More than two and half decades after it was founded as a regional security organization to secure porous borders in the depths of Central Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is coming of age as it expands its reach and agenda across Eurasia.

Twenty-six leaders gathered for the SCO forum in the northern city of Tianjin in China on September 1 that brings the Global South together and is now openly challenging the West as one of the preeminent Global South geopolitical groups.

The host, Chinese President Xi Jinping, along with his guest of honour, Russian President Vladimir Putin, laid out a vision for a new multipolar world order and called for an end to colonial and Cold War era mindsets. The SCO is composed of ten-full members, but the Eurasian landmass that is its core focus is becoming increasingly important in the growing geopolitical rivalry between East and West.

The Global South is increasingly united by lingering resentment to the two-speed unipolar world, dominated by the US, where the West dictates to the emerging world and punishes them for non-compliance with missile strikes or sanctions. That process has been catalysed by shared grievances to US President Donald Trump aggressive Liberation Day tariffs that has driven more and more countries into China’s arms.

Notably, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first trip to China in seven years to attend the event, and in a joint press conference with Xi, called for a reset to Indo-Chinese relations that have been undermined by decades of military tension on their mutual border. Likewise, Modi was in the room with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, with whom India fought a short war earlier this year in May.

However, former tensions are still very visible. Pointedly, Modi stopped off in Japan on his way to China, a member of the Western-backed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue together with the US and Australia, which is Nato’s main ally in Asia. He will also skip the military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII in Asia, where Chinese weapons will be on display, some of which Beijing sold to Pakistan for use in the recent war with India earlier this year.

The success of the event suggests that Putin’s big bet on the Global South Century may pay off. He has defied Western sanctions to invade Ukraine in the hope of forcing it to abandon its Nato ambitions and switched Russian trade to the burgeoning new markets in the rest of the world with some success.

China likes to emphasise the SCO size and reach. It accounts for about a quarter of the global economy and 40% of the world’s population. But Beijing itself rejects the idea that the grouping should develop into a formal bloc and should instead concentrate on expanding its international influence of non-Western countries.

It has been a long time in the making and now joins other young institutions that are representing the emerging markets, such as the G20, a BRICS bloc, the Eurasian Economic Union (EUU), and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) which tied up with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in May to form the world’s biggest market, accounting for 30% of global GDP.

The forum is a key part of China’s campaign to be seen as a reliable partner in a new economic paradigm and a counterweight to US unpredictability in an increasingly transactional multipolar world model. Since its inception, the SCO has broadened its brief from ensuring border security in Central Asia to a much more general geopolitical and economic integration agenda.

Tianjin was chosen as a venue as it is home to the Luban workshops, vocational education and training centres established by China overseas and a key plank in the BRI cooperation with other countries. The first Luban Workshop was launched in 2016 in Thailand by Tianjin’s vocational colleges, but they have since expanded to 20 more countries, across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. China presents them as a way to share skills, raise educational standards, and train local talent for industries linked to BRI projects.

The ten-member group was founded in 2001 by six countries -- Russia China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan -- to promote trade and security within Central Asia and all five of the presidents of the so-called ‘Stans are in attendance in Tianjin, standing prominently in the front rank with Putin and Xi during the photo call.

Now the SCO is moving into a new phase. Xi called for deepening economic ties to take advantage of the group’s “mega-sized market,” and suggested establishing an SCO development bank to work in parallel with the China-based New Development Bank (NDB, formerly known as the BRICS Bank) – the Global South’s answer to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). China has already invested $84bn in member countries as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and will provide another $1.4bn in loans over the next three years, Xi said.

From its Eurasian roots, the SCO has taken on an increasingly Asian flavour, providing both Beijing and Moscow a useful platform to shape policies in their shared backyard. In Russia’s revised foreign policy concept released in March 2023, the Kremlin reorientated its external relations from partnership with the West to developing its relations with the Eurasian landmass to the south and east. China has a very similar emphasis.

The SCO summit is the latest rung up ladder to building an alternative world order not based on western-established and dominated global institutions. At the most recent BRICS summit in Kazakh last year one of the main topics of discussion was setting up an alternative payments system, based on the BRICS Pay cryptocurrency, to challenge the dollar’s dominance of global trade. The themes dominating the SCO talks so far are overtly geopolitical and a direct challenge to the US aggressively transactional foreign policies.

The SCO was formally established in June 2001 in Shanghai, evolving from the “Shanghai Five” (without Uzbekistan). The first countries to join the SCO after it was founded were India and Pakistan in 2017

at the Astana summit in Kazakhstan. In 2023, Iran became a full member at the New Delhi summit in India, and Belarus was admitted as the tenth full member last year. Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are among 14 dialogue partners, while Mongolia and Afghanistan are observers. On August 31, Xi endorsed the applications for full membership of South Caucasus neighbors Azerbaijan and Armenia.