Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit to be hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in virtual format next week, the Chinese foreign ministry has announced.
”At the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend via video conference in Beijing the 23rd meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and deliver important remarks on July 4,” Chinese news agency Xinhua quoted the foreign ministry as saying.
India hosted the SCO foreign ministers meeting in Goa in May. All SCO member states – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – have been invited for the summit. In addition, Iran, Belarus and Mongolia have been invited as observer states. As per the SCO tradition, Turkmenistan has also been invited as the guest of the chair.
The heads of six international and regional organisations have also been invited to the summit. The organisations are the UN, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia). The heads of the two SCO bodies – the secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) – will also be present.
The SCO is an influential economic and security bloc and has emerged as one of the largest transregional international organisations. India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit on September 16 last year.