Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s affirmation that Pak-China friendship was ‘higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the oceans’ may be a somewhat worn expression, but is certainly not a worn sentiment. Mr Sharif went to the heart of the matter when he said that CPEC II would bring about Pakistan’s transformation. He made this statement the same day as Foreign Office spokeswoman Mumtaz Baluch rejected the report on a website that Pakistan was giving Gwadar as a naval base to China. While Mr Sharif was addressing the economic impact of the relationship, Ms Baluch addressed the geostrategic aspect of the relationship.
Mr Sharif made his remarks at the event hosted (a little prematurely) by the Chinese Embassy to mark the 75th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, and they encapsulated much. China’s Brick and Road Initiative has as its centrepoint CPEC. Now that CPEC I is nearing completion, CPEC II is in the pipeline, to take Pakistan’s economy into the phase of development. A series of industrial zones, a high-speed railway and a second port should help catapult the country into the kind of prosperity that China itself enjoys. From a geostrategic point of view, this will also be the first time ever that the Chinese will have a presence, albeit a peaceful one, across the Indus. The implications for India’s hegemonistic designs and the USA’s confrontation with China are immense. One of them is a sneaking suspicion among US circles that China seeks naval bases, and that one of them is Gwadar. China so far has only one naval base outside the mainland, and that is in Djibouti, allowing the Chinese Navy to operate freely around the Horn of Africa, protecting transcontinental shipping lanes. US experts fear that the Chinese wants other bases in the Indian and Pacific Ocean for any impending clash or confrontation with the US Navy, presumably backed by its QUAD partners, India, Australia and Japan, in the South China Sea.
Pakistan does not want to spoil relations with the USA, but it has to be realized that it is too important a nation to be taken for granted with such impunity. The USA has not contributed towards Pakistani economic development beyond a voice in multilateral institutions which have merely got Pakistan more firmly in a debt trap. It may not have given China any bases, even though as if it is not that it gave the USA bases when it invaded Afghanistan.
