Autocrats, populists, friends and foes, a strongman waging a war in Europe and the leader of the world’s biggest democracy will all be hosted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping this weekend at a summit designed to showcase Beijing as a global leader capable of providing a counterweight to Western institutions.
Heads of state and delegations from across Asia and the Middle East will meet from Sunday in the Chinese port city of Tianjin for the two-day summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security grouping that has emerged as a cornerstone of Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drive to rebalance global power in their favor.
Chinese officials have billed the summit as the SCO’s largest yet, with the diplomacy and pageantry setting the stage for Xi to tout his country as a stable and powerful alternative leader at a time when the world’s leading superpower the United States under President Donald Trump is shaking up its alliances and waging a global trade war.
The gathering also comes days ahead of a major military parade in Beijing that will offer a different message – that of China’s rapidly developing military might, and draw autocrats like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing alongside Putin and Russia-friendly European leaders Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and Slovakia’s Robert Fico.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Joe Weber
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.offthepress.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
