The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), held on August 31 and September 1, 2026 in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, marked the organization’s twenty-fifth anniversary and brought together the ten member heads of state \u2014 Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Belarus \u2014 as well as representatives from seventeen partner countries and six international organizations. Twenty-eight documents were signed there, foremost among them the Bishkek Declaration. But beyond this common framework, the Russian and Chinese press offered noticeably different readings of it, revealing the distinct priorities of the two powers that dominate the organization.<\/p>\n\n
The Russian narrative: security, financial sovereignty, and defiance toward the West<\/strong><\/p>\n\n In his address to the Council of Heads of State, Vladimir Putin summed up the quarter-century that had passed by stating that the SCO had “strengthened and grown, transforming into one of the autonomous and influential centers of the emerging multipolar world.” But the emphasis placed by Russian coverage falls less on this general rhetoric than on concrete issues of sovereignty vis-\u00e0-vis the West. Putin thus spoke out in favor of creating an SCO Development Bank, insisting that it should be “as independent as possible from the financial systems of countries that use economic instruments as a political weapon” \u2014 a transparent allusion to the Western economic sanctions weighing on Russia, but also on Cuba, Venezuela, Myanmar, Afghanistan, North Korea, and so on. He also argued for an expansion of the UN Security Council.<\/p>\n\n Kommersant<\/em> places these positions within a broader framework of challenging the institutions stemming from the Bretton Woods agreements signed in 1944, which notably created the IMF and the World Bank, as well as the United Nations as it was established in 1945. The newspaper quotes Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, for whom the countries of the SCO and BRICS wish to “bring the Bretton Woods institutions into line with the real balance of power in the world economy,” calling this “an imperative,” and “advocate for a comprehensive reform of the UN in order to increase its democratic character, its representativeness, and its effectiveness.” Kommersant <\/em>also notes, through the words of Putin’s diplomatic adviser Yuri Ushakov, an identity-based dimension claimed by Moscow: SCO members would share “spiritual and moral values that are close or similar,” which they intend precisely to “promote on the international stage” \u2014 thereby presenting the organization not merely as an alliance of interests, but as a civilizational bloc facing the West.<\/p>\n\n The Chinese narrative: global governance, economic multilateralism, and the “Shanghai Spirit”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The Chinese press adopts a noticeably different register, more institutional and technocratic, and far less centered on direct confrontation with the West. Xi Jinping presented a “four-point plan” there: promoting an inclusive economic globalization beneficial to all, by consolidating cooperation in trade, investment, connectivity, and energy, while extending it to artificial intelligence, the digital economy, and green industry; affirming the equality of all states regardless of size and the settlement of disputes through dialogue rather than confrontation; supporting the implementation of his Global Governance Initiative (GGI), launched last year at the Tianjin summit and which has since received, according to the Global Times<\/em>, the support of nearly one hundred sixty countries; and perpetuating the “Shanghai Spirit” in building a “community with a shared future.”<\/p>\n\n A significant point in the Chinese discourse is the way Xi Jinping presented the absence of a formal alliance as the main lesson of the SCO’s quarter-century: “finding the right way to coexist without alliance, without confrontation, and without targeting any third party” \u2014 a formula which, without ever naming the United States or NATO, implicitly opposes them, presenting the Chinese model of regional cooperation as a more stable alternative to Western military alliance systems.<\/p>\n\n On the SCO Development Bank, the Chinese press adopts a markedly more optimistic tone than its Russian counterpart: the Global Times, for instance, presents the project, politically decided at Tianjin in 2025, as having taken, at Bishkek, “a further step” toward its realization, without noting, as the Russian press does, the absence of any concrete result on this matter.<\/p>\n\n What the comparison reveals<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The two narratives converge on the essential point: the staging of an alternative multilateral pole to the Western-dominated international order, driven by the rise of the “Global South,” and the idea \u2014 never phrased identically but omnipresent on both sides \u2014 that Western unilateralism belongs to the past. But the emphasis differs markedly depending on the source: the Russian press favors a geopolitical and defensive register, centered on the direct challenge to Western sanctions and on crisis-driven bilateral diplomacy; the Chinese press favors an institutional and economic register, in which inclusive globalization, global governance, and the “Shanghai Spirit” take precedence over any explicitly named confrontation \u2014 including, notably, on the Ukrainian question, of which Beijing continues to speak with a calculated caution that Moscow, evidently, does not share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), held on August 31 and September 1, 2026 in Bishkek,…","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[48],"class_list":["post-8255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-geopolitics","tag-articles-en","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"yoast_head":"\n