SCO's Smallest Members Steal the Show at Bishkek Summit — SkimNews
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- The SCO summit in Bishkek (August 31–September 1) marked the organization's 25th anniversary; with 10 member states including China, India, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and four Central Asian republics, the bloc now represents nearly half of humanity.
- Narendra Modi directly urged Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine "for humanity's sake" — the most pointed such appeal at the summit — while Modi and Shehbaz Sharif traded barbs and Xi Jinping and Modi skipped a formal bilateral meeting.
- Kyrgyzstan, as outgoing SCO chair, used the summit to push its own agenda: promoting the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway (a BRI corridor from Kashgar), emerging India-Pakistan trade routes via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and a deal to drastically increase bilateral trade with Pakistan.
- Kyrgyzstan in 2025 established the Tamchy Special Financial and Investment Territory, a special economic zone designed as an outpost of Western regulatory codes and law — a concrete signal that Bishkek is pursuing capital outside the SCO's economic orbit even while hosting the bloc.
- Smaller members drove the summit's most concrete institutional proposals: Xi proposed AI hubs, Uzbekistan proposed an industrial cooperation mechanism, Kyrgyzstan lobbied to host a joint SCO development bank in Bishkek, and Tajikistan pushed a regional digital agro-ecological platform.
- Central Asian governments routinely balance Chinese infrastructure investment with capital from Europe, the United States, Turkey, the Gulf, Japan, and South Korea — preserving agency and avoiding dependence on any single patron.
- The SCO's three largest powers — China, India, and Russia — lack the mutual leverage needed to impose a common strategic direction, which is why implementation of institutional initiatives most often depends on whether smaller members see a direct benefit.
Why it matters: The Bishkek summit underscored that the SCO functions less as an emerging anti-Western bloc than as a competitive marketplace where Central Asian states leverage Chinese, Russian, Indian, and Western interest against each other. Kyrgyzstan's Tamchy zone — a Western-law investment hub sitting inside the China-Russia sphere — illustrates the strategy in concrete terms, and gives Washington a viable entry point into a region it has otherwise ceded to Beijing and Moscow.
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