BEIJING, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The Shanghai Spirit, initiated and followed through by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members, is essential in promoting win-win cooperation and bringing more certainty to the world.

Featuring mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for diversity of civilizations and pursuit of common development, the Shanghai Spirit is considered the source of the SCO's strong vitality and momentum of cooperation.

As a comprehensive regional cooperation organization that covers the largest area and population in the world, the SCO is expected to be developed into a model organization highlighting unity and mutual trust, sharing of weal and woe, mutual benefit, as well as inclusiveness and mutual learning.

When such a group is eyeing on a closer community with a shared future, the world has the reason to believe that peace and development remain an irreversible trend of the times.

The SCO has eight member states, four observer states and six dialogue partners. Despite differences in social systems, ideologies and cultural backgrounds, the SCO members count on each other's understanding and support on major issues that affect their respective core interests.

Transcending outdated concepts such as clash of civilizations, Cold War mentality and zero-sum game, the SCO has served as a good example of a new type of international relations against the backdrop of rising unilateralism and increasing threats to the international order.

With a priority on regional security and stability, the SCO has taken tough measures to crack down on terrorism, separatism and extremism, enhancing cooperation on defense security, law enforcement security and information security.

The SCO members have joined hands to increase complementarity of their respective development strategies and promote free trade.

This serves as another example that in the current world where countries' interests and future are so interconnected, the pursuit of cooperation for mutual benefit represents a surging trend.

The SCO members have been supporting the multilateral trading system so as to build an open world economy, which is expected to further shore up the world's confidence in global economic development.

As one of the SCO's initiators and founders, China has been playing a major role in the development of the organization.

It has been sharing experience in state governance with other SCO members, which are either emerging economies or developing countries, to achieve common development and prosperity, showing its sense of international responsibility.

With a focus on deepening the synergy between development strategies of individual countries and regional cooperation initiatives, the SCO has kept scaling up cooperation in trade, investment, connectivity, energy, innovation and people-to-people exchanges.

The SCO members will keep carrying forward the Shanghai Spirit, facilitate a deeper and more practical all-round cooperation, boost fresh development from a new starting point and make further contributions to building a community with shared future for humanity.