BEIJING - The 13th meeting of the Heads of Government Council of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will be held in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, on Monday. Established in 2001, the SCO has moved smoothly toward establishing a community of common destiny in the region.

In Astana, visiting Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and other SCO heads of government will sum up the developments of the SCO cooperation in various areas in the past year, mull the opportunities and challenges facing the bloc, review the implementation of the consensuses of the Dushanbe summit and formulate the organization's further development program.

Observers say that over the past 13 years the SCO has developed steadily and become an increasingly strong and important force in the world and that the upcoming meeting will inject new impetus into the grouping's development.

Since its founding, the SCO has committed to boosting all members' reciprocal cooperation and promoting the bloc's mechanism construction with a long-term view. The organization has entered a fast track of expanding pragmatic cooperation and grown into an integral part of the Eurasian security system.

At the SCO summit in Beijing in June 2012, its member states adopted a wide range of important documents, including the Strategic Plan for the Medium-Term Development of the SCO, the Declaration on Building a Region with Lasting Peace and Common Prosperity, and the SCO Regulations on Political and Diplomatic Measures and Mechanism of Response to Events Jeopardizing Regional Peace, Security and Stability, which greatly deepened the members' collaboration in a variety of fields, clarified the cooperation priorities in the future and concrete measures to this end.

During his visit to Central Asia in September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward a series of initiatives for strengthening practical cooperation among the SCO member states, which have been echoed very positively by the SCO members.