India’s China Challenge by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-04-01T13:09:57+00:00

New Old Friends

‘Chun chi xiang yi’, or ‘as close as lips and teeth’, was how Mao Zedong once described China’s close relationship with North Korea. For decades, North Korea was China’s only ally, but in Beijing today, there is a new epithet that is the flavour of the moment for strategic affairs experts: ‘Ba tie’, or ‘iron brother’ Pakistan. When Mao’s People’s Liberation Army marched into the restive Muslim-majority region on China’s western frontier in 1949, the Chairman decided to christen the People’s Republic’s newest province as Xinjiang, literally meaning ‘new frontier’ – a historical name used intermittently for China’s borderlands. Today, for many in Beijing, Pakistan is the new ‘new frontier’.

If the twenty-year-old blueprint envisioned by China and Pakistan comes to fruition, Beijing will soon have a say in many facets of the Pakistani economy. A leaked draft master plan that was published in June 2017 by Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper underlined the extent to which China plans to involve itself in Pakistan’s economy. Besides roads, power projects and dams, which make up most of the investment, Chinese firms will even take up agricultural land as well as build tourism and cultural projects.¹

Today, Chinese companies are building and managing the country’s key transport networks, from national highways to Lahore’s metro rail. China has bought a stake in Pakistan’s stock exchange. It is building Pakistan’s power sector – coal plant by coal plant – and will eventually, many experts believe, determine how much Pakistani citizens pay their government for electricity.

Ties between China and Pakistan go back to the early 1960s, a relationship forged in their mutual animosity towards India in the wake of their respective wars – a relationship that, as one Indian official at the time put it, was ‘united in a strange marriage of convenience’.² But the lofty rhetoric often used by China and Pakistan to describe their relations as ‘higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the oceans, and sweeter than honey’ has not often been matched by reality. This was a relationship forged in the heights of the Karakoram Highway in the 1960s – when the two countries battled a common enemy, India – and one that has historically had immense strategic value, with China offering Pakistan missiles and aircraft, and both illicitly helping the other’s nuclear programmes.

Since then, both governments, and particularly their militaries, have developed close relations. China has bolstered up Pakistan as a counterweight to India in South Asia, most notably through its continuing support of the country’s nuclear programme. Ties remained close, but somewhat faded to the background as the US began leaning heavily on Pakistan for its war in Afghanistan, emerging as its biggest financial donor after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

This also coincided with Beijing more carefully balancing its relations with India. As China’s economy lifted off in the 1990s, caution and self-interest, rather than romanticism, began dictating its approach to a neighbour whose periodic descents into chaos were viewed warily across the Khunjerab pass. This was all the more evident after

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