scope of NATO's responsibility to the Indo-Pacific region as well. Obviously, US efforts are aimed at uniting all Asian and European allies, their military, economic and geostrategic resources to create a new tool for the realization of American global ambitions. It can be conditionally called the Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization according to the patterns of NATO.
Of course, the arrival of NATO to the East, especially since the new military bloc of the West, will threaten the security interests of Russia as a Pacific power. But first of all, it will be directed against China. Strengthening the militarization of the region will also contradict the interests of economic stability and security of ASEAN, APEC and other groupings of the region.
Serious obstacles may arise in the way of implementing Biden's chess game. We are not talking about the fluctuations of European satellites in NATO such as "ready for anything" Poland, the "Baltic troika" or the Balkan neoplasms. It is unlikely that we will talk about England with its age-old anti-Chinese traditions and loyalty to Washington at the level of a conditioned reflex. But such large "stakeholders" as Germany, France, Spain and Italy may think hard about the consequences of entering into a military confrontation with China, taking into account their trade and economic interests.
These powers are well aware of the benefits of bilateral trade with China, which amount to tens and hundreds of billions of euros. They are also aware of the intention of the White House to lift trade sanctions against China in an attempt to bring down the threatening increase in inflation. The role of trade and economic "cannon fodder" is unlikely to entice figures claiming some level of independence even within the framework of NATO. In Madrid, the leaders of significant European powers are unlikely to voice their doubts, but then they will try to "put on the brakes" in implementation of Biden's Indo-Pacific plan.
Another important reason for avoiding the dubious honor of becoming a member of the anti-Chinese coalition may be Washington's inconsistency. Just two years ago, then US president Donald Trump reproached NATO member countries for the insufficiency of military efforts, the desire to "ride for free" and even promised to dissolve the military bloc. What will happen after the next presidential election? Will Trump come back? Won't those business and political circles that oppose the dispersion of the waning power of their power, for the concentration of resources on solving domestic economic and humanitarian problems, win?
Europeans are already suffering losses from following Biden's anti-China course. The ratification of the China-Europe Comprehensive Investment Agreement has been disrupted. Taking into account the hostile policy of Poland and the Baltic countries, Chinese logistics companies are reviewing the routes of goods delivery to Europe via the Silk Road. Beijing is studying the experience of "crippling sanctions" against Russia. After all, Washington has threatened to impose similar sanctions not only in case of the aggravation of the situation around the Taiwan island, but even if China refuses to participate in sanctions against Russia.
The US' convulsive attempts to return itself to the role of world hegemon are unlikely to succeed. But they can cause considerable harm to mutually beneficial relations between countries, which will be difficult to compensate quickly.
The author is head of the "Russian Dream-Chinese Dream" analytic center of the Izborsk Club. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
On the heel of the G7 summit, NATO leaders are scheduled to convene in Spain from Tuesday to Thursday for their annual summit
with the main focus on Russia and toughening up its stance toward China, while analysts said including China in the US-led military bloc's new
strategic concept cannot help alleviate US divergences with the EU, especially on China, and severe domestic problems will also weaken Washington's ambitious plan to maintain hegemony.
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