Our FRIENDSHIP with China is beyond your comprehension, it has always been a mutual affair.
The ignorance of our "friendly neighbors " of history of the Sino-Pak relationship is amusing :
In the early 1960s, China was under brutal sanctions, denied a membership of the United Nations , was under a US naval blockade on its east coast and had a huge military buildup of the Soviet Union threatening its Western borders. A drought had resulted in a failure of the harvest and food stocks were depleted and the threat of famine loomed.
It was then that Pakistan defying international sanctions sent food to China. Pakistan also sent medicines, fruit, & sugar and whatever else it could send . The quantities were small and the assistance was almost symbolic but China appreciated and remembered Pakistan's help.
More importantly this was a time when China was under the threat of military aggression from both the Soviet Union, USA and India. China's air space in the east was under constant violation by the ROC Air Force. It's coastal islands always under attack by ROC special forces .
With the Soviet Union cutting off China's access in the west, the only countries with open borders with China were North Korea and Pakistan. North Korea itself was under a heavy threat with constant air space violations by South Korean aircraft , special forces raids by US and South Korean forces and sporadic shelling. There was also Vietnam but that country was itself divided into North and South and in a state of a disastrous war.
Pakistan remained China's only ally that was militarily strong enough to hold its borders; specifically the region of Kashmir under its control which bordered China.
It was then that Pakistan took a historic step of adjusting its borders with China, ceding territory to enable the building of roads and communications links. which was to a mutual advantage against a common enemy. An engineering challenge and feat, the Karakoram highway was first intended as a basic link between Pakistan and China crossing the mountains.
The Karakoram Highway has blossomed as the CPEC today far beyond anything either China or Pakistan had envisaged at that time.
With a $20 b trade, military interoperability, co-development of military hardware, and development of the port of Gwadar, the Pakistan China relationship continues to grow .
It all started with a few symbolic bags of rice, and some army surveyors in the cold icy heights of the Karakoram range shaking
hands 60 years back.
It was the most strategic decision Pakistan could ever have made. Likewise for China this link up has far reaching consequences for its economic, and diplomatic outreach to the Persian Gulf countries and the security of its energy supplies.
www.forbes.com
