When it comes to debts, Islamabad should consider that Beijing may be a less sympathetic creditor than the West.
Since being officially launched by Chinese President Xi in April 2015, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has attracted some $25 billion investment into Pakistan’s roads, ports, power plants and fibre optic cables. Given the power imbalance between China and Pakistan and also Beijing’s reputation for an unswerving focus on its own national interests, it has been widely assumed that China was always going to secure the most benefits. In some respects, it has. The terms of specific deals have been so beneficial to China that Pakistan will face a major challenge repaying the debts it is amassing. Not only that, in some cases China has apparently even brought in its own prisoners as a workforce rather than providing Pakistanis with much-needed jobs. But a major new study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has suggested that Pakistan has also enjoyed some success in securing its objectives in relation to CPEC. Perhaps it should not be such a surprise. After all, for many decades Pakistan has outmanoeuvred successive United States administrations, securing huge quantities of aid whilst not changing its national security policies of building a nuclear bomb and supporting pro-state violent jihadists. The Carnegie report suggests that China too has discovered that when you deal with Pakistan, it is not all one-way traffic. When CPEC first got underway, Nawaz Sharif wanted China to focus on the energy projects that had been a key feature of his 2013 election manifesto. To some extent, this suited Beijing too. After all, if it was to relocate factories to Pakistan, it would need the energy to supply them.
