TIANJIN: Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to arrive in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on Sunday, where he will join President Xi Jinping and around 20 other world leaders for a major regional summit. 

The gathering, organised under the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), will run until Monday and comes just days before a huge military parade in Beijing marking 80 years since the end of World War II.

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 sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance.

In an interview published on China’s Xinhua news agency on Saturday, Putin said the upcoming summit will “strengthen the SCO’s capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space”.

“All this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” Putin said, Xinhua reported.

As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms like the SCO to curry influence.

“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

“In short, it offers a Chinese-inflected multilateral order that is distinct from the western-dominated ones in international politics,” Loh told AFP.

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.

“The large-scale participation indicates China’s growing influence and the SCO’s appeal as a platform for non-Western countries,” Loh added.

Beijing, through the SCO, will try to “project influence and signal that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game”, said Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“It is framed as something different, built around sovereignty, non-interference, and multipolarity, which the Chinese tout as a model,” Lee told AFP.

Talks on the sidelines

Chinese President Xi met leaders including Egyptian Premier Moustafa Madbouly and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet in Tianjin on Saturday.

Other bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the summit will be organised.

Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Turkey’s Erdogan and Iran’s Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear programme respectively.

Putin needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage and also the support of the second largest economy in the world”, said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.

“Russia is also keen to win over India, and India’s trade frictions with the United States present this opportunity,” Lim told AFP.

The summit comes days after India was hit by a sharp bump up in US tariffs on its goods as punishment for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.

India’s 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 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.

Modi was not on a list of attendees for the Beijing parade published by Chinese state media on Thursday that included Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.