This paper examines some of the ways in which language was pivotal to the construction of Shanghai spirit, an idiom that has been employed to capture multilateral cooperation between China, Russia, and the independent Central Asian states since 1996. In 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was designed for widespread cooperation in a globalizing world, a goal transferred via a lexicon of cooperation that fearured its formal statements and communiqués: “good neighbourliness”; “win–win”; “mutually beneficial and comprehensive cooperation”; “political multipolarity”; “economic and information globalization”. But today there is disagreement between the language of cooperation and the SCO’s realizations: over the last fifteen years, SCO member states have contracted bilateral security conventions with outside countries (covering the United States), and trade between SCO countries was, and is, treated bilaterally, like Chinese and Russian investments in Central (and South) Asia. Nonetheless, the cooperation vocabulary stays notable as a space-making exercise conceiving new political configurations in a globalizing world. These novel geographical imaginaries of Eurasia have kept the promise of cooperation even if success stays restricted.