The ‘Shanghai Spirit’ and the Principles of the SCO

The SCO’s mission and its very nature as an international organisation have been the subject of much debate. Oleg Barabanov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club, explores one potential source of clues towards the self-perception of the SCO—the organisation’s founding documents and numerous summit declarations.

The recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Bishkek marked the organisation’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The SCO makes a significant contribution to ensuring security across the space of Greater Eurasia. Over these years, an institutional structure has been formed and now functions effectively within the SCO. Annual meetings of the Council of Heads of State are held, and regular meetings are organised at the interdepartmental level. Day-to-day cooperation is also developing. From the outset, and to this day, cooperation on strengthening security has been and remains one of the SCO’s main priorities. This is also historically determined: as is well known, the SCO’s prehistory lies in Soviet-Chinese confidence-building measures, both on border issues and in the broader aspects of mutual security.

Naturally, over the years of the SCO’s work, the organisation’s activities have acquired a far broader dimension, and its day-to-day projects are not confined to security matters alone. But one way or another, the SCO can still, to a certain extent, be called a specialised international organisation that focuses chiefly on a single priority task. This becomes more apparent when the SCO is compared with structures of genuinely comprehensive cooperation that operate across a wide range of fields. BRICS is one such example.

In this respect, owing to this specialised priority, the SCO’s documents have often devoted less attention than those of BRICS, for example, to questions of common and shared values, to the drafting of appropriate formulations, and to their subsequent crystallisation. The evolution of BRICS’s values platform has already been examined in our Valdai Report. Nevertheless, the anniversary year marking the SCO’s twenty-fifth birthday offers a good opportunity to turn our attention to the values-related component of the SCO’s documents and practice as well.

It should also be borne in mind that, unlike BRICS, the SCO is an institutionalised international organisation. The SCO has a founding document—the Charter of the SCO—which was signed on 7 June 2002 and entered into force on 19 September 2003. It is on this basis, and within the constraints it sets out, that the SCO builds its practical work.

If we examine the text of the SCO Charter, we find that it says nothing at all about values. Instead, the Charter contains a dedicated Article 2, entitled “Principles”. It is on these principles that the SCO bases its activities.

These principles include the following: mutual respect for sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and the inviolability of state borders; non-aggression; non-interference in internal affairs; the non-use of force in international relations; the equality of all member states; the peaceful settlement of disagreements between member states; the non-targeting of the SCO against other states; and others. A particularly telling principle is that of the phased implementation of joint actions in areas of common interest. This emphasis on phased implementation as a guiding principle actually explains a great deal. In any case, in our view, the occasionally inflated expectations of the SCO’s activities, and the disappointment sometimes closely bound up with them—that “nothing happens beyond the summits”—are, firstly, simply mistaken, and, secondly, find their explanation precisely in this fundamental principle of phased implementation.

The very absence of the term “values” from the SCO Charter is likewise perfectly explicable, and by no means diminishes the level of mutual trust between member states. Let us recall that, in the case of BRICS too, the term “values” was far from an immediate feature of the final declarations, only becoming firmly established there from the mid-2010s onwards. Before that, the term used to characterise BRICS’s internal cohesion was, among others, precisely the term “principles”, just as with the SCO.

Moreover, in 2002 the term “values” was not yet as politically fashionable as it is today, and it was used fairly rarely in the documents of the leading countries of the non-Western world. At that time, in these countries—Russia included—the word “values” was more often postulated in the political lexicon in a negative sense, as “values imposed by the West”, and therefore as something requiring resistance. The realisation that this is a game two can play, and that in order to effectively strengthen solidarity among non-Western countries they needed to formulate their own platform of shared values, came much later. And the work of ensuring that non-Western values are perceived as comprehensible, attractive, and at the same time not banal—not simply in the style of “we are for all things good and against all things bad”—continues, in our view, with mixed success, to this very day.

