Ramesh Jaura
For more than two decades, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) lingered in the margins of Western coverage—a Eurasian acronym that sounded bureaucratic, not dramatic. But in September 2025, as leaders gathered in Tianjin to mark the group’s 25th anniversary, the world could no longer look away. What was once dismissed as a “talk shop” has become one of the most consequential laboratories of multipolarity, finance, and security—an institution whose contradictions may prove as influential as its ambitions.
A Club No One Took Seriously
When the SCO was founded in 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, it looked unthreatening. The West had its NATO, its EU (European Union), its G7 (Group of 7). The SCO was Central Asian, niche, and—critics said—paralyzed by consensus. Even after India and Pakistan joined in 2017, Western coverage rarely went beyond clichés: a “photo-op forum,” a “bureaucratic shell,” or “China’s NATO in waiting.”
The dismissiveness missed the point. By geography and demography, the SCO is vast: today it stretches from Belarus to Beijing, Iran to India, covering 42 percent of humanity and a third of global output in purchasing power terms. More importantly, it offers members a political bargain Western institutions rarely did: no conditionality, no preaching, no litmus tests. That sovereignty-first ethic is precisely what has given it durability.
Scene in Tianjin
Tianjin, China’s bustling port city on the Bohai Gulf, is not Beijing’s political theatre or Shanghai’s commercial showcase. Yet in early September 2025, it briefly became both. Neon-lit skyscrapers framed the summit venues, cordoned streets carried motorcades past banners proclaiming “Shared Destiny, Shared Future,” and the air outside the main hall mixed the humidity of late summer with the sharp scent of fresh paint from hurried renovations.
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