At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin presented a coordinated front against Western influence, denouncing US hegemony and NATO expansion. Behind the speeches and handshakes, a deeper strategic realignment continues to unfold.
The SCO summit 2025, hosted in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, opened under heavy symbolism and deliberate messaging. Chinese President Xi Jinping denounced the “bullying behaviour” of unnamed powers, a transparent jab at the United States, whose return to tariff warfare and aggressive diplomatic posturing under Donald Trump has once again inflamed tensions across the Eurasian landmass.
In his address to the bloc’s gathered leadership, comprising Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus, and several Central Asian republics, Xi offered an ostensibly measured but unmistakably confrontational tone. “The security and development tasks facing member states have become even more challenging,” Xi warned, before calling for unity under the so-called “Shanghai Spirit”, a vague yet ideologically charged term that glosses over deep rivalries within the bloc but aims to assert a civilisational counter-model to the Atlanticist worldview.
Putin Points Finger Westward
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stood firmly alongside Xi, seized the platform to justify his ongoing military campaign in Ukraine. His rhetoric was striking: the war, now in its fourth year, was not a Russian aggression, he claimed, but rather the consequence of a Western-sponsored coup in Kyiv and the insistent push to draw Ukraine into NATO’s orbit.
“This crisis wasn’t triggered by Russia’s attack,” Putin insisted, “but by a coup d’État backed and encouraged by Western powers.”
His speech, peppered with familiar talking points, also referenced recent talks with Donald Trump and appreciation for diplomatic overtures from China and India—two nations whose ambiguous neutrality has become increasingly strategic. The message was clear: the Kremlin seeks to portray itself as a rational actor reacting to provocation, not an imperialist power.
Xi, Modi and the Quiet Calculus of Detente
Amid the grand statements and military posturing, a quieter subplot unfolded: the bilateral meeting between Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The encounter, Modi’s first visit to China since 2018, was a calculated signal to Washington, which has found its efforts to woo New Delhi hampered by overreach and short-termism.
“We must not let the border issue define the overall China-India relationship,” Xi reportedly told Modi—echoing a shift from confrontation to compartmentalisation, especially as both powers navigate their complicated entanglement with the West.
Modi, for his part, echoed themes of “mutual trust and dignity”, language far more reserved than the bombast of his Western engagements. That India and China, two ancient civilisational states with unresolved disputes, would nonetheless speak of joint stewardship over the fate of 2.8 billion people, reveals the changing incentives of a multipolar world.
The SCO’s Counter-Narrative: Order Over Ideology
Since its inception in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has struggled with coherence, given its ideological diversity and internal contradictions. But its utility has always been more performative than functional, designed less to produce tangible policy and more to offer a stage for non-Western states to assert dignity, sovereignty, and shared grievance.
In Tianjin, that symbolism was on full display. Red carpets. Group photos. Posters extolling “mutual benefit” in both Chinese and Russian. Leaders from 10 full members and 16 observer or dialogue states gathered not to unite, but to be seen as united. Even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is expected to attend the follow-up military parade in Beijing.
The timing is no accident. With Trump’s White House once again seeking economic and ideological confrontation, the Eurasian bloc appears to be consolidating its own version of order, one that prioritises state sovereignty over democratic evangelism and seeks stability through hierarchy rather than liberal consensus.
Conclusion: Beyond the Optics, a Strategic Signal
The SCO summit 2025 may offer little in the way of concrete deliverables, but it functions as a signal: the world’s centre of gravity is tilting eastward. The American narrative of rules-based order finds few buyers in Tianjin, where grievances run deep and memories of past humiliations are long.
What Xi and Putin presented was not merely a critique of the West, but an offer, however vague, of a new kind of internationalism, one built on ‘respect’ and ‘multipolarity’, but ultimately resting on hard power and historical necessity.
Whether this new axis can overcome its internal contradictions remains to be seen. But for now, the message has been sent.
