Pakistan Can’t Afford China’s ‘Friendship’

[Jungibaaz]

The World Bank says that Pakistan's "ability to maximize the benefits of CPEC will require ancillary investments and reforms by the provinces to ensure that the private sector can respond to the opportunities presented." That can't be done unless the information on CPEC dealing is made public.

Thanks for the report, I'll read through the CPEC related parts when I have time. And I agree with this assessment, I said something very similar in a lengthy discussion I had elsewhere.

Not quite. She points out that IF Gwadar is to compete with the Chabahar route THEN etc. etc. Since such connections aren't in the plan, CPEC's main competition, as I see it, is the sea route from China's southeast ports.

But that's irrelevant, it doesn't matter what stage of development Chabahar is at or how successful it is, it cannot compete with the primary demands of Gwadar which are Pakistan centric and China centric via Pakistan. Also, I think you've confused the issue here again, CPEC as a whole isn't just a trade route. Gwadar + infrastructure links to Kashgar through Pakistan are the trade routes to China that as you said compete with the sea route through South East Asia. CPEC as a whole also contains a network of road and rail infrastructure that spans all of Pakistan's major population centres and they don't have much to do with trade intended for China. The energy projects and agriculture have nothing to do with trade routes at all, they're just a desperate need of ours in Pakistan that also provides an investment opportunity for the Chinese.

So maybe you can see why I take issue with the way Christine Fair has presented these concepts. She's confused them in her own mind. It only takes a few hours of research to know these minor distinctions.


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edit: Also, @Solomon2. If you'd like to learn a bit more from my perspective what people often misunderstand about CPEC. Have a look at this thread I made a while back.

Just read the first half, and ignore the route alignment controversy part.

Here are some of initial MoUs signed by our government with the Chinese. They've been changed and expanded upon since, but they pretty much illustrate how different just Gwadar port and trade routes are from CPEC overall:

https://www.dawn.com/news/1177129/details-of-agreements-signed-during-xis-visit-to-pakistan

Also, another point to make on the finances of CPEC, Moody's one of the major credit ratings agencies, describes these projects as 'credit positive':

https://www.moodys.com/research/Moo...h-and-reduction-in-fiscal-deficits--PR_366262

They take an even more optimistic view than I have.

 

[Imad.Khan]

As soon as i saw the author was Christine Fair, i know its not worth to waste my time.

 

[Radio Mirchi]

I think this is Christine Fair's article: link


ARGUMENT
Pakistan Can’t Afford China’s ‘Friendship’
Pakistan's elites think Chinese cash can save the country. They're wrong.
BY C. CHRISTINE FAIR | JULY 3, 2017, 9:00 AM

Abbottabad, PAKISTAN: Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Major General Liu Minjiang (C) and Pakistani Major General Mohsin Kamal (behind flag) stand during the opening ceremony of the ten day Pakistan-China anti-terrorist military exercise in Abbottabad, 11 December 2006. More than 200 Chinese troops headed to Pakistan's mountainous northern region at the start of the first ever joint military exercise held here by the two allies. AFP PHOTO/Aamir QURESHI (Photo credit should read AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images)


Photo Credit: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

An Observation:
While the chinese flag is hoisted at the top of pole, why pakistani flag is hoisted at half mast??
Isn't it insulting?

 

[jaydee]

How can you be sure about that? It's secret, remember?

None of your business.

 

[Thorough Pro]

her real name is Christian Unfair

Even Orya Maqbool Jan(Pakistanis know what I'm talking about) has more credibility then Christine Fair.

 

[Trango Towers]

If you want to attack the academic personally, you have to destroy her arguments first. Fail, and what she writes can be accepted and your opinion relegated to the circular file.

Who cares what she writes. Everyone thinks Pakistan has terrorists running all over the country yet our side of the border is all but fine and Afghanistan is festering with activity yet the whole of NATO does nothing and these journalists are worried for Pakistan's welfare wrt CPEC. Fact there are so many negative articles shows they know it's going to be a success

 

[Clutch]

I think this is Christine Fair's article: link


ARGUMENT
Pakistan Can’t Afford China’s ‘Friendship’
Pakistan's elites think Chinese cash can save the country. They're wrong.
BY C. CHRISTINE FAIR | JULY 3, 2017, 9:00 AM

