TIANJIN: Russian President Vladimir Putin landed in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on Sunday (Aug 31) to attend a summit hosted by counterpart Xi Jinping with around 20 other world leaders.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit (SCO) will be held in the port city until Monday, days before a massive military parade in the capital Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus, with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.
Russian and Chinese state media reported at around 9.30am that Putin had touched down in Tianjin.
China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance.
In an interview published on China’s Xinhua news agency on Saturday, Putin said the upcoming summit will “strengthen the SCO’s capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space”.
“All this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” Putin said, Xinhua reported.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms like the SCO to curry influence.
“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
