August 10, 2007 (LPAC)--Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet twice next week, both at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek, Kyrgystan, and at the SCO joint maneuvers near the Russian Ural city of Chelyabinsk, and will discuss security cooperation and joint energy projects, Voice of Russia reported today. President Hu will also visit Kazakhstan during his tour Aug. 14-18. The trip will help bring relations between China and its Central Asian neighbors into a whole new age, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Li Hui announced in Beijing yesterday. The SCO nations are to sign a "long-term good-neighbor treaty of friendship and cooperation" in Bishkek, Li said. "The treaty will confirm the SCO spirits of pursuing peace and friendship generation over generation in the form of legal document, which is of great significance to the mutual trust and mutually beneficial cooperation in central Asia."

China has already signed a bilateral Good Neighbor treaty with Russia, and with the other SCO members. However, this multilateral treaty "will have more binding force ... and lay a legal foundation for the good-neighborly ties among SCO member countries," Xinhua quoted Xu Tao, of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

As the SCO maneuvers got underway yesterday, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, Chief of the Russian General Staff, said that successful economic activities within the SCO "are impossible without building up security in the region, particularly involving the SCO military agencies in this process," Itar-Tass reported. Baluyevsky was speaking from Urumchi, China, where the SCO military leaders will meet during the maneuvers. Baluyevsky said that the SCO is not forming any military-political block, but that it is a priority to work out "conceptual foundations of military cooperation within the SCO framework." Russia has already proposed a draft policy, which must now be considered. He also said that the SCO is preparing to deal not only with terrorism, extremism, and drug trafficking, but also stressed the problems of ensuring information security "in conditions of the growing pressure on part of media outlets in some Western countries. These countries keep making attempts to persuade our peoples that so called 'truly democratic'" public institutions "on the Western pattern" must be set up, and this "contributes to the destabilization of the situation in the countries of the region," Baluyevsky said.