Abbottabad, PAKISTAN: Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Major General Liu Minjiang (C) and Pakistani Major General Mohsin Kamal (behind flag) stand during the opening ceremony of the ten day Pakistan-China anti-terrorist military exercise in Abbottabad, 11 December 2006. More than 200 Chinese troops headed to Pakistan's mountainous northern region at the start of the first ever joint military exercise held here by the two allies. AFP PHOTO/Aamir QURESHI (Photo credit should read AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images)


In recent months, the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has left Pakistanis emboldened, Indians angry, and U.S. analysts worried. Ostensibly, CPEC will connect Pakistan to China’s western Xinjiang province through the development of vast new transportation and energy infrastructure. The project is part of China’s much-hyped Belt and Road Initiative, a grand, increasingly vague geopolitical plan bridging Eurasia that China’s powerful President Xi Jinping has promoted heavily.

Pakistani and Chinese officials boast that CPEC will help address Pakistan’s electricity generation problem, bolster its road and rail networks, and shore up the economy through the construction of special economic zones. But these benefits are highly unlikely to materialize. The project is more inclined to leave Pakistan burdened with unserviceable debt while further exposing the fissures in its internal security.

Pakistan and China often speak of their “all-weather friendship,” but the truth is that the relationship has always been a cynical one. China cultivated Pakistan as a client through the provision of military assistance; diplomatic and political cover in the U.N. Security Council; and generous loan aid in an effort to counter both American influence and the system of anti-Communist Western treaty alliances. China also sought to embolden Pakistan to harangue India, but not to the point of war because that would expose the hard limits of Chinese support. Despite Pakistan’s boasts of iron-clad Chinese support, when Pakistan went to war with India in 1965, 1971, and 1999, China did little or nothing to bail out its client in distress.

During the 1971 war, when India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war in its Bengali-dominated eastern wing, President Richard Nixon requested China move troops along its eastern border with India to intimidate India and stave off Pakistan’s defeat. However, China declined to undertake even this modest effort to preclude India from vivisecting Pakistan. East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh in 1971. In a nod to Pakistan, China refused to recognize Bangladesh until August 1975, even after Pakistan did so in February 1974.

There’s little reason to think China has made a sudden conversion to altruism when it comes to CPEC. The project originated in 2013, when the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, and Pakistan’s then-president, Asif Ali Zardari, agreed to build an economic corridor between the two countries. The project inched closer to fruition in 2014, when Pakistan’s President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif traveled to China on different occasions to further discussions. In November 2014, the Chinese government announced that it would finance $46 billion in energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan as part of CPEC. In September 2016, China announced a new loan deal for CPEC valued at $51.6 billion. In November 2016, part of CPEC became “operational” when products were moved by truck from China and loaded onto ships at Pakistan’s port Gwador along the Makran coast for markets in West Asia and Africa. After this major development, China declared that it would increase its investmentagain to $62 billion in April.

Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership alike have told the public that CPEC will solve Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages, improve an aging road and rail infrastructure, provide a fillip to Pakistan’s economy, knit an increasingly pariah state to a new Chinese-led geopolitical order, and diminish the role of the much-reviled United States in the region. CPEC has the bonus of irritating the Indians because it strengthens Pakistan’s hold on territory in Jammu and Kashmir that it snatched in the 1947-48 war as well as portions of that territory that Pakistan subsequently ceded to China in 1963 as a part of the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement. India claims these lands, currently held by Pakistan and China, and deems their occupation illegal.

Despite the bold claims made by China and Pakistan, there are many reasons to be dubious about the purported promises of CPEC. There’s already violence all along the corridor. The north-most part of CPEC is the Karakoram Highway (KKH), which gashes through the Karakoram Mountain Range to connect Kashgar in Xinjiang with Pakistan’s troubled province of Gilgit-Baltistan. Xinjiang is in the throes of a slow-burning insurgency by the Muslim Uighur minority against the Communist state. Gilgit-Baltistan, a Shiite-majority polity under the thumb of a Sunni-dominated Pakistan, is part of the above-noted contested territory of Jammu-Kashmir. Here, geology and weather further limit CPEC. The Karakoram Highway, a narrow road weaving through perilous mountains, can’t bear heavy traffic. Expanding the KKH will not be easy. Residents of Gilgit-Baltistan worry about the environmental costs in relation to the few benefits they will enjoy. There have been episodic protests, which the Pakistani government has ruthlessly put down. Meanwhile, Gwador is experiencing a prolonged drought, frustrating the project while the four extant desalination plants remain idle.

