Posted on September 6, 2025
Karachi:
With almost half of the world’s population and a quarter of the global GDP, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has matured on a platform that challenges the grammar of international politics, offering a vision that contrasts with the most fenced order in the West.
In his recent summit in Tianjin, the greatest in the history of the block, President Xi Jinping described Asia and Europe as “a garden of civilizations” blooming in mutual prosperity.
His call to pluralism and shared universalism could not be more different from the insular worldview of the western decomposition elite. Only three years ago, the head of EU Foreign Policy Josep Borrell exposed this mentality when he declared that “Europe is a garden” and “the rest of the world is a jungle.”
Borrell’s metaphor echoed the old imperial creed: wealth in the center, insecurity on the periphery. “The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more committed to the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, in different ways and media,” he warned, repeating not so gracefully the justification behind centuries of western interventions.
The Renaissance of Europe, after all, was financed by the gold and silver of the Americas. Its industrial revolution for forced labor and the resources of Asia and Africa. The ordered céspedes of the “garden” of Europe were fertilized with blood.
On the contrary, XI’s counterpoint in Tianjin invoked bridges instead of walls. He asked for shared platforms in energy transition, green industry, higher education, artificial intelligence and even space exploration.
“The vast land of Asia and Europe, a cradle of ancient civilizations where the first exchanges between the East and West took place, has been a driving force behind human progress,” Xi said. SCO members must “jointly cultivate a garden of civilizations in which all cultures flourish in prosperity and harmony through mutual lighting,” he added.
Unlike NATO, which expands through exclusion and militarization, the SCO grows through inclusion, which now embraces almost half of humanity. Without the headquarters or the permanent army, it remains a forum in which governments openly defend the negotiation on force, even in disputes.
XI global governance initiative
The Tianjin Summit also revealed the substance behind the GLOGI (GGI) initiative of XI. Warning that “global governance has reached a new crossroads,” urged the “hegemonism and power policy.”
Based on the UN Foundation in 1945, XI described five principles: sovereign equality, strict adherence to international law, true multilateralism, development -centered development and practical coordination.
“All countries, regardless of size, strength and wealth, are equal participants, decision makers and beneficiaries in global governance,” he said, rejecting the “rules of the chamber of a few.”
He stressed that “international law and rules must be applied equally and uniformly. There should be no double ratings”, while decisions must arise from “extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefits.”
In addition, XI repeatedly invokes neutral language in class (“all countries”, “common interests”) and opposes all forms of unilateralism or racism.
The summit statement also declared itself on the “right side of history and the side of equity and justice”, indicating continuity with the anti -fascist and anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century.
Concrete measures followed. The leaders approved the SCO Development Bank for a long time to finance infrastructure and regional projects, together with six cooperation platforms: three Chinese-SCO platforms in energy, green industry and the digital economy and three centers for technological innovation, higher education and vocational training.
The planned projects include expanding renewable capacity by “dozens of gigawatts” in five years, establish an AI Applications Center and share Chinese satellite navigation and lunar research with SCO Partners.
Beijing promised ¥ 2 billion in grants, ¥ 10 billion in loans and training programs throughout the global south. XI also announced ten new “Luban Workshops” to train workers in renewable energy technologies, rail and automotive.
Meanwhile, the economic weight of the SCO is increasing. In 2024, the Bilateral Trade of China-SCO reached $ 512.4 billion, almost $ 900 billion if observers and dialogue partners are included, indicating an increasingly protected European supply chain of western sanctions and protectionism.
Collapse of Western Universality
It would be safe to argue that the SCO agenda embodies what could be called “dialectical anti -imperialism”: address the contradictions of capitalist globalization not through ethnic or civilizational rhetoric, but through multilateral cooperation.
The statement supported the WTO -based system, condemned protectionism and rejected unilateral sanctions, instead asking for an “economy of the open world.”
China, on the other hand, is launching as a redistributor of the global surplus, not as extractor. Their state companies build infrastructure in Africa and Latin America, relying on local work instead of forced relocations or land grabbing. Its vast commercial surpluses are recycled in global finance, with $ 750–800 billion in US treasures.
For these reasons, China does not meet the classic criteria of imperialism: without territorial conquest, without puppet regimes, without global capital concentration in a financial oligarchy. Academics argue that while the property and planning of the State remain central, China will not evolve towards imperial power. Instead, it works as an economy directed by the state of Sui Generis, prioritizing stability and internal development over foreign domination.
Therefore, China fails the central criteria of an imperialist state: it does not concentrate global capital in a financial oligarchy, divide the world for the super fine of profit or subjugated customers. With the dominant public property, state banks and planning, their foreign policy pressures differ from capitalist empires. Beijing’s internal approach to employment and stability reduces incentives for the conquest, according to its declared rejection of hegemony.
The writing is on the wall: a “garden” fenced against a “jungle” encodes hierarchy, siege and paranoia, and in doing so writes its own obituary. The spirit of Shanghai has shown that the contest between two models of order, one rooted in imperial nostalgia, the other in the post -colonial possibility, is no longer abstract.
In a cruel irony, the elites of Europe, tied to an increasingly irrelevant transatlantic alliance, run the risk of losing the emergence of a Euroasy order. The second line of the Hymn of Ukraine, “fate still smiles at us, other Ukrainians,” now sounds painfully hollow. You could say that fate no longer smiles on Europe itself.
A continent that once imagined as the avant -garde of history has become a stage for decline, disorientation and crisis. Europe, the watchmaker of modernity, no longer maintains the time. All the powers of the “old Europe”, in the Holy Alliance with their transatlantic partners, fight to preserve the illusion that their order decreases still defines the future.
However, the story is moving elsewhere. The arrogance of the Western elites clashes with a simple fact: another civilization, with deeper and more broad horizons, has presented a new proposal for the world order. China’s global civilization initiative directly denies the Eurocentric universalism. Imagine plurality without domination, cooperation without hierarchy, principles that resonate in the global south.
As Karl Marx wondered once, the reactionaries of Europe, who reach the great wall, would they find registered: “République Chinoise – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”? Irony today is marked: while Europe retires behind the walls and fears of the invasion, it is China, along with its partners, which invokes fraternity, equality and freedom not as abstractions, but as the material basis of multipolar development.
The disturbing spectrum of the world is no longer communism in its narrow European sense, but the collapse of Western universality itself. Against which increases a vision rooted in the long memory of civilizations, where the future is co -author on all continents.
The substance behind the “Garden vs Jungle” talk is alarming. Western powers routinely release the economic war, with the United States and the EU imposing unilateral sanctions on dozens of countries, often challenging the UN. A study by Lancet found such sanctions “as fatal as the war itself.”
Today, only the United States has sanctioned approximately 40% of all nations, reducing trade and finance without UN approval.
Economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot estimate that the sanctions kill around 500,000 civilians annually. As they point out, although they are commonly called “international sanctions”, “there is nothing international in them”, they are unilateral acts that serve powerful states, not to global law or decency.
In practice, China’s “dialectical” anti -imperialism prioritizes the shared material interests on identity policy.
The Tianjin Summit exhibited pragmatic projects (a development bank, linked energy networks, clean technology, with a civilization narrative that serves diversity and cooperation. Civilizations were treated not as camps in conflict but as communities that work on equal terms.
As the Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the SCO “summarized, will defend the spirit of Shanghai … [and] Make more contributions to build a multipolar world. ”
