The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in a nutshell

Founded in 2001, when Putin didn’t seem such an ogre, with two official languages—Chinese and Russian—the SCO included as members, alongside China and Russia, mostly the former soviet republics from Central Asia whose names end in -stan. These countries had (and still have) important oil resources, and both China and Russia wanted to prevent any interference from the United States in the region.

Honestly, should we ignore Russia’s innate malevolence, the approach had its legitimacy. NATO continued its expansion eastward, while its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, ceased to exist. Furthermore, US troops remained in Western Europe, whereas Russian troops had left Eastern Europe. The might—true or imaginary—of the former Soviet Union ceased to exist. The world suddenly became unipolar, with a unique leader: the United States. Let’s not fool ourselves: Europe is in tow of the United States. It’s obvious now that Europe has relegated most of its defense to the US, and most of its industrial production to Southeast Asia. Also, please explain how Europe could survive without Microsoft and Google, which are 100% American!

So the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was actually meant to be more a security alliance than an economic one. This explains the partial overlapping with BRICS, especially now that several other countries have joined or are partner and friends with both BRICS and the SCO. India, a founding BRICS member, joined the SCO in 2017. Iran, a full SCO member since 2021, joined BRICS in 2024. Pakistan joined the SCO in 2017, despite its strained relations with India, and never considered BRICS. Turkey is only an SCO dialogue partner since 2012. Geographically, the SCO is more Eurasian-focused, while BRICS spans multiple continents. Right now, at the 2025 SCO summit in Tianjin, there was an important stress on economic cooperation and development, but rest assured that the SCO is a strategic security alliance before overlapping with the economic and trade aims of BRICS, which also has multipolar ambitions.

While Russia is a key member in both the SCO and BRICS, each time you hear about a “multipolar” world, don’t think of “the United States, Russia and China, plus India and whatnot” but rather think of “China and its sphere of influence wants to overpower the United States and its sphere of influence.”

In the brown circle: “Upholding the Shanghai spirit: SCO on the move”

The Aug 31–Sep 1, 2025, Tianjin SCO summit

It was dubbed “the meeting of the dictators” because of the presence of the leaders of Russia, Belarus, Iran, even Turkey. And “free elections” by Western standards only took place in India and Turkey (which insists on being called Türkiye even in English). But, frankly, Turkey is anything but a true democracy.

It doesn’t really matter, because China and the other SCO members only talk of “promoting democracy in international relations,” not of internal Western-style political democracy, meaning a plurality of political parties with equal chances.

I’ve heard some “analysts” trying to minimize or underestimate the power of the participating states in the SCO. Military aside, one of them talked GDP this way:

  • China + India + Russia ≈ $25.5 trillion
  • EU + UK ≈ $24 trillion
  • EU + UK + Canada ≈ $26 trillion

In other words, even without the United States, Wir schaffen das.

Well, I’m not so sure. I don’t believe that the GDP has any relevance nowadays. Not even when PPP-adjusted. The PPP adjustment would make sense in connection with the average income or with the minimum salary. It would be a fair indicator of the standard of living offered by the wages typical to a place. The GDP, on the other hand, has lost its indicative value, IMNSHO.

My favorite pet peeve is that a certain product can leave China (or Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, etc.) at $1 apiece only to retail in the West for $10 or even more. Add or subtract what you want, even consider the costs of replacing under warranty; the fact is that the entire value has been created in the country that exported the item at $1.

Most of everything else is purely parasitic, yet it gets included in the GDP of those Western countries that proudly boast their GDPs! Even the VAT is included in the GDP of the destination country! (Strange enough, the customs tariffs are not.) And the exporting country perceives zero VAT!

There is a Romanian saying that translates literally to “Both fucked and with the money taken” (“Și futut, și cu banii luați”). The official figures are hogwash. Go purchase 100 different non-food items at random and count how many of them are not made in China!

Now, of course, this is self-screwing. It wasn’t China that forced the West to move its production to China and other Southeast Asian countries. It was the greed of Western CEOs that led to that situation!

Also, the only reason we can afford computers at such prices is the fact that they’re made, with practically most of their components, in Southeast Asia. Let me tell you what kind of prices we have in the West.

Access the publicly available documents for the public works contracted by your city council. Say, how much did it cost to add a new bench in the park or a new streetlamp? The item plus the labor. You shouldn’t be surprised if the bill per bench or per streetlamp was something like €5k‒€10k, or even more! That’s how absurd our Europe has become. The European public works procurement process, the compliance with regulations, the bureaucracy overhead, and the Mafia that qualifies to execute such public works—all come at a cost. And it’s not any better in the United States!

We couldn’t survive without, well, China. We’d probably pay 3–4 times more for a computer, for instance, if every single component of it were manufactured in the West. We’d live at the real value of our work, once we subtract the cost of bureaucracy and ineptitude.

And it’s not always because of higher wages, because there are means to limit them. For example, a significant portion of the workforce in agriculture and construction from Eastern European countries, such as Romania, has migrated to Western Europe for better pay, often taking jobs that locals in the West are unwilling to accept at such rates. Meanwhile, Romania imports construction workers from Vietnam and food delivery workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. In each case, this reflects social dumping and the exploitation of workers willing to accept lower wages than the local workforce. We need a new Marx.