In the south, CPEC is anchored to the port at Gwador in Pakistan’s insurgency-riven Balochistan province. The local Baloch people deeply resent the plan because it will fundamentally change the demography of the area. Before the expansion of Gwadar, the population of the area was 70,000. If the project comes to full fruition the population would be closer to 2 million — most of whom would be non-Baloch. Many poor Baloch have already been displaced from the area. Since construction has begun, there have been numerous attacks against Chinese personnel, among other workers.

There’s also the stubborn problem of economic competitiveness. For CPEC to be more competitive than the North-South Corridor that is rooted to the Iranian port of Chabahar, Gwador needs to offer a safer and shorter route from the Arabian Sea to Central Asia. For that to happen, Gwador needs to be connected by road to the Afghan Ring Road in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, which is under sustained attacks by the Afghan Taliban. Alternatively, a new route could connect Gwador with the border crossing at Torkham (near Peshawar) by traveling up Balochistan, with its own active ethnic insurgency, through or adjacent to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is the epicenter of Islamist terrorism and insurgency throughout Pakistan. It takes great faith — or idiocy, or greed, or all of the above — to believe that this is possible.

All of these issues raise salient questions about the real utility of this unfolding fiasco. If CPEC is not an economically viable route for actual commerce, what purpose does it serve? Analyst Andrew Small, among others, has argued that CPEC is, in reality, a redundant supply route for China should it face an embargo during a military conflict. It’s also possible that if the port at Gwador is not economically sustainable the real goal is the creation of a Chinese naval outpost. Many in India, Pakistan’s historic rival, have also come to this conclusion. They may well be correct, according to recent Chinese reports indicating that China may “expand its marine corps and may station new marine brigades in Gwadar.”

While the benefits to transit may be illusory, it is possible that Pakistan could benefit from purportedly low-hanging fruit, including the much-lauded economic zones and power plants. Pakistan does struggle with power shortages. But its problem is not a lack of supply, rather the complex issue of “circular debt” referring to the accumulating unpaid bills of the power sector; the theft of power through illegal connections, meter tampering, and other means; and an inadequate transmission system. Meanwhile, Pakistanis have learned that the current Chinese development model will do little for their economy. China prefers to use its own companies and employees rather than hire locally.

Pakistani citizens also have no way to know what CPEC will cost them. Neither government has been clear about what projects are part of the plan. Costing has been completely opaque. China sets the price, contracts the work out to Chinese companies, and saddles Pakistan with the loans. Given the ongoing security threats on Chinese nationals in Pakistan, Islamabad is raising a CPEC Protection Force, the costs of which will be passed on to Pakistani citizens. The State Bank of Pakistan has repeatedly called for more transparency, to no avail. Astonishingly, according to the Pakistani daily The Dawn, “Despite the frantic activity, Islamabad had yet to determine the expected cost and benefit, expressed in monetary terms, of the mega project.” And that’s before factoring in other costs such as the cultural and religious tensions between Chinese and Pakistanis, although there’s been a public relations push by both governments to downplay them.

Recently, The Dawn claimed to have accessed the alleged CPEC “master plan,” drawn up by the China Development Bank and the National Development Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China. It suggests that CPEC is really about agriculture, an issue that had not previously been discussed in the extensive media coverage of the plan. As part of the overall project, thousands of acres of productive agricultural land will be leased to the Chinese for “demonstration projects” for newly developed seed varieties and irrigation technology. Chinese companies will be the primary beneficiaries of these initiatives.

Pakistanis should be worried about the way CPEC is shaping up. If it is even partially executed, Pakistan would be indebted to China as never before. And unlike Pakistan’s other traditional allies, such as the United States, China will probably use its leverage to obtain greater compliance from its problematic client. China is particularly concerned about the Islamist militant groups active among China’s Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang. Uigher militant groups have long shared ties with groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of which have been patronized by the Pakistani state, such as the Afghan Taliban. China has used religious and political oppression, along with crude violence, to eviscerate the Islamist revival among Xinjiang’s Uighers and has counted on Pakistan to give China political cover while doing so. In taking on Chinese debt, Pakistan may also risk severely worsening its already critical relations with India, which has been watching the CPEC drama unfold with growing alarm. In the north, CPEC continues to make permanent the Pakistani and Chinese grip on territory India claims. In the south, Chinese naval vessels may dock in the deep port of Gwador, threatening New Delhi in the Arabian Sea. In normal times, this would be a serious concern for the United States — but Washington is so distracted by the chaos of the Trump administration that the issue has gone largely under the radar.

