The Indian media has lost its dinner over the Chinese visit and has been spinning tales of Pakistan exporting terror to China. The official line taken by the Indian government is that India is not threatened by the economic corridor, as an economically-strong Pakistan would bring regional stability. The whopping $46 billion that China has committed to is a good $15 billion more than the United States has pumped into Pakistan since 2002. This is a a chilling message to India. China is going to be empowering a nuclear-armed neighbour who has made all security and economic policy in the past sixty plus years, in opposition to India. This partnership coincides with Pakistan’s increasing strategic ties with Russia. Additionally, Chinese presence in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, becomes all pervasive and powerful. Remember that India has a land dispute with China over Aksai Chin.
China wants it all to work out, but Balochistan’s lawlessness is increasing due to multiple insurgencies, with support from India. Chinese workers in Balochistsan have been targeted before and will be in the future. India is rooting for the plan to crash and burn, and we have a track record of foreign aid and investment given to the government amounting to naught. Pakistan shares a 372-mile border with Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region home to 10 million Uighurs, a largely Muslim Turkic-speaking minority, a region with sporadic outbreaks of violence between Uighurs and the majority Han population. In August 2011, officials in the region of Kashgar in southern Xinjiang claimed that Uighur militants had received training in Pakistan, and Chinese officials had pressured Pakistan to expel Uighur separatists. But with this potential problem, we must remember that Pakistan and China have no past or current disputes and a common challenger in India. It should be no surprise that China had come to Pakistan with a bag of money. In fact, had the past twenty years not been rife with terrorists and fanatics, China might have been more forthcoming and this would have happened sooner. It is China’s desire to keep clean of political complications in the region that has inhibited them from investing.
China’s decision to invest in Pakistan augments its “pivot to Asia” strategy. While the US has “pivoted” to East Asia in recent years, China has been pivoting to Central, South and West Asia since at least the mid-1990s. We are part of a grand economic scheme.