It should further be noted that, with regard to one particular term (and its substantive significance), the SCO chronologically outpaced BRICS by a considerable margin. This is the term “spirit”. In the declarations of the annual BRICS summits, the term “BRICS spirit” and its constituent elements first appeared during China’s chairmanship in 2017. The “spirit” then disappeared from BRICS documents for several years. The term returned once again in 2022, once more during China’s chairmanship. But thereafter, in all subsequent BRICS summit declarations of 2023­25, whose initial drafts were prepared by other countries, the term “BRICS spirit” was consistently present.

In the case of the SCO, however, the term “spirit” appeared in the very first declaration following the Shanghai summit of 15 June 2001, when the “Shanghai Five”, previously existing as an informal grouping, was transformed into a fully-fledged international organisation, the SCO. In this declaration, the “Shanghai spirit” was mentioned as a separate point, characterised by mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, mutual consultation, respect for cultural diversity, and a striving for shared development. It was emphasised that this “Shanghai spirit” constituted an invaluable asset accumulated by the countries of the region over years of cooperation, and one that would be further enhanced in future.

It is evident from these SCO and BRICS texts that the term “spirit” is rooted, first and foremost, in contemporary Chinese political tradition, since in every case it first appeared in documents in years when the summits were held in China. This is, in a sense, a Chinese peculiarity. That said, the term “spirit”, even if not immediately, subsequently became firmly established in BRICS declarations; and in the case of the SCO, a year later, in 2002, when the summit was held not in China but in Saint Petersburg, the term “spirit” entered the preamble of the SCO Charter. In the Charter, however, the epithet “Shanghai” disappeared in relation to the spirit; there it is referred to simply as the “spirit of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, mutual consultation, respect for cultural diversity, and a striving for shared development”.

In addition, and relevant to today’s political ideology, is the civilisational approach reflected in the Shanghai Declaration of 2001. It specifically noted “mutual respect and mutual trust between states belonging to different civilisations and bearing different cultural traditions”. A year later, however, the mention of civilisations disappeared from the preamble of the SCO Charter.

If, in this context, we examine the preamble of the current Bishkek Declaration of the SCO Council of Heads of State of 1 September 2026, we find it emphasises “firm commitment to the goals and principles enshrined in the SCO Charter, as well as to the further strengthening of good-neighbourliness, friendship, and effective multifaceted cooperation”. Moreover, this declaration once again employed precisely the term “Shanghai spirit”, which is embodied in the principles set out in the preamble of the SCO Charter.

It is clear that, since the constituent elements of this SCO spirit are fixed in the legal text of the Charter, their formulations remain unshakeable even twenty-five years on. Herein lies the difference between the spirit of the SCO and the spirit of BRICS, where, from year to year, various elements of this spirit are added or removed by successive chairing countries, depending on their own national particularities. And the definition of the BRICS spirit turns out, each year, to be at least slightly different. But in the case of the SCO, it is telling that the epithet “Shanghai” has returned—an epithet which, unlike the spirit itself, is not legally fixed.

It should also be noted that the particular attention devoted in the Bishkek Declaration to the SCO’s commitment to the Shanghai spirit and to the SCO’s principles is not especially typical of other SCO summit declarations in recent years; there is some variation here. For example, in the declarations following “non-anniversary” summits, a preamble is practically absent altogether, and the description of the international situation and security challenges begins right from the outset. In the declarations issued in Astana in 2024, in Delhi in 2023, and in Moscow in 2020, neither the “Shanghai spirit” nor simply the “spirit” was mentioned (although the Moscow declaration does contain the term “SCO space”). In the declarations issued in Tianjin in 2025 (naturally enough), in Samarkand in 2022, and in Bishkek in 2019, there is a mention of the “Shanghai spirit”, but it is located not at the beginning of the text but deep within the first section.

It is clear that the specific character of the current declaration is explained by its anniversary nature; the declaration issued in Dushanbe for the previous anniversary—the twentieth, in 2021—was composed in exactly the same way, likewise featuring a lengthy preamble that mentions the Shanghai spirit and commitment to the principles. Nevertheless, this is highly telling.

That said, it is entirely natural that a terminological analysis of the texts, and of the values platforms they reflect, merely supplements the far larger picture of practical cooperation between the SCO countries achieved over these twenty-five years.