Tianjin: Russian president Vladimir Putin is expected to arrive in the Chinese city in the north of Tianjin on Sunday, where he joined President Xi Jinping and around 20 other world leaders for a large regional summit.
The rally, organized under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), will take place until Monday and will be done just a few days before a huge military parade in Beijing marking 80 years since the end of the Second World War.
SCO includes China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus – with 16 other countries affiliated with observers or “dialogue partners”.
China and Russia have sometimes presented SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance.
In an interview published on the Chinese news agency in Xinhua on Saturday, Putin said that the next summit “will strengthen the OCS capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and to consolidate solidarity in shared Eurasian space”.
“All this will help shape a fairer world multipolar order,” said Putin, Xinhua reported.
While China’s claim on Taiwan and Ukraine’s invasion by Russia has seen them with the United States and Europe, experts say Beijing and Moscow are impatient to use platforms like the OCS for Curry influence.
“China has long sought to present SCO as a block of power not directed by Western which promotes a new type of international relations, which, according to it, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, assistant professor at the Nanyang technological university in Singapore.
“In short, he offers a multilateral order influenite Chinese distinct from the west in international politics,” Loh told AFP.
More than 20 leaders, including Iranian and Turkish presidents, Masoud Pezeshkian and Rece Tayyip Erdogan will attend the largest block meeting since its foundation in 2001.
“Large-scale participation indicates the growing influence of China and the attraction of the OCS as a platform for non-Western countries,” added Loh.
Beijing, through the OCS, will try to “project influence and point out that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game,” said Lizzi Lee of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It is considered something different, built around sovereignty, non-interference and multipolarity, which Chinese boasts as a model,” Lee told AFP.
Key discussions
Chinese President XI met leaders, including Egyptian Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet in Tianjin on Saturday.
Other bilateral meetings on the touch of the summit will be organized.
Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Erdogan Turkish and Iranian Pezeshkian on the Ukrainian conflict and the Tehran nuclear program respectively.
Putin needs “all the advantages of the SCO as a player on the world scene and also the support of the second largest economy in the world,” said Lim Tai Wei, professor and expert in East Asia at Japanese University Soka.
“Russia also wishes to win in India, and the commercial friction of India with the United States presents this opportunity,” said LIM to AFP.
The summit comes a few days after India was struck by an acute bump in American prices on its goods as a punishment for Russian oil purchases from New Delhi.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Tianjin on Saturday evening after a trip to Japan, marking the start of his first visit to China since 2018.
The two most populated nations are intense rivals in competition for influence through South Asia and fought a deadly border confrontation in 2020.
A thaw started last October when Modi met XI for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
Modi did not appear on a list of participants for the Beijing parade published Thursday by the Chinese state media who included the Indonesian president Prabowo Subbowo, the head of the Myanmar junta, Min Aung Hlaing and the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un.
