SCO Tianjin: Xi–Modi–Putin Reset Global Power Balance

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Beyond declarations, the Tianjin SCO Summit projected power through images: India, China, and Russia aligning on energy, finance, and digital rules while challenging the G7, BRICS, and G20 narratives.

By TRH Global Affairs Desk

NEW DELHI, September 2, 2025 — The Tianjin SCO Summit may not have trended in Washington—where Labour Day football overshadowed foreign policy—but in the global chessboard, it was anything but trivial. What unfolded in the northeastern Chinese port city was more than a leaders’ gathering; it was a performance, an optics-heavy show of power that hinted at how a post-American-led international order may soon look.

Former Indian diplomat Sanjay Kumar Verma, dissecting the Tianjin Declaration, framed the summit as part of a contest among global “clubs”: SCO building financial and energy toolkits with India’s sharper rhetoric on terrorism, BRICS pushing Global South solidarity, G20 mediating between geopolitics and trade, and the G7 tightening rules-based order. In a post on LinkedIn, he concluded: these aren’t parallel declarations but competing scripts for global governance.

That sense of rivalry was reinforced by the images. The handshake between Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi—leaders who barely acknowledged each other two years ago—was symbolic. “The moment when Modi and Vladimir Putin, walking hand-in-hand, laughed their way toward Xi was even more powerful. Whether choreographed or not, the scene carried a blunt message: Asia’s big three are writing their own script, independent of American pressure,” wrote Eric Olander of The China–Global South Project.

For Trevor Skinner, the image represented three billion people—industrial might, vast resources, and massive consumer markets—coming together.

Yet not everyone is convinced this path strengthens global governance. Geopolitics commentator Sari Arho Havrén warned on LinkedIn that the SCO’s rise cements a China-led order that is “more fragmented and less transparent, where democratic values will be less protected and tolerance for authoritarian solutions higher.”

The G7 debates AI and Ukraine, the G20 tries to split the difference, BRICS champions reform, and the SCO plays host to an emerging alignment of major non-Western powers. The Tianjin Summit did not just underline this divergence—it embodied it.

The real question now is not whether these clubs converge, but whether the fragmentation they represent becomes the architecture of the 21st century.