Tianjin: Russian President Vladimir Putin will arrive in the city of Northern China in Tianjin on Sunday, where President Xi Jinping will join and around 20 other world leaders for an important regional summit.
The meeting, organized under the cooperation organization of Shanghai (SCO), will be executed until Monday and occurs a few days before a large military parade in Beijing that marks 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO includes China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tayikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus, with 16 most affiliated countries as observers or “dialogue partners.”
China and Russia have sometimes promoted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance.
In an interview published in the China Xinhua news agency on Saturday, Putin said that the next summit “will strengthen the ability of the OCs to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and will consolidate solidarity throughout the shared Euroasy space.”
“All this will help shape a more fair multipolar world order,” Putin said, Xinhua reported.
As China's statement about Taiwan and the invasion of Ukraine of Russia and Russia have seen them collide with the United States and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms such as OCs for the influence of Curry.
“China has tried to present the SCO as a block of power not led by the West that promotes a new type of international relations, which, according to them, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, assistant professor at the University Nanyang Technological of Singapore.
“In summary, it offers a multilateral order with Chinese influence that is different from those dominated by the west in international politics,” LOH told AFP.
More than 20 leaders, including Iranian and Turkish presidents, Masoud Peeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will attend the largest meeting in the block since its foundation in 2001.
“The large -scale participation indicates the growing influence of China and the attractiveness of the SCO as a platform for non -western countries,” Loh added.
Beijing, through the SCO, will try to “project the influence and point out that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game,” said Lizzi Lee of Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It is framed as something different, built around sovereignty, non -interference and multipolarity, which the Chinese promote as a model,” Lee told AFP.
Margin conversations
The Chinese president, XI, met with leaders, including the Egyptian Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet in Tianjin on Saturday.
Other bilateral meetings will be organized outside the summit.
Putin is expected to conduct conversations on Monday with Erdogan from Türkiye and Peseshkian from Iran about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran's nuclear program, 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 expert in Eastern Asia at the Soka University of Japan.
“Russia is also interested in winning India, and the commercial frictions of India with the United States present this opportunity,” Lim told AFP.
The summit arrives days after India was beaten by a strong increase in US tariffs on their goods as punishment for Russian oil purchases in New Delhi.
The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, arrived in Tianjin on Saturday night after a trip to Japan, marking the beginning of his first visit to China since 2018.
The two most populated nations are intense rivals that compete for the influence in southern Asia and fought against 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 to the Beijing parade published Thursday by the Chinese state media that included the Indonesian President Pabowo Subianto, the head of the Junta de Myanmar, Min Conit Hlaing and the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un.
