Tianjin: Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to arrive in the North China city of Tianjin on Sunday, joining President Xi Jinping and about 20 other world leaders for a larger regional summit.
The collection, which is arranged during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), runs until Monday and comes just days before a huge military parade in Beijing, marking 80 years ago the end of 2. World War.
SCO consists of China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadsjikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus – with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.
China and Russia have sometimes declared SCO as an alternative to NATO’s military alliance.
In an interview published on China’s Xinhua news agency on Saturday, Putin said the upcoming summit would “strengthen SCO’s capacity to respond to modern challenges and threats and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space”.
“All of this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” said Putin, Xinhua reported.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen them collide with the United States and Europe, experts say Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms like SCO to curry influence.
“China has long tried to present SCO as a non-Western-led power block that promotes a new type of international relations as it claims is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
“In short, it offers a Chinese-influenced multilateral order that differs from the Western dominated in international politics,” Loh AFP said.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian and Turkish presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan attend the block’s biggest meeting since its founding in 2001.
“The big participation indicates China’s growing influence and SCO’s appeal as a platform for non-Western countries,” Loh added.
Through SCO, Beijing will try to “project influence and signal that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules in the game,” said Lizzi Lee of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It’s framed as something else, built around sovereignty, non-interference and multipolarity, like the Chinese tout as a model,” Lee told AFP.
Lecture on the sidelines
Chinese President XI met leaders, including Egyptian Prime Minister Moustafa Madboullly and Cambodian Prime Minister she manted in Tianjin on Saturday.
Other bilateral meetings on the sidelines at the summit will be organized.
Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Turkey’s Erdogan and Iran’s Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear program.
Putin needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage and also support from the second largest economy in the world,” said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.
“Russia is also eager to win over India, and India’s trade friction with the United States presents this opportunity,” Lim told AFP.
The summit comes days after India was hit by a sharp unevenness in US tariffs on its goods as punishment for New Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Tianjin on Saturday night after a trip to Japan and marked the start of his first visit to China since 2018.
The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence in South Asia and fought for a deadly border clash in 2020.
A thaw began last October when Modi met with XI for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
Modi was not on a list of participants for Beijing parade published by Chinese state media on Thursday, which included Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Myanmar’s Junta chief My Aung Hlaing and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.
