Published September 6, 2025
Karachi:
With almost half of the world’s population and a quarter of the global GDP, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has matured into a platform that challenges the very grammar in international policy that offers a vision that contrasts sharply with the West’s increasingly fenced, crisis-ridden order.
At his recent summit in Tianjin – the largest in the history of the block – President Xi Jinping Asia and Europe described as “a garden of civilizations” that bloom in mutual prosperity.
His call for pluralism and shared universalism could not be more separate from the insular world view of the decaying Western elite. Just three years ago, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell put this mentality when he declared that “Europe is a garden” and “the rest of the world is a jungle”.
Borrell’s metaphor repeated the old imperial creed: wealth at the center, uncertainty at the periphery. “The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans need to be much more engaged in the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us in different ways and means,” he warned, and non-so-ironic repeats the rationale behind centuries of Western interventions.
After all, Europe’s Renaissance was funded by gold and silver in America. Its industrial revolution in forced labor and resources from Asia and Africa. The neat lawns in Europe’s “garden” were fertilized with blood.
In contrast, XI’s counterpoint of the Tianjin bridges called rather than walls. He called for shared platforms in energy transition, green industry, higher education, artificial intelligence and even space exploration.
“The Great Land of Asia and Europe, a cradle of ancient civilizations, where the earliest exchange between East and West took place, has been a driving force behind human progress,” XI noted. SCO members must “jointly cultivate a garden with civilizations where all cultures bloom in prosperity and harmony through mutual enlightenment,” he added.
Unlike NATO, which is expanded through exclusion and militarization, SCO is growing through inclusion, and now almost half of humanity embraces. Without headquarters or standing army, it remains a forum where governments open master dealer over power, even in disputes.
XIS Global Governance Initiative
The Tianjin summit also revealed the substance behind the XIS Global Governance Initiative (GGI). Warning that “Global governance has reached a new intersection,” he called for opposition to “hegemonism and power politics.”
Based on the founding of the UN in 1945, XI outlined five principles: sovereign equality, strict adherence to international law, genuine multilateralism, human-centered development and practical coordination.
“All countries, regardless of size, strength and wealth, are equal participants, decision makers and recipients in global governance,” he said, rejecting the “house rules for a few”.
He emphasized that “international law and rules should be applied equally and uniform. There should be no double standards,” while decisions must be stated in “extensive consultation and common contributions to shared benefits.”
Furthermore, XI repeatedly invokes the class neutral language (“all countries”, “common interests”) and is against any kind of ensilateralism or racism.
The communication of the summit also declared itself “the right side of history and on the side of justice and justice”, signaling continuity with the anti -fascist and anti -colonial struggle of the twentieth century.
Concrete measures followed. Leaders approved the long-discussed SCO Development Bank for Financing Infrastructure and Regional Projects Together with Six Collaboration Platforms: Three China-Sco platforms in energy, green industry and the digital economy and three centers of technical innovation, higher education and vocational education.
Planned projects include expansion of sustained capacity with “tens of thousands of gigawatts” within five years, establishing an AI application center and sharing Chinese satellite navigation and moon research with SCO partners.
Beijing promised $ 2 billion in grants, $ 10 billion in loans and training programs over the global South. XI also announced ten new “Luban Workshops” to train workers in renewable energy, rail and car technologies.
Meanwhile, SCO’s financial weight increases. By 2024, Bilateral China-SCO trading reached $ 512.4 billion in $ 900 billion, whose observers and dialogue partners are included-signalized a Eurasian supply chain that is increasingly shielded against Western sanctions and protectionism.
Collapse of Western universality
It would be safe to argue that SCO’s agenda embodies what might be called “dialectical anti-imperialism”: relate to contradictions of capitalist globalization not through ethnic or civilization rhetoric, but through multilateral cooperation.
Communique approved the WTO-based system, condemned protectionism and rejected unilateral sanctions and instead called an “open world economy”.
China, in turn, throws itself as a redistribution of global profits, not as an extractor. Its state -owned companies are building infrastructure in Africa and Latin America, which depend on local work rather than forced relocation or land. Its huge trade surplus is reused for global funding, with $ 750-800 billion in US treasuries, effectively subsidizing western consumption-the opposite of imperial rental extraction.
For these reasons, China does not fail to meet the classic criteria of imperialism: no territorial conquest, no puppet regimes, no concentration of global capital in an economic oligarchy. Researchers claim that as long as state ownership and planning remain central, China will not develop into an imperial power. Instead, it acts as a Sui Generis state -headed economy that prioritizes domestic stability and development rather than foreign dominance.
China thus fails the core criteria in an imperialist state: It does not concentrate global capital in an economic oligarchy, shares the world for super profit organizations or subjected clients. With dominant public ownership, state banks and planning separates its foreign policy pressure from capitalist empires. Peking’s domestic focus on employment and stability reduces incentives to conquest, in accordance with its declared rejection of hegemony.
The writing is on the wall: a “garden” fenced against a “jungle” codes for hierarchy, siege and paranoia, thereby writing his own obituary. The Shanghai spirit has shown that the competition between two order models-the one rooted in imperial nostalgia, the other in postcolonial opportunity-no longer is abstract.
In a cruel irony, Europe’s elites are bound to an increasingly irrelevant transatlantic alliance that lacks the emergence of a Eurasian order. The second line of Ukraine’s anthem – “Fate still smiles at us, colleagues Ukrainians” – now calling painfully hole. You could say that fate no longer smiles on Europe itself.
A continent that was once imagined as the Vanguard of the story has become a scene for decline, disorientation and crisis. Europe, the urm of modernity, no longer lasts time. All powers from “Old Europe” in the Holy Alliance with their transatlantic partners are struggling to preserve the illusion that their decreasing order still defines the future.
However, the story moves somewhere else. The arrogance of the Western elite collides with a simple fact: Another civilization with deeper roots and wider horizons has made a new proposal to the world order. China’s global civilization initiative directly negates Eurocentric universalism. It imagines plurality without dominance, cooperation without hierarchy – principles that resonate across the global south.
As Karl Marx once speculated, would Europe’s reactionaries who reached the great wall find enrolled: “République Chinoise – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”? The irony today is sharp: While Europe is withdrawing behind walls and fears of invasion, it is China with its partners that call for Brotherhood, Equality and Freedom not as abstractions, but as the material basis for multipolar development.
Specter, who haunts the world, is no longer communism in its narrow European sense, but the collapse of Western universality itself. Against it, a vision raised that is rooted in the long memory of civilizations where the future is co -author across continents.
The fabric behind the “Garden vs Jungle” speech is alarming. Western powers routinely lead to economic warfare, where the US and the EU impose unilateral sanctions against dozens of countries, often contrary to the UN. A lancet study found such sanctions “as deadly as the war in itself”.
Today, the United States alone has sanctioned approx. 40% of all nations and cut off trade and financing without UN approval.
Economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot estimate that sanctions kill about 500,000 civilians annually. As they notice, while they are often called “international sanctions”, “there is nothing international about them” – are the one -sided acts that serve powerful states, not global law or decency.
In practice, China’s “dialectical” anti-imperialism prioritizes shared material interests over identity politics.
The Tianjin summit showed pragmatic projects – a development bank, interconnected power network, pure technology – with a tale of civilization that serves diversity and cooperation. Civilizations were not treated as camps in conflict, but as a society that worked with an equal footing.
As Foreign Minister Wang Yi summarized, SCO “will maintain the Shanghai spirit … [and] Make more contributions to building a multipolar world ”.
