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BEIJING: China’s President Xi Jinping will host world leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi from Sunday for a summit before a huge military parade as he seeks to showcase a non-Western style of regional collaboration.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit will be held Sunday and Monday, days before the military parade in nearby Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II, which North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will attend.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners.”
China and Russia have used the organization — sometimes touted as a counter to the Western-dominated NATO military alliance — to deepen ties with Central Asian states.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, analysts say the SCO is one forum where they are trying to win influence.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian and Turkish presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan will attend the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
Hosting this many leaders gives Beijing a chance to “demonstrate convening power,” said Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute.
But substantial outcomes, she added, are not expected as the summit would be more about optics and agenda-setting.
“The SCO runs by consensus, and when you have countries deeply divided on core issues like India and Pakistan, or China and India, in the same room, that naturally limits ambition,” Lee told AFP.
Beijing wants to show it can bring diverse leaders together and reinforce the idea that global governance is “not Western-dominated,” she added.
Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin said Friday that the summit will bring stability in the face of “hegemonism and power politics,” a veiled reference to the United States.


Putin’s attendance comes as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky insists that a meeting with him would be “the most effective way forward.”
While US President Donald Trump has pushed to broker a Ukraine-Russia summit, Moscow has ruled out any immediate Putin-Zelensky talks.
Putin at the SCO summit will likely seek to demonstrate Russia’s continued support from non-Western partners to promote its narratives of the cause of war and “how the ‘just’ end of the war will look like,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
“With Putin in the room, the war will hang over the proceedings,” Asia Society’s Lee said, but added that the topic of Ukraine would not be “front and center” of the summit.
“The SCO avoids topics that divide members, and this one obviously does,” she told AFP.
But Putin will want to show that he “is not isolated, reaffirming the partnership with Xi, and keeping Russia visible in Eurasia,” Lee added.


Modi’s visit is his first to China since 2018.
The world’s two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought 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.
Caught in geopolitical turbulence triggered by Trump’s tariff war, they have moved to mend ties.
“China will try its very best to pull out all stops to woo India, particularly capitalizing on India’s trade issues with the US,” said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.
But fundamental differences between the countries cannot be resolved easily, he cautioned.
“Temporary respite or temperature-cooling, however, may be possible,” Lim told AFP.
Modi was not present at China’s 2015 parade and it remains unclear if he will attend this year’s.
His attendance would be “a barometer of where the geopolitical wind blows in the global contestation between the West and China,” Lim said.
China and India announced in August that they would restart direct flights, advance talks on their disputed border, and boost trade.

PARIS: French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou on Wednesday warned that snap legislative polls would not help restore stability in his country, after calling a parliamentary confidence vote in less than two weeks that he is widely expected to lose.
Bayrou’s surprise gambit to hold the confidence vote on September 8 has raised fears that France risks entering a period of prolonged political and financial instability.
Should Bayrou lose the vote — called after months of squabbling over a budget that aims to slash spending — he must resign along with his entire government.
President Emmanuel Macron could reappoint him, or select a new figure who would be the head of state’s seventh premier since taking office in 2017, or call early elections to break that political deadlock that has now dogged France for over a year.
Bayrou’s move has also raised questions for Macron, who has less than two years to serve of his mandate, with the hard left calling on the president to resign — something he has always rejected.
Bayrou told TF1 television in an interview that he “did not believe” dissolving the National Assembly and calling snap elections “would allow us to have stability.”
Bayrou is due to host heads of political parties from Monday for last-ditch talks over the budget, which foresees some 43.8 billion euros ($51 billion) of cost-savings rejected by the opposition.
Bayrou told TF1 he is ready to “open all necessary negotiations” with the opposition on the budget, but “the prerequisite is that we agree on the importance of the effort” on the savings to be made.
“The economic situation is worsening every year in an intolerable way,” said Bayrou, warning that the young will be the victims “if we create chaos.”
“There are 12 days left (to the confidence vote), and 12 days is a very, very long time to talk,” he said. “And if we agree on the seriousness, on the urgency of things, then we open negotiations.”

With both the far-right and left-wing parties vowing not to back the government, analysts say that Bayrou has mathematically little chance of surviving without a major political turnaround.
The prime minister fumed against the left and far-right, usually sworn enemies, for teaming up in an alliance “which says ‘we are going to topple the government’.”
Bayrou acknowledged, though, that he was himself not optimistic about winning the vote, saying: “Today, on the face of it, we cannot obtain this confidence (from parliament), but we know that there has not been a majority for a long time.”
Edouard Philippe, a former prime minister and strong centrist contender for the 2027 presidential election, backed Bayrou but said a new dissolution of the lower house could be inevitable in the event of a persistent deadlock.
“If nothing happens, if no government can prepare a budget, how can this issue be resolved? Through dissolution,” he told AFP.
The last such elections, in mid-2024, resulted with pro-Macron forces a minority in a parliament where the far-right National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen is the single largest party.
Macron on Wednesday gave his “full support” to Bayrou, according to government spokeswoman Sophie Primas.

Bayrou, 74, a veteran centrist appointed by Macron in December last year, had on Tuesday vowed to “fight like a dog” to keep his job.
But some members of Macron’s camp now believe calling new elections might be the only solution.
“No one wants it, but it is inevitable,” a senior member of the presidential team told AFP on condition of anonymity.
A broad anti-government campaign dubbed “Bloquons tout” (“Let’s block everything“) and backed by the left has urged the French to stage a nationwide shutdown on September 10.