The 16 September speech delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State meeting in Samarkand made a significant mention of the Eurasian continent as a “home to us all”. By pitching Eurasia as a region for upholding “peace and development” as well as “an important responsibility” for all the SCO members, Xi’s speech raises some very fundamental questions about the import and intent of Chinese foreign policy. Could this be a signal of waning influence of the much-hailed Xi’s dream project, the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) that was envisioned to challenge the US global preponderance? Or could this mean an expansion of the SCO’s perimeter to encompass the Eurasian continent to counterbalance the US led Indo-Pacific region? Pertinently, the principal goal of China’s foreign policy is to marginalise the US global supremacy and to recenter itself as a global superpower. And this has been the central thrust of Chinese foreign policy since the days of Mao Zedong.
It may be recalled that the SCO, as a regional organization in Central Asia, evolved in the aftermath of the Soviet disintegration when China’s northwestern borders were threatened by the newly emerged Central Asian countries and Russia. It was then that Chinese president Jiang Zemin constituted the Shanghai Five, a precursor of the SCO, in 1996, comprising of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan and Tajikistan. The purpose of the regional forum was to create confidence-building measures along the common borders and reduce the number of troops in the region. From 1998 onwards, the group graduated to emerge as an important platform for combatting, what the Chinese call, “the three evils”—terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. In fact, around this time, the Uyghur separatism in Xinjiang became a major headache for China, and hence, terrorism acquired a central focus of the forum. Further, with China’s launching of Western Development Programme in 1999, energy issue became an important component of regional security, which in effect, fostered China’s twin goals of economic development and border security. However, the most significant development was the establishment of the US military bases in Central Asia post-9/11. For instance, the Manas air base in Kirghizstan in close proximity to Chinese western borders of Xinjiang was perceived as a grave security threat to China. And from then on, countering the US challenge became a preeminent goal of the SCO. The evolution trajectory of the SCO clearly suggests that although it is a multilateral forum to uphold peace and development in the region, it chiefly served to fulfil Chinese realpolitik goals.
This realpolitik calculation characterising the SCO has continued to inform the foreign policy objectives of the present Xi Jinping government as well. In fact, under him, the SCO has become an essential cog in the gigantic BRI project launched in 2013. Arguably, this led China’s great leap from a regional to a global power, and concomitantly, an expansion in the perimeter of Chinese international role and influence. It is pertinent to note that at the initial stage, the BRI was conceptualised to constitute two basic routes. One, the land route connecting China’s imperial capital of Xian with Venice in Italy. And the other, the maritime route linking the ancient port of Quanzhou in Fujian province with the Dutch port of Rotterdam, Netherlands. This clearly demonstrated the expanse of the BRI routes that encompassed a greater part of the Eurasian continent. Moreover, the initial logic behind the launching of the BRI is instructive. It was envisaged to avoid geopolitical collision with the US in East Asia where under President Obama had advocated the ‘rebalance to Asia’ strategy in 2011. Thus, under the rubric of “March West” policy, Xi Jinping launched the BRI that traversed through Central Asia to link the European continent. This also effectively kept the US and its allies- Japan and Australia out. Tellingly, the notion of Eurasia is embedded in the conceptualisation of the BRI, and, therefore, not a new foreign policy thrust mooted by China in the Samarkand SCO meet. This, then raises the question about the need for introducing the concept of Eurasia in the SCO forum. The scepticism shared by some of the BRI partner countries on the efficacy of the project and the rising controversies over the dept-trap issue may have dimmed Chinese hopes to project the BRI as an effective strategy to counter the US. Therefore, the Chinese leadership presumably rationalised to catapult the SCO, which so far was subsumed under the BRI, as a foremost regional forum to resist the US dominance. This becomes all the more evident from the 66th provision of the SCO Samarkand Declaration.
It called for “the idea of establishing a Greater Eurasian Partnership involving the SCO countries, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other interested States and multilateral associations.” Undoubtedly, this means bringing all the non-US led regional associations—the EU, Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, and the 10 ASEAN countries within the fold of the SCO. More than that, the 67th provision of the Declaration mentioned about “deepening cooperation between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA)”. The CICA, as an intergovernmental forum for enhancing security, comprises of members from 27 countries, hailing only from Asia and Europe and also includes organisations, such as, the League of Arab States and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. This again, reinforces the idea of keeping China’s principal enemy, the US out from all multilateral and regional initiatives that concerns Chinese national interests. Furthermore, the current decision of extending a full membership to Iran and granting dialog partner status to a host of countries, including Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Maldives, all apparently Islamic nations, also validate China’s envisioning of a vast space encompassing the Eurasian region. Clearly then, the idea of Eurasia mooted in the SCO is to counter the US-led Indo-Pacific region.
For China, the Indo-Pacific region has emerged as a principal challenge to its great power dream since the time of the former US president Donald Trump’s formulation of the Indo-Pacific as a strategy to counter the China threat. As a concept, Indo-Pacific was first put forward by the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe but it got teeth only with the US backing. Also, when the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue process gained significant traction in 2021 and complemented the US Indo-Pacific strategy, China perceived it as a US containment strategy aimed at derailing Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”.
In sum, by mooting the idea of Eurasia in the SCO, Xi Jinping has indeed challenged the US-led Indo-Pacific region. And in doing so, he has also unleashed a clash of regionalism between China and the US. Ironically, the SCO, which is purported to be a regional cooperative security architecture, has emerged as a realpolitik tool for China to promote its grand strategy and national interests to the detriment of world peace and stability.