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China Moves to Bolster Pakistan Ties Amid U.S. Rapprochement

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Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica podcast network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to focus on South Asia, a lot of moving parts going on this week in particular, but we’re going to focus on the situation in Pakistan. And we’re looking for some folks to come on the show to talk about China-India relations that are also going through some very, very important changes.

But it’s been an incredibly busy week in China’s South Asia diplomacy.

It began on Monday with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arriving in New Delhi for high-level talks with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and even a very rare bilateral meeting with Narendra Modi at his residence in New Delhi.

I say rare because normally the Indian Prime Minister does not meet with a visiting foreign minister, but he’s doing so this time in part because, listen,

“the game has changed right now.”

I think a month ago, maybe two months ago, none of us had on our bingo cards that the U.S.-India relationship would implode quite the way it has. And so that has changed things for