Raffaello Pantucci
RUSSI - 5 July 2016
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has become one of the
emblematic foreign policy initiatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
broader ‘Belt and Road’ vision. An ambitious and wide-ranging investment
project, the CPEC offers Pakistan a way through a number of its biggest
problems – including domestic power supply, lack of infrastructure, and
parts of the country that are underdeveloped – while giving China
strategic port access to the Indian Ocean and creating a corridor to
external markets for the underdeveloped southern part of the Xinjiang
Uighur Autonomous Region.
Yet earlier this year, the Chinese
Embassy in Islamabad was put in the awkward position of having to
formally distance itself from acrimonious internal political wrangling
within Pakistan around the CPEC. In a pattern that is likely to repeat
itself elsewhere as China continues to try to turn the ‘Belt and Road’
concept into a reality, Beijing is finding that it is unable to simply
sidestep local entanglements and plead non-interference. Pakistan may
prove to be a testing ground to see whether China can avoid local
entanglements as the Xi administration seeks to advance its vision for a
network of global trade corridors under the ‘Belt and Road’ rubric.
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