The foreign ministers of a dozen-odd countries gathered this week on the Indian coast of the Arabian Sea at a resort that advertises itself as the epitome of “languid and laid-back lifestyle,” on white sand beaches with a spa for wind-down massages after nine holes of golf. Members and observers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which likes to think of itself as an alternative to the United Nations, certainly did a lot of talking at their get-together in Goa, but, par for the course, they didn’t say a lot and got even less done.
It’s tough to define the SCO, as even its members don’t seem to regard it as a decision-making conclave. It doesn’t issue meaningful communiques or calls for action on specific issues or galvanize collective approaches to pressing regional or global issues. “It’s amorphous,” one senior Indian diplomat said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified.
Nominally, the SCO is a slowly expanding bloc of Eurasian nations making up almost 40 percent of the world’s population and not much less of its GDP. It was first convened in 1996 by China, with bordering Central Asian states and Russia, as the Shanghai Five to discuss security issues. It now includes India and Pakistan, is about to welcome Iran to its top table, has extended a hand to Turkey, and gives smaller countries such as Mongolia and Armenia the feeling that they belong.
It’s just not clear what they belong to. From some angles, the SCO looks like a rogues’ gallery taking solace in the company of fellow travelers. While the world is facing war, terrorism, hunger, repression, the rollback of human rights, ever-widening divides between rich and poor, and meddling by bad actors in the democratic processes of free countries, some bureaucrats went to the seaside and had a very nice time, thank you. They didn’t say or do anything constructive in Goa but still aired a few old-fashioned rants and paid obeisance to China.
For China and Russia, the SCO is first and foremost an “anti-West and anti-U.S. bloc,” said Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Observer Research Foundation America.
With the SCO founded by China, headquartered in Beijing, and led by a Chinese secretary-general, it’s predominantly a Chinese club, and the members mostly come together to praise and seek benefits from China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a colossal infrastructure project that is already snaking across much of Central and South Asia and seeks to connect China to markets in Europe and Africa. Joint statements invariably praise the BRI and China’s leadership and pledge support for mutually beneficial programs such as on environmental protection, tourism, and sports. Chinese President Xi Jinping showed how important Central Asia is to his foreign policy when he chose Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, SCO founding members, for his first post-pandemic foreign trip last September. He announced his BRI plan in Kazakhstan in 2013 and has called it the “project of the century.”
With Chinese-financed infrastructure networks now reaching across Turkmenistan to the Caspian Sea, through the Straits of Malacca to Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, and on to Kenya, the Maldives, Djibouti, and Greece, Beijing is showing the world the meaning of connectivity with Chinese characteristics. The BRI may have slowed its pace after the COVID-induced economic slowdown in China, but its ambitions have still rattled policymakers in Washington and Brussels, eclipsed not just by China’s spending but also by its lack of conditionality, such as the building and labor standards that U.S. and European firms are obliged to follow. That makes the BRI more attractive to poorer, and less accountable, governments that are being pulled into China’s orbit, Jaishankar said.
When it comes to the SCO, the BRI is the thing. “Everyone gets something out of it—otherwise they wouldn’t be members—but not everyone gets the same thing,” he said.
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What the SCO—whose remit is theoretically about both security and the economy—offers is the promise of an alternative to the U.S.-dominated multilateral lending institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that dominated global development funding in the 20th century. The SCO complements the relationships built in the early 21st century through the tie-up of so-called BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—as well as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was established in Beijing in 2016 and steadily increased its development finance, though it still pales in comparison with traditional Chinese state-owned banks such as the Export-Import Bank of China. The Financial Times recently reported that the total scale of BRI lending in the past decade could be in the vicinity of $1 trillion, but no one knows for sure.
The loans may not have strings attached, but they can still choke recipient countries. Sri Lanka, for instance, last year defaulted on its debt for the first time in its history and is trying to repay loans to China in kind. Despite being burned before—Sri Lanka had to turn over to China its port of Hambantota when it couldn’t repay its debts—Beijing is again pouring big sums into Sri Lankan ports. Pakistan, which like Sri Lanka is buckling under historic inflation, owes China more than $30 billion and is seeking more cash as its economy sinks toward bankruptcy. Angola, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya are bathed in Chinese red ink to the tune of billions of dollars, according to a Statista analysis.
Despite the apparent risks of signing up to the BRI, most SCO members are slavishly silent; statements are prepared by Beijing, and the focus is the “happy family photo” of delegates at the end of each meeting, diplomatic sources in Goa said. But not everybody. India, leveraging its history as a British colony to warn against what it sees as China’s new colonialism, is trying to ensure that its membership in the club straddles East and West. New Delhi, which basically invented the nonaligned stance in international relations, balances its participation in the SCO with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad, with the United States, Australia, and Japan, as well as bilateral defense and intelligence cooperation with Washington.
Another Indian official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said India sees itself as the steadying hand of the SCO, pointing out the obvious when no one else will and watering down the linguistic anti-West excesses of both Moscow and Beijing. Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has criticized the BRI for infringing on national sovereignty, a point he reiterated in Goa; has refused to sign past SCO communiques praising the program; and made a point this week of tweeting that he had brought up border issues when he met Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
India is also using its membership in the SCO to manage fraught relations with Pakistan, its archrival since the latter’s founding in 1947. China’s efforts to expand the BRI, including through the disputed territory of Kashmir, is one reason for India’s reticence toward China’s checkbook diplomacy. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir and come close on many other occasions. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari became the first Pakistani foreign minister to visit India in almost 12 years when he arrived in Goa direct from Karachi on Thursday. He and Jaishankar shook hands over dinner, but there was no bilateral meeting and no rapprochement. The visit was more about Pakistan’s efforts to leverage SCO membership to achieve its own goals in Central Asia than making nice with India.
“We are squeezed between two hostile neighbors,” said the second Indian official, referring to China and Pakistan. “Our role is to keep them on the straight and narrow while also making sure that we keep an open forum for dialogue with countries that could easily be seen as our enemies and which, unlike India, do not have an ethos of open communication.”
But, as has been the case for more than a quarter-century, China is the main driver inside the SCO and increasingly in the region. Qin, the Chinese foreign minister, sandwiched the SCO vacation in between some serious work. He arrived in Goa from Myanmar, where he met with the leaders of the military junta that seized power in a coup two years ago—and who are now invited into the SCO family. He heads from Goa to Pakistan to meet Bhutto Zardari, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and the Taliban’s de facto foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who has been granted a suspension of his U.N. Security Council travel ban especially for this meeting. Pakistan needs cash to keep the economy afloat, and China needs assurances that the Taliban will keep their jihadi friends on a short leash long enough for the BRI to take hold in Pakistan and extend through Afghanistan, which is now hosting terrorist groups intent on acting as spoilers.
“Everyone can see the writing on the wall,” an Indian journalist in Goa said. “Everyone wants to be friends with China.”