Another random case of stupidity. Bloomberg: Germany Urges Europe to Stop China Buying So Much Copper Scrap. According to Germany’s Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, “The Chinese are buying copper scrap from the market in huge quantities,” so that “large German copper smelters are no longer getting any raw materials.” Why is that so? Because the Chinese are offering a better price than the stingy European copper scrap smelters! But the Chinese, after buying the copper scrap, actually do something with it. And the finished Chinese products will be cheaper in the end than if they were manufactured in Europe! Isn’t Europe great? We need new leaders.

The righteous reports on “the meeting of the dictators”

Obviously, I’m always cringing when I see Xi being such a friend and ally of Putin, despite holding the belief that this is mostly conjunctural: China needs energy products from Russia (India has similar needs) and from Iran, and every opportunity is good to thumb their nose at the United States.

The Western press has focused on such images: Xi and Putin stand shoulder to shoulder as China casts itself an alternative global leader (CNN).

This is gross and indecent

Also, the televisions have shown images from the banquet, suggesting that Putin had received a very warm welcome:

This might be deceiving

The full gang:

This “laughing session” (Putin, Modi, Xi) also looks disturbing:

What if there is another way to look at it?

NEXTA TV is a pro-European, pro-Ukrainian independent media outlet that originated in Belarus, but now is headquartered in Poland. In April 2022, it has been declared a terrorist organization by the Supreme Court of Belarus, so it cannot be suspected as being pro-Kremlin.

Well, as reported by NEXTA TV on X, with a video excerpt from an Azeri TV station (to which it added English subtitles in which Erdoğan has been spelled phonetically), this interpretation is possible:

🤭 How leaders are welcomed vs. how Putin is “welcomed”

The video compares the arrival ceremonies of Aliyev, Erdoğan, and Putin in China.

Aliyev and Erdoğan were greeted by senior officials, an honor guard, music, and flowers — Putin was received formally, without honors.

The visual contrast is so obvious that no commentary is needed.

From the subtitle:

Putin was received more as a burdensome guest who was best seen off as soon as possible.

Now, I’m not necessarily buying this interpretation, but it could serve as food for thought. Here’s the full video by Budrooo News, in Russian: ⚡️Китай показал разницу: Алиев — дорогой друг, Путин — лишний гость (⚡️China showed the difference: Aliyev—a dear friend, Putin—an unwanted guest). YouTube has added a secondary audio channel in English (which should be the default one for you, unless your browser is in Russian), but it’s AI-generated.

Nonetheless, if Xi started to become slightly ashamed of Putin, even if he doesn’t show it boldly, that’s a good sign. But this is a big “if”!

In other news, here’s The Kyiv Independent reporting:

China’s Heihe Rural Commercial Bank has stopped accepting payments from Russia after falling under European Union sanctions, Russian pro-government media outlet Vedomosti reported on Sept. 1.

Heihe, a small rural lender, was one of the last Chinese banks willing to process transactions for Russian non-sanctioned credit organizations after larger Chinese banks cut off such services.

Many Russian small and medium-sized businesses had shifted to Heihe following earlier restrictions.

People’s Daily was busy these days—and so was Xi

To get a grasp on the Chinese official media’s reports on the Tianjin SCO summit, here’s a list of SCO-related articles posted on the site and in the app of People’s Daily, which aggregates China Daily, Xinhua, Global News, CGTN, and People’s Daily itself:

A few more links:

China’s V-Day is a different topic, and I’m not going to cover it. Kim Jong-un will be present for the 2025 China Victory Day Parade on September 3.

Instead of a closing section

I really don’t know how to take the 2025 SCO summit. I said before that Xi makes a huge mistake by nurturing Putin. And I also said that in the face of the heinous bullying of the Orange Retard also known as Donald Trump, China was the only bulwark.

On the other hand, I don’t care much that most of the member countries of the SCO (and of BRICS+, for that matter) are authoritarian regimes. Our Western “democracy” became more and more hypocritical and fake, if not useless.

The governments didn’t stop those CEOs from undermining the national economies through treason to the benefit of China and Russia, and neither did Brussels. In the case of Russia, let’s not mention Gerhard Schröder and Gazprom. But how about halving the natural gas production of Europe just to purchase it cheaper from Russia? (And now, from the United States, much more expensive.)

Find me a computer fully made in Europe, and I’ll agree that China and its allies don’t matter. Don’t get fooled by the likes of Tuxedo Computers: based in Augsburg (Bavaria), they try to be slightly cheaper by “manufacturing” in Leipzig (Saxony), but what they do is this: they take a base laptop without RAM and storage and a few other modules, they configure it, and they label it “Made in Germany.” But what they do is to assemble 6-7 modules, LEGO-style! And these modules and their components are all made in China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc.

Meanwhile, the European Union wants to save its economy by imposing an arbitrary €5 tax on each small package coming from TEMU or Shein. This is how smart Ursula is! By the book, each package should be taxed with VAT and, beyond a certain value, with a customs tariff. Obviously, the legally estimated value should be taken into account, not the declared one. So the legal path is to establish that the content of a package is valued at, say, €50 instead of the selling price of €5, and to apply the VAT to €50. The illegal and illegitimate €5 tax should be contested at the World Trade Organization! I never bought anything from TEMU, and I’ll never do such a thing, but rules are rules. In Xi’s lingo, I am “promoting democracy in international relations.”

I cannot see how the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could be disregarded by “us, the Westerners.”

Oh, about Erdoğan having been to Tianjin? How about Hungary’s Orbán and Slovakia’s Fico, both being Russia’s fifth column in NATO and the EU?

We’re literally doomed, and licking Trump’s ass cannot help anymore.