Shanghai Cooperation Organization An Effective Pattern Of Harmonious Periphery To Face China’s Security Problems In Central Asia

The end of the Cold War in the90s disrupted the old patterns of political power and led to the creation of a new international scenario where new actors, state and non-state ones, could act on.This historical event led China to re-think its diplomacy and strengthen its already growing integration and influence in world affairs.During the last decade, China started to elaborate a new strategy on which basing its foreign policies in the new international scenario.The formulation of a New Diplomacy focused on the concepts of Harmonious World and New Security signed for China the beginning of a new phase of diplomatic activism, particularly developed in its relations with the peripheral regions, renamed Good-neighbourhood diplomacy. A region on which Chinese authorities paid special attention for the realization of this concept has been Central Asia.Great debates aroused all over the world centring around the nature and the effectiveness of this new diplomatic approach, especially if compared to the one of the United States.Interested in developing the studies around China’s diplomatic action towards its neighbours, the research analysed the peculiar form it took in its relations with Central Asian countries and Russia as built into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and, in particular, its effectiveness in dealing with the regional threats posed to China security.The research, first developed on a theoretical basis, helped clarify the concepts embedded in the new diplomatic approach and the way they have been applied to China’s general peripheral diplomacy of Good-neighbourhood.From this initial analysis, the new diplomacy appears as the theoretical basis used by China to shape its relations with the neighbouring countries and as an effective tool that allowed China to be regarded by its neighbours as a good citizen and an effective mainstay of East Asia’s diplomatic architecture.A further analysis, carried out from an historical perspective, examined the specific security threats posed to China’s territorial integrity and unity by Central Asia and how they affected the construction of the SCO’s security mechanism as shaped on the new diplomatic approach.Specifically, the difficult relationship between the Uyghurs’Xinjiang ethnic minority and China’s government and its worsening in conjunction with the end of the Cold War and the consequent establishment of the Central Asian republics, together with the border disputes’issue turns out to be the reasons for China to push for the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose Shanghai Spirit and documents made of it a specific model of China’s harmonious periphery diplomacy towards Central Asia.A special analysis of the documents and activities of SCO, products of the form of cooperation fostered by the new Chinese diplomacy, has been useful to assess to what extent the new diplomatic formula has been effective in dealing with security threats in Central Asia.The Agreement on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions and the Agreement on Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions, products of the initial cooperation among these countries under the Shanghai Five, SCO forerunner, framework, specifically, turned out to have contributed to solve China’s border disputes and, therefore, to have fostered the creation of a good and collaborative atmosphere that is, in turn, evidence of the effectiveness of the new diplomacy as applied to a specific region. The Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism in2001, the establishment of a regional anti-terrorism structure (RATS) capable of speedy intervention in Central Asia and the building of joint military exercises turned out, on the one hand, to have increased SCO anti-terrorism cooperation and the support received by China to tackle it but, on the other hand, to have been criticized as arbitrary instruments to crackdown on Uyghurs thus preventing to give a unilateral and clear assessment of their effectiveness in tackling the second threat posed to China by the so-called three evil force.