The SCO Samarkand Summit advanced the procedure to admit Iran as a member state, and it launched the procedure for Belarus' accession.

Wang said the summit once again demonstrated the vitality, unity and charm of the Shanghai Spirit, and the group's expansion is living proof that the SCO is not a closed and exclusive "small circle", but an open and inclusive "big family".

Xu Bu, president of the China Institute of International Studies, dismissed some Western analysts' calling the SCO the "NATO of the East", saying that "such a definition is misinterpreting, and even smearing the SCO".

"The SCO pursues no alignment, no confrontation and no targeting of any third party, making it a comprehensive regional grouping that covers the largest land area and amount of people in the world," Xu said.

"The grouping is open and inclusive, and its expansion will boost its participation in global and regional governance. Also, most SCO members are developing countries, and economic development is their top priority, so their collaboration aims at common development," Xu added.

Arhama Siddiqa, a research fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad in Pakistan, said that this year's summit was "the first in-person meeting" of the post-pandemic era.

"The fact that President Xi chose the SCO platform for his international trip shows how much importance he attributes to the organization and simultaneously to the Central Asian republics, especially in terms of building infrastructure globally and increasing connectivity and trade," she said.

Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, said as the SCO becomes a melting pot of human exchanges and interactions, "it is also becoming a pool of attraction much beyond the region".

"That's why we're seeing so many observer states at the SCO," he said.

Defense is still an important focus of the SCO with regard to dealing with extremism, terrorism and separatism, and the organization strives to ensure that those forces are completely squashed and don't rise again, he said, adding that "the SCO has moved from this defensive focus ... and has a very positive agenda of indivisible multilateral cooperation".

"The SCO has huge promise. It is showing that promise, and it has become a pool of attraction within the international system," he said.