Trump casts a long shadow over China's gathering of global leaders Analysis by Ivan Watson, CNNAugust 29, 2025 at 3:24 AM Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Moscow, Russia, May 8, 2025.
- - Trump casts a long shadow over China's gathering of global leaders
Analysis by Ivan Watson, CNNAugust 29, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Moscow, Russia, May 8, 2025. - Sergei Bobylyov/Host agency RIA Novosti/Reuters
The leaders of three of the world's largest countries will be gathering for a Eurasian summit in China this weekend.
But when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping join other heads of state in Tianjin for the 25th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), absent will be American sparring partner President Donald Trump.
"For this particular summit, the US may not be at the table, but the US is always present," said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center.
Trump will nonetheless be the talk of Tianjin.
"The one thing that they're going to talk about is the United States, its policies, its tariffs," predicted Sushant Singh, lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University.
Case in point, Prime Minister Modi. He will arrive in Tianjin days after the Trump Administration imposed a stinging 50% tariff on Indian goods, among the highest of Trump's current tariffs. The White House presents this partly as a penalty for India's purchase of Russian oil.
Trump's unexpectedly tough approach to India (which he recently called a "dead" economy much to New Delhi's chagrin), reverses decades of US cultivation of the South Asian giant as a democratic counterweight to China
"It's a massive shift. It's a U-turn," said Yale University's Singh.
Analysts say the tariffs broadside from Trump has pushed Modi into making some concessions towards China and cautiously embrace Xi at a time when the two giant neighbors had already been exploring an improvement of their frosty ties.
"Mr. Modi had no option but to go and cut a deal with President Xi," said Singh, speaking on the phone from New Delhi.
This will mark the Indian leader's first visit to China since 2018.
Relations between the two Asian giants cratered in 2020, after Chinese and Indian soldiers bludgeoned each other to death in the first of a series of violent clashes in a disputed Himalayan border region.
But after a freeze that lasted years, both countries recently started re-issuing tourist visas for each other's citizens and have said they would resume direct flights cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic.
For years, India's foreign minister stated that relations between the two countries would never be normalized until tension on the disputed border was resolved.
Modi's mere presence in Tianjin will mark something of a strategic recalibration and a demonstration of India's new geopolitical vulnerability.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets Chinese President Xi Jinping prior to the dinner on September 4, 2017 in Xiamen, China. Ties between India and China are cautiously improving after relations cratered in 2020. - Mikhail Svetlov/Getty ImagesThe Kremlin's best friend
Less than three weeks after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin at a US airbase in Alaska, the Russian president will be arriving for a visit to China at a time when Moscow's missiles continue to pound Ukraine.
He will not only participate in the Tianjin summit but also attend a massive military parade in Beijing alongside Xi and North Korea's Kim Jong Un on September 3, setting the stage for a stark show of unity between the three powers.
Trump's on-again, off-again overtures to the Russian strongman are unlikely to impact the so-called "no limits" partnership between Russia and China.
That relationship has only deepened in recent years, as cross-border trade has hit new heights. Meanwhile, both countries continue to engage in security cooperation, most recently with the announcement that they conducted their first-ever joint submarine patrol in the Pacific.
Analysts say the glue that binds these once-hostile neighbors ever closer is their shared perception of the US as a threat.
"There's a famous saying in the Chinese policy community," says Sun from the Stimson Center. "China and Russia can share miseries but not happiness."
China, faced with a slumping domestic economy, is also grappling with its own long and painful trade war with the US.
Meanwhile, Russia, with its much smaller economy and the international isolation triggered by its invasion of Ukraine, desperately needs a hand from China, turning Moscow into the junior partner in this relationship.
Beijing's top diplomat reportedly told European officials China can't accept a Russian defeat in Ukraine.
It would be a "major devastation for the Chinese security architecture if Russia were to fall or become Westernized," said Claus Soong, an analyst who specializes in China-Russian relations at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
New world order
In 2022, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin and Xi met on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics to call for "shaping a polycentric world order."
Their governments have chafed for years at the global dominance the US has enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
President Trump's chaotic foreign policy, which has included attacks on longtime allies and the almost-overnight dismantling of global free trade, presents China, the world's second largest economy, with fresh opportunity.
As world leaders gather for the SCO summit in Tianjin and the subsequent World War II victory military parade in Beijing, expect Xi to promote China as a stable alternative to Washington.
"China is definitely using this opportunity to demonstrate to China's neighbors that China is a benevolent leader, a benevolent hegemon…dependable, predictable," said the Stimson Center's Sun.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has deep structural flaws, including the wars that erupted in recent years between several of its member states and dialogue partners (India and Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan).
But this Eurasian gathering may present a more appealing alternative to nations worried by the US and its increasingly unpredictable position on the world stage.
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