China’s multipolar ambition is making the US sit up and fire back

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin this week, the choreography was striking. Chinese President Xi Jinping, flanked by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, unveiled proposals for a development bank, expanded BeiDou satellite services, and cooperation in green technology, artificial intelligence and infrastructure.

The message was unmistakable: the SCO is no longer just a security forum. It is evolving into a platform offering economic and political alternatives to the Western-led order.

The SCO’s roots lie in the mid-1990s, when China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan formed the Shanghai Five to demilitarise post-Soviet borders. By 2001 it had become the SCO, expanding to Uzbekistan and shifting focus to counterterrorism. Over time, its remit widened, first to energy and trade, then political coordination.

Two decades on, the SCO encompasses 40 per cent of the world’s population and around 23 per cent of global nominal gross domestic product. Its output, around US$24 trillion in 2023, was smaller than the Group of Seven’s US$47 trillion, but its growth momentum is stronger: India is projected to expand 6.5 per cent this year and China 4.5 per cent, compared to under 2 per cent for most G7 economies. New members now include Iran, which joined in 2023, and countries such as Turkey are waiting in the wings.

What began as a regional security pact could be maturing into a multipolar platform.

That evolution has not gone unanswered. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed Xi and Modi as “bad actors” and described the SCO summit as “performative”. United States President Donald Trump, seizing on Beijing’s Victory Day parade where Xi stood alongside Putin and Kim Jong-un, wrote on Truth Social that America had given a “massive amount of support and ‘blood’” in World War II to secure China’s survival.

  

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