More than 25 national leaders and heads of 10 international organisations are meeting in the Chinese coastal city of Tianjin to talk about security, the global economy and regional issues. Hosted by China’s Xi Jinping, participants include Vladimir Putin of Russia, Narendra Modi of India (on his first trip to China for seven years), and the leaders of Iran, Indonesia and Turkey. Together, their countries account for a quarter of the world’s GDP – and growing – and almost half of the world’s population. Standby for the group photo: if you wanted an illustration of a large part of the world’s future, here it is.
This three-day gathering is the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Set up in the 1990s to moderate regional disputes that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse, it was revamped in 2001 as a counterpart of sorts to the Western bloc of Nato, the US and the EU, although its clout has never matched that aspiration. The rising influence of the BRICS also clouded the picture, as the inclusion of Latin America made their reach greater. With the record turnout for the SCO in China this year, however, the dynamic between the two groups could be changing.
