Posted on September 06, 2025
Karachi:
With almost half of the world’s population and the quarter of the world’s GDP, the Shanghai cooperation Organization (SCO) has matured a platform that calls into question the grammar even of international policy, offering a vision that contrasts strongly with the increasingly fenced order of the West crisis.
During his recent summit in Tianjin – the most important in the history of the block – President Xi Jinping described Asia and Europe as “a garden of civilizations” flourish in mutual prosperity.
His call to pluralism and shared universalism could not be more distinct from the vision of the island world of the Western elite decomposing. Barely three years ago, the head of the EU foreign policy, Josep Borrell, exposed this mentality when he declared that “Europe is a garden” and “the rest of the world is a jungle”.
Borrell’s metaphor echoes the old imperial belief: wealth at the center, insecurity at the periphery. “The gardeners must go to the jungle. Europeans must be much more committed to the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, in different ways,” he warned, not so ironically repeating the justification behind centuries of Western interventions.
The rebirth of Europe, after all, was funded by the gold and the silver of the Americas. Its industrial revolution through forced labor and the resources of Asia and Africa. Careful lawns from the European “garden” were fertilized with blood.
On the other hand, the counterpoint from XI to Tianjin invoked bridges rather than walls. He called for shared platforms in energy transition, green industry, higher education, artificial intelligence and even spatial exploration.
“The vast land of Asia and Europe, a cradle of old civilizations where the first exchanges between the East and the West took place, was an engine of human progress,” noted XI. OCS members should “jointly cultivate a garden of civilizations in which all cultures flourish in prosperity and harmony by mutual illumination,” he added.
Unlike NATO, which develops thanks to exclusion and militarization, SCO grows through inclusion, now kissing almost half of humanity. Without a permanent seat or army, there remains a forum where governments openly defend negotiations on force, even in disputes.
XI global governance initiative
The Tianjin summit also revealed the substance behind the XI global governance initiative (GGI). Warning that “global governance has reached a new crossroads”, it has urged resistance to “hegemonism and the policy of power”.
Based on the UN Foundation in 1945, XI described five principles: sovereign equality, strict adhesion to international law, real multilateralism, development focused on people and practical coordination.
“All countries, regardless of size, strength and wealth, are participants, decision-makers and equal beneficiaries in global governance,” he said, rejecting the “rules of the house of a few”.
He stressed that “international law and rules should be applied equally and evenly.
In addition, XI repeatedly invokes the neutral language of the class (“all countries”, “common interests”) and is opposed to all forms of unilateralism or racism.
The summit press release also declared itself on the “right side of history and on the side of equity and justice”, signaling continuity with the anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century.
Concrete measures have followed. Managers approved the long -term SCO development bank to finance regional infrastructure and projects, alongside six cooperation platforms: three China – SCO platforms in energy, green industry and the digital economy and three technological innovation, higher education and vocational training centers.
The planned projects include expanding renewable capacities by “dozens of gigawatts” within five years, the establishment of an AI application center and the sharing of Chinese satellite navigation and lunar research with SCO partners.
Beijing has promised 2 billion yen subsidies, 10 billion yen of loans and training programs in the world. XI also announced ten new “Luban workshops” to train workers in renewable, rail and automotive technologies.
Meanwhile, the economic weight of the SCO increases. In 2024, bilateral trade in China -SCO reached $ 512.4 billion – nearly $ 900 billion if observers and dialogue partners are included – reporting an increasingly provocative Eurasian supply chain of Western sanctions and protectionism.
Collapse of Western universality
It would be prudent to argue that the OCO agenda embodies what could be called “dialectical anti-imperialism”: approaching the contradictions of capitalist globalization not by ethnic or civilizational rhetoric, but by multilateral cooperation.
The press release approved the WTO system, condemned protectionism and rejected unilateral sanctions, rather calling for an “open global economy”.
China, for its part, presents itself as a redistributor of the global surplus, not as an extractor. Its public enterprises build infrastructure in Africa and Latin America, based on local workforce rather than on forced relocations or land seizures. Its vast trade surpluses are recycled in global finance, with $ 750 to $ 800 billion in US treasury bills effectively subsidizing Western consumption – the opposite of the imperial rents of rents.
For these reasons, China does not meet the classic criteria of imperialism: no territorial conquest, no puppet regimes, no concentration of world capital in a financial oligarchy. Researchers argue that as long as state ownership and planning remain central, China will not evolve in imperial power. Instead, it operates as an economy led by the Sui Generis State, prioritizing stability and domestic development in relation to foreign domination.
China thus fails the fundamental criteria of an imperialist state: it does not concentrate world capital in a financial oligarchy, divides the world for super buildings for customers. With dominant public property, state banks and planning, its foreign policy pressures differ from capitalist empires. Beijing’s interior emphasis on employment and stability reduces incentives to conquest, in accordance with its declared rejection of hegemony.
The writing is on the wall: a “garden” closed against a “jungle” encodes the hierarchy, the seat and the paranoia, and, in doing so, writes its own necrology. The Spirit of Shanghai has shown that the competition between two models – one anchored in imperial nostalgia, the other in post -colonial possibility – is no longer abstract.
In a cruel irony, the elites of Europe, attached to an increasingly non -relevant transatlantic alliance, may miss the emergence of an Eurasian order. The second line of Ukraine’s anthem – “Destiny still smiles in the United States, its Ukrainian colleagues” – now sounds painfully hollow. You could say that fate no longer smiles at Europe itself.
A continent once imagined as the avant-garde of history has become a stage of decline, disorientation and crisis. Europe, the watchmaking of modernity, no longer keeps time. All the powers of “old Europe”, in the Holy Alliance with their transatlantic partners, fight to preserve the illusion that their decreasing order always defines the future.
However, history is evolving elsewhere. The arrogance of the Western elites collided with a simple fact: another civilization, with deeper roots and wider horizons, has filed a new proposal for the world order. The Global Civilization Initiative of China directly denies Eurocentric Universalism. He imagines plurality without domination, cooperation without hierarchy – principles resonating in the world of world.
As Karl Marx once wondered, the reactionaries of Europe, reaching the Great Wall, would they find: “Chinese Republic – Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”? Irony today is austere: while Europe retires behind the walls and fears of an invasion, it is China, as well as its partners, which invokes fraternity, equality and freedom not as abstractions, but as the material basis of multipolar development.
The spectrum haunting the world is no longer communism in its narrow European sense, but the collapse of Western universality itself. Against this increases a viewed vision in the long memory of civilizations, where the future is co-written on the continents.
The substance behind the “Garden vs jungle” conversation is alarming. Western powers regularly make economic war, the United States and the EU imposing unilateral sanctions on dozens of countries, often in defiance of the UN. A Lancet study revealed that sanctions “as deadly as war itself”.
Today, the United States alone has sanctioned around 40% of all nations, reducing trade and finance without approval of the UN.
Economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot believe that sanctions kill around 500,000 civilians per year. As they note, although commonly known as “international sanctions”, “there is nothing international about them” – these are unilateral acts serving powerful states, not on global law or decency.
In practice, “dialectical” anti-imperialism of China favors shared material interests on identity policy.
The Tianjin summit presented pragmatic projects – a development bank, linked electrical networks, clean technology – with a narrative of civilization serving diversity and cooperation. Civilizations were treated not as conflict camps but as communities working on an equal footing.
While the Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi summarized, the SCO “will maintain the spirit of Shanghai … [and] Bring more contributions to the construction of a multipolar world ”.
