By Peter Koenig
Global Research
September 10, 2025
"No mountain or ocean can distance people who have shared aspirations," China's President Xi Jinping said in July 2024, addressing leaders from fellow Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states and a few other nations in Astana, Kazakhstan.
It is not reaching too far, saying that this year's 25th SCO Summit (SCO) in Tianjin, China, from 31 August to 1 September 2025, fulfilled - and more - President Xi's vision of 2024. The summit caused a tectonic shift in the conventional world order.
China's Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin told a news conference in Beijing, shortly before the SCO summit, that the 2025 SCO event be
"One of China's most important head-of-state and home-court diplomatic events this year".
As the Economist says, "A New Reality is Taking hold." The "new reality" is not anti-US or anti-West; it is just separating the western unipolar aspirations from the newly created multi-polar, or perhaps better, multi-block, world, where countries aim at a peaceful cooperation towards a joint future with shared benefits.
The SCO was established in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Today the SCO consists of ten member-states with headquarters in Beijing. In addition to the founding members, SCO members have increased by India, Iran, Belarus, and Pakistan. SCO members account for 23% of the world's GDP and for 43% of the world's population.
Further attendance included high-level government officials from Myanmar, Egypt, Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives, Turkey, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
This year's summit made clearly the SCO the guiding light for the Global South which includes the 11 BRICS countries, plus the 10 BRICS partners, added at the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024.
While even the UNSG, Mr. Guterres, was invited - while the UN was or still is (?) considered by the US and the West in general as the World Organization in the western camp - President Trump felt snubbed by China, "left out" from the world shifting SCO event in Tianjin.
So, Trump invented a last-minute opportunity to leave his mark on the meeting by requesting President Xi literally on the eve of the SCO summit for "military talks," a phone call between the two defense ministers (in the US now called War Minister, as the Ministry of Defense has been re-christened by Trump as War Ministry).
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Beijing rejected the proposal, reasoning "a lack of mutual understanding between the two countries", asking a pertinent question:
"Is there any sincerity in and significance of any communication like this?"
Of course not. Trump just wanted to interfere in the SCO summit, showing his self-styled emperor head. But to no avail. The West was absent - the "naked emperor" as well as his European puppets, the (almost) defunct European Union, and especially the non-elected and every time more rejected European Commission (EC).
Imagine just a few weeks earlier, a delegation of the EC including Kaja Kallas, the Commission's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the Commission's top-diplomat so to speak, visited Beijing to discuss tariffs, but on the side they were insinuating that China should distance herself from Russia.
So much aggression, let alone undiplomatic thinking and acting - like at home spending taxpayers' money destined for social programs, instead for a monster armament to go to war against Russia - aggression and a war philosophy that can only lead to a EU downfall which is accelerating by the day.
To add insult to injury, the symbolic leader of the EU, Germany, her Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently:
"Putin is a war criminal. He is perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time that we have seen on a large scale. We must be clear about how to deal with war criminals: There is no room for leniency."
It is time for the Real World, the Global South, to distance themselves from the western warmongers and war-makers. This is just happening with the 25th SCO Summit - a new awakening for peace, cooperation, and togetherness in the spirit of working towards a future of shared benefits.
A future with shared benefits is not possible by western economic standards and principles, that followed since 1989 the so-called Washington Consensus, an un-stated agreement between the three most powerful western financial institutions, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank - to "subdue" the "emerging and developing world" with debt, so as to get a hold of their natural resources.
This disequilibrium already started with the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference during which the World Bank and IMF were created, two institutions which were and still are veto-dominated by Washington. Real economic equality and development had and up to now has no chance under these circumstances. Instead, it is abusive exploitation and neocolonialism.
The SCO decision at their Summit to create an SCO Development Bank bodes well with a new future of togetherness and cooperation. It fits right in with the Chinese Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). It is a vivid sign of pulling free from the neoliberal western financial institutions making their living by exploiting "socioeconomic development", instead of enhancing it.
Together and perhaps with a newly furbished BRICS New Development Bank, they will allow the Global South to evolve and grow according to their sovereign and independent terms, using instead of an isolating "protective" tariff system - Trump-style - their comparative advantages to deal and trade with each other - tariff-free. No conflicts but cooperation.
See also this.
This SCO Summit was not a western-style aggression event of "The Willing", but a China-initiated reorientation of the world order, in which long-term objectives were envisioned by real leaders who had seen and lived enough of western-dictated aggressions, wars and destruction, but instead opted for Peace and Cooperation - and it very much looks like they may succeed.
In his opening speech, President Xi made this point clear:
"Humanity is again faced with a choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, and win-win outcomes; or zero-sum games."
This clearly creates a growing chasm between East and West. The former seeking peaceful constructive development, while the latter are still clinging to their destructive economic model, wars and killing for a growing military complex and a tech-world that goes hand in hand with the agenda of transhumanization and destruction of humanity.
The highly successful SCO Summit in Tianjin was deliberately staged just before China's Grand Military Parade on Tiananmen Square, marking 80 years since the end of World War II. It was the culmination of a new "World Order", one of Peace - demonstrating the West, silently but visibly, that a new epoch is about to begin.
The original source of this article is Global Research.