But the news may not be all bad. For China to get maximal returns on its extensive investments in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan it needs stability in both countries. In recent years, China has stepped up its role in trying to negotiate peace in Afghanistan by helping to mediate between Pakistan and Afghanistan. As Pakistan’s economy becomes evermore interwoven with China’s, China may be in a position to dampen Pakistan’s worrying affinity for terrorist groups and nuclear proliferation — particularly the latter, because China enabled Pakistan’s nuclear program to begin with. If China took on the responsibility of managing Pakistan, Washington might be happy to wash its hands of the problem and let the civilians in Islamabad and the uniformed men in Rawalpindi stab someone else in the back for a change.

Photo Credit: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

Are you a pakistani? I ask because on your avatar you have Israel's flag and Pakistan's flag however all your posts are anti-Islam and Anti-Pakistan and all are pro-Israel.

Now I don't care about the Pro-Israel posts because I am of the opinion Pakistan's recognition of Israel is good for Pakistan... but why all the Anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam posts?... at least take off the Pakistani flag from your avatar... be who you are not a hypocrite.

@Solomon2

Pakistan has been China friend since the 1950s.... Over 60 years.... It's been affording it all this time..

 

[lastofthepatriots]

Jin Ki jaal ti he, uni jaal ne do.

 

[Advocate Pakistan]

Soviets or umreekan never made us to fight their wars.

The 1971 war as much Soviet's war as India. Soviet intelligence cooperation in instigating insurgency is no secret. Unfortunately, I have always met Indians that either believe in their Government's propaganda or need spoon feeding for finding out any clues.
As far as the Americans are concerned, they have very different modus operandi, they will make you believe yourself as the mightiest, and when you have lost your senses owing to the "presumed power", you'll be doing their dirty job soon as is evident from your cozying up with U.S. allies in the western Pacific.

An Observation:
While the chinese flag is hoisted at the top of pole, why pakistani flag is hoisted at half mast??
Isn't it insulting?

No, it is being hoisted. The picture is from an exercise. The flag is sometimes raised with the national anthem. The Chinese anthem might be done. The Pakistani might be underway.
Do you really think that we have done all the exercise over the past 70 years to become a colony again. If so, than Indian media has succeeded.

 

[xyxmt]

If you want to attack the academic personally, you have to destroy her arguments first. Fail, and what she writes can be accepted and your opinion relegated to the circular file.

there is a big difference between Acadamia and Bullimia, if someone only sees everything negative about a country then its not acadamia it bullimia.

 

[python-000]

another impressive propaganda against CPEC & Pak-China friendship

 

[Pandora]

If you want to attack the academic personally, you have to destroy her arguments first. Fail, and what she writes can be accepted and your opinion relegated to the circular file.

It is an OPINION PIECE written by CHRISTINE FAIR. You still needs an argument over this piece of horse shit of an article? Are you that naive ?

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

In fairness to the author, she doesn't actually write that in the article.

A number of U.S. magazines and newspapers have their editors headline their writer's articles and I think FP is one of these. It grabs eyeballs but it's not really fair to the reader.

You'll have to be specific.

Sure.. Last time I heard her interview... The biatch was talking about bombing civilian infrastructure like bridges n tunnels... And joking about dead Pakistani civilians.

So Fuk her n you

An Observation:
While the chinese flag is hoisted at the top of pole, why pakistani flag is hoisted at half mast??
Isn't it insulting?

Because the flag is in the process of hoisting during a military exercise..

 

[Solomon2]

It is an OPINION PIECE written by CHRISTINE FAIR. You still needs an argument over this piece of horse shit of an article? Are you that naive ?

her real name is Christian Unfair

Sure.. Last time I heard her interview... The biatch was talking about bombing civilian infrastructure like bridges n tunnels... And joking about dead Pakistani civilians. So Fuk her n you.

Christine and her gang of Pakistan bashers should be happy if Pakistan won’t be able to afford this friendship.In worst case scenario Pakistan will break up and that should make her ilk happy. So it is none of their business what we do with our country.

When pigs fly we will dance with joy
Christine Fair is the maiden fairy
Always neutral and a bit fluffy
She hates Pakistan but loves Curry

Dr. C.C. Fair's response to all sexist critics.​