It’s always about hard work – for the common good. That’s what BRICS and SCO are fighting for.

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Oh, what a show that was. A pan-Asia, pan-Eurasia, crossover Global South ball, with glittering dynamo Tianjin as backdrop, enjoyed as such by the overwhelming majority of the planet, while predictably generating cascades of sour grapes among the fragmented West – from the omnipotent Empire of Chaos to The Coalition of the Toothless Chihuahuas.

History will register that as much as BRICS finally stepped into the limelight at the summit in Kazan in 2024, the SCO replicated the move at the summit in Tianjin in 2025.

Among a feast of hightlights – hard to top Putin and Modi walking hand in hand – this was of course M.C. Xi’s ball. The original RIC (Russia, India, China), as conceptualized by the Great Primakov in the late 1990s, were finally back in the game, together.

But it was Xi who personally set the main guidelines – proposing no less than a broad, new Global Governance model, complete with important ramifications such as a SCO development back, which should complement the BRICS’s NDB, as well as close AI cooperation in contrast with Silicon Valley’s techno-feudalism.

Global Governance, the Chinese way, encompasses five core principles. The most crucial, no doubt, is sovereign equality. That connects with respect for the international rule of law – and not a shape-shifted, at will, “rules-based international order”. Global Governance advances multilateralism. And also inevitably encourages a much-lauded “people-centered” approach, away from vested interests.

Putin for his part detailed the role of the SCO as “a vehicle for genuine multilateralism”, in tune with this new Global Governance. And he crucially called for a pan-Eurasian security model. That’s exactly the “indivisibility of security” that the Kremlin proposed to Washington in December 2021 – and was met by a non-response response.

So taken together, BRICS and SCO are totally engaged in burying the Cold War-era mentality, a world divided by blocs; and at the same time they are visionary enough to call for the UN system to be respected as it was originally conceived.

Now that will be the Mother of Uphill Battles – including everything from taking the UN out of New York to completely revamping the Security Council.

The dance of Bear, Dragon and Elephant

If Xi set up the guidelines in Tianjin, the strategic guest of honor had to be Putin. And that extrapolated to their one-on-one meeting on Tuesday at the Zhongnanhai in Beijing: very private, as only special conversations are held at the former imperial palace. Xi greeted his “old friend” in Russian.

As Putin emphasized the central role of the SCO Development Program for the next 10 years, he was playing it very much the Chinese way, when it comes to all those successive, successful 5-year plans.

These roadmaps are essential to set long-term strategies. And in the case of the SCO, that means organizing its progressive shift from initially an anti-terrorism mechanism to a complex multilateral platform coodinating infrastructure development and geoeconomics.

And that’s where China’s new idea – the establishment of the SCO Development Bank – comes in. It’s a mirror institution to the NDB – the BRICS bank based in Shanghai, and parallel to the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the multilateral bank based in Beijing.

Once again, BRICS and SCO run intertwined, as their key focus is to progressively ditch dependence on Western paradigms and at the same time fight the effect of sanctions, which not by accident hit hard on the four top members of both BRICS and SCO: Russia, China, India and Iran.

And of course, among all the camaraderie in Tianjin, there was Modi in China for the first time in 7 years. Xi went straight to the point: “China and India are great civilizations whose responsibilities extend beyond bilateral issues.” And M.C. Xi once again hit the dancefloor: the future lies “in the dance of the dragon and the elephant.” Cue to the Three Eurasia amigos chatting amicably in the corridors.

The Tianjin Declaration – not as extensive as Kazan last year – still managed to emphasize the key points that apply to Eurasia: sovereignty, above anything else; non-interference in internal affairs of member-states; and total rejection of unilateral sanctions as tools of coercion.

Crucially, that should apply not only to SCO member-states but to partners as well – from the Arab petromonarchies to the Southeast Asian powerhouses. Development strategies of different nations already cooperate, in practice, with BRI projects, from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to the China-Belarus Industrial Park, extrapolating to cross-border e-commerce, AI and Big Data.

The SCO’s astonishing geographic scale, combined with half of the world’s population, carries tremendous potential across the spectrum – for instance on trade, transport infrastructure, cross-border investment and financial transactions. The potential is far from being realized.

But the high-speed trains are already rolling: geopolitical imperatives are guiding increased pan-Eurasia geoeconomic interaction.

Shanghai Spirit eviscerates “War on Terror”

So this is the top takeaway of the Tianjin Show: the SCO affirming itself as a solid strategic pole uniting a great deal of the Global Majority. And all that without the need to metastasize into an offensive military behemoth like NATO.

It’s a long way from a pavillion in a Shanghai park in 2001, only three months before 9/11 – which was marketed by the Empire of Chaos as the foundation stone of the “war on terror”. That other initially modest foundation stone – with Russia, China and three Central Asian “stans” – was the “Shanghai spirit”: a set of principles based on mutual trust and benefit, equality, consultation, respect for the diversity of civilizations, and an emphasis on common economic development.

How the Shanghai spirit actually outlasted the “war on terror” leaves us with much to ponder.

In his toast at the elegant banquet offered in Tianjin for SCO guests, Xi had to quote a proverb: “In a race of a hundred boats, those who row the hardest will lead”.

Hard work. Results of which can be seen by anyone facing Tianjin’s spectacular development. That has absolutely nothing to do with “democracy” – as debased by its allleged practitioners as it is across the collective West – opposed to “the autocrats”, or “villains”, or Axis of Upheaval, or any other stupidity. It’s always about hard work – for the common good. That’s what BRICS and SCO are fighting for.