Adversary Intelligence — 2026-09-14

Chinese Ambassador Urges SCO Countries to Increase Intelligence Sharing and Joint Exercises

BLUFBeijing is leveraging the SCO's stalled security architecture to position itself as the bloc's intelligence-cooperation hub across Central and South Asia while other major members remain distracted.

Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui, writing in an article for TASS, called on Shanghai Cooperation Organisation members to increase intelligence sharing and strengthen security and law-enforcement cooperation mechanisms 1. Zhang said members should regularly hold joint exercises and drills and called for activating four SCO security centers covering transnational crime, information security, counter-narcotics, and broader threat response 2. The ambassador linked the appeal to remarks by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the SCO summit held in Bishkek on August 31-September 1, where Xi said the organization should assume "historical responsibility" in shaping global governance and advancing a multipolar world 13. Zhang also cited cyber, food, and energy security along with environmental challenges as threats requiring collective response 2.

Analysis
Zhang's op-ed reads less as policy announcement than as Beijing's push to convert the SCO's four dormant security centers, covering transnational crime, information security, counter-narcotics and broader threats, into a functioning intelligence-sharing mechanism, explicitly tied to Xi's Bishkek call for the bloc to assume "historical responsibility" in global governance. That positions China as the SCO's principal institutional driver at a moment when Russia's war footing and India-Pakistan tensions leave other members little bandwidth for new commitments, and activated centers would hand Beijing a formal channel over crime, cyber and counter-narcotics cooperation spanning Central and South Asia. Reporting rests solely on Zhang's TASS op-ed, republished without independent sourcing by Mail.ru, Rambler, and DID, yielding single-source consensus at low reliability. The appeal may instead reflect a recurring genre of ambassadorial rhetoric timed to summits rather than a substantive shift in China's SCO security posture.

4 sources