A new world order, made in China: Video

Over the past week, a series of summits and meetings in China suggested that this vision is moving closer to reality, as Xi Jinping courts unlikely partners and draws in countries that the West once kept at the margins.

On September 1, Xi hosted more than 20 leaders from across the Global South at the 2025 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), an intergovernmental bloc founded in 2001 to deepen political, security and economic ties across Eurasia.

From the stage, the Chinese president pitched what he cast as an alternative system — one that emphasises multilateralism, prioritises the Global South, and rejects what he called “hegemonism” and a “Cold War mentality.”

Among those listening were Vladimir Putin of Russia and Narendra Modi of India, both leaders who have butted heads with U.S. President Donald Trump in recent months — Russia over the war in Ukraine, and India over U.S. restrictions on energy imports.

The new alignments underscore a paradox of Donald Trump’s foreign policy: His aggressive use of tariffs and sanctions was meant to weaken U.S. rivals, but analysts say it has instead nudged adversaries and competitors into closer cooperation.

“This is a strange time when unlikely bedfellows like India and China are now overtly comfortable with each other, which was not the scene until three or four months ago,” said Dr. Pooja Bhatt, director of the Jindal School of International Affairs in India.

“This shows how the U.S.'s excessive use of its force or policies and diplomacy can lead to even the most unlikely of countries to come together and form a partnership,” she told Global South World. 

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has become the testing ground for that cooperation. Founded in 2001 to manage regional disputes and coordinate counterterrorism efforts, it now claims nearly half the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP. 

This scale gives it leverage as a potential platform for agenda-setting beyond Eurasia.

“SCO does offer an alternative,” said Dr. Ila Joshi, an international relations scholar focused on India and China. “This is a very opportune moment when countries of the Global South are coming together to think about common issues — whether it’s terrorism, technology, or the sharing of information.”

Whether the bloc can deliver on its promises remains unclear, but Bhatt said the appeal of the SCO’s new world order pitch lies in the dissatisfaction of countries that feel sidelined by the U.S.-led order.

“Countries that are unhappy with the current economic, diplomatic, and political world order would benefit more from joining the SCO,” she said. “It is too soon to say that if the SCO will deliver the promises it is making right now, but I think it's worth an effort to see if China can build an alternate world order that it has been promising.”

Beijing in the driver’s seat

Whatever soft power China projected during the SCO summit, it quickly reinforced with a show of military muscle. Days later, Beijing staged a sprawling parade to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, a display that lasted more than an hour and featured intercontinental missiles, laser weapons and fleets of drones.

Xi, flanked by Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, struck an ominous, almost threatening note in his speech delivered before more than 50,000 spectators at the historic Tiananmen Square.

“Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,” Xi said, insisting that the Chinese people “firmly stand on the right side of history.”

The twin images — Xi presiding over regional leaders at the SCO, then hosting a military pageant with Moscow and Pyongyang — highlight Beijing’s dual strategy: presenting itself as a stabilising force while challenging the Western-led system.

“China is not exactly trying to replace the West-dominated world order. It’s also trying to build a new regional understanding where the Global South decides on things, where international relations are also seen from the perspective of countries that are underdeveloped or developing,” Joshi said. 

China already commands the world’s largest standing army, with about 2 million active personnel, though it still lags behind Washington economically, with an economy worth $16 trillion compared to America’s $30 trillion.

For Bhatt, Beijing’s ambitions reach far beyond hard power — it wants to overhaul the Western order.

“China wants an alternative world order, whether you talk about culture, whether you talk about security, whether you talk about institutions, in every way. China is trying to build up structures that are contrary to what the U.S. has already established. 

For the Global South or just against America?

Trump, the architect of tariffs that many analysts say have backfired, appeared visibly irked by the spectacle of his rivals linking arms in Beijing. 

He dismissed the gathering of Xi, Putin and Kim as a “conspiracy,” lamenting that the U.S. was losing partners like Russia and India to what he called “the deepest, darkest China.”

What began as a defensive reaction to American tariffs and sanctions is now taking shape as something larger — a coalition of countries testing the limits of Western influence.

“The West is not happy to see a group of countries coming together and building an alternative world order,” Bhatt said.

“It is a message of cooperation and defiance against the U.S. policies, which can be seen by the rest of the world that the emerging powers of the world are now coming together, and all of them incidentally are facing bad relations with the U.S.,” she added.

That shift, she argued, may prove more consequential than the confrontations that prompted it.

“The U.S. is definitely losing its game,” she said. “The more it tries to push these countries under sanctions, the more these countries are compelled to come together.”

The challenge for the Shanghai bloc, however, is its own internal diversity. Its members span continents and political systems, from democratic India to authoritarian Russia and China, each with competing interests and historic grievances. China and India, for instance, only recently stepped back from a deadly Himalayan border dispute that left dozens of soldiers dead.

Whether such divisions can be managed will determine whether the coalition matures into a durable alternative or falters under the weight of its contradictions. What is clear, Joshi said, is that the era of a passive Global South has ended.

“International relations are not to be seen only from the perspective of West,” she said. “When they talk about a new world order, the Global South is now ready to take things into its own hands.”