Chinese President Xi Jinping's remarks at the 20th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) highlighted the importance and necessity of closer multilateral cooperation at this challenging and uncertain moment, experts said.
In his speech via video link on Tuesday, Xi explained China's approach to strengthening SCO cooperation, calling on member countries to carry forward the Shanghai spirit and deepen solidarity and collaboration in such areas as anti-pandemic, security, economy and people-to-people exchanges.
"Together, we will contribute more to the stability and development of countries in the region and take more steps toward building a community with a shared future for mankind," he noted.
"The Chinese president has focused on global partnership to address problems being faced by the humanity," said Rupak Sapkota, deputy executive director of Institute of Foreign Affairs, a think tank under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Nepal. "There is no doubt, without global partnership, global challenges cannot be addressed."
Sapkota said Xi's proposal to build a community of security for the SCO is "commendable" because "global peace can be achieved only by accommodating the security interests of all nations."
President Xi stressed a very important thing -- joint efforts to fight not just the coronavirus, but also different kinds of challenges that not only face China, but also the humankind, said Aleksey Maslov, acting director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Russia.
In his eyes, Xi's SCO speech, with a global vision, is about how "we can cooperate in the future."
For Vladimir Petrovsky, chief researcher at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the COVID-19 pandemic "has clearly shown that it is necessary to strengthen interaction within the SCO."
Petrovsky said that besides security cooperation, SCO cooperation in such fields as trade and economy, finance and investment is continuously increasing, and that needs to be further enhanced to meet growing challenges.
B.R. Deepak, chairperson at the Center of Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies at the New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University, noted that to deal with challenges like the pandemic and global economic recovery, Xi called for concerted efforts and collective approaches, which are important to achieving the goal of common development and shared prosperity.
