China This Week | A summit and a parade, and how the world views China

Among the guests at the September 3 parade was Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. A day later, China and Pakistan jointly issued a 2025-2029 action plan “to foster an even closer China-Pakistan community with a shared future in the new era.”

In other news, key US security agencies named Chinese state-sponsored cyber threat actors as “targeting networks globally,” including telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks.

Here is a closer look at these developments:

1. Culmination of China’s SCO presidency and a massive parade

Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to China for the SCO summit, also meeting Xi for a bilateral meeting on Sunday (August 31). In last week’s tracker, we noted the highlights from their talks.

Member countries of the SCO, which was established in 2001 for regional security, condemned the Pahalgam terror attack in a joint statement in Tianjin. Pakistan is also a member nation, and while the statement spoke about the need to “combat terrorism, including cross-border movement of terrorists”, it did not name the country.

UPSHOT: Photos from the event showed PM Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Xi engaging in conversation, prompting US President Donald Trump to post on Truth Social on Friday: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China”. Shortly after, however, he reaffirmed the strength of the ties with India, which Modi responded to with a post on X: “Deeply appreciate and fully reciprocate President Trump’s sentiments and positive assessment of our ties.”

The incident highlights not just the turbulence introduced by the Trump administration in the US’s relationships with other nations, but also that India seeks to maintain its longstanding practice of seeking multipolarity. This, despite its problems with China or even the US, over trade and immigration.

But there are clear limits to some of these ties, including in how PM Modi did not attend the military parade in China. In two earlier explainers, we wrote about the history behind the parade and why the show of power was significant.

2. Pakistan-China action plan signed

The full text of the action plan mentioned that Sharif also met the Chinese Premier, Li Qiang. “The two sides recalled that China and Pakistan are good neighbors connected by mountains and rivers, good friends… and good brothers sharing weal and woe.”

The document further said, “It was reiterated that any attempt to disrupt or undermine the strategic cooperative partnership is bound to fail… The Chinese side reiterated that the China-Pakistan relationship is of special significance in China’s foreign policy. The Pakistani side underscored that the Pakistan-China relationship is the cornerstone of its foreign policy.”

UPSHOT: There is little to indicate that the strategic Pakistan-China relationship will lose relevance for either country anytime soon, despite the questionable sustainability of China’s continued investments into Pakistani infra projects, and terror attacks by Pakistani groups on Chinese workers in the country.

As China analyst Andrew Small wrote in his 2015 book, The China Pakistan Axis, “Pakistan is a central part of China’s transition from a regional power to a global one,” based on their common goal of countering Indian influence.

“For Pakistan, China is the best potential ticket out of instability and economic weakness, the greatest hope that a region contemplating a security vacuum after the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan can instead become an integral part of a new Silk Road. China has been Pakistan’s diplomatic protector, its chief arms supplier, and its call of last resort when every other supposed friend has left it in the lurch,” he wrote.

3. Behind China’s cybersecurity strategy

Several key US agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), released a document recently. It said that the “People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber threat actors are targeting networks globally… While these actors focus on large backbone routers of major telecommunications providers… they also leverage compromised devices and trusted connections to pivot into other networks.”

It mentioned the likes of Salt Typhoon, a persistent threat actor believed to be linked to China. Interestingly, the document was also co-signed by agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, and other countries.

UPSHOT: Chinese cyberattacks have been frequently reported over the years, across the world. Dakota Cary, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, told NPR in July that it stemmed from large-scale investments that the government made more than a decade ago into its digital capabilities.

The reasons for these attacks range from monitoring diaspora members and Chinese-origin dissidents, as well as the strategic aims of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). While many countries are known to conduct such operations, Cary said China was unique in its “economic model” for it.

“We’ve not seen other countries kind of put out a wish list of information and then just pay people who are willing to come forward with that information… China is unique among countries in their ability to operationalize stolen intellectual property into their economy,” she added. The IP issue is something that China hawks in the US have long cited as an example of its unfair trade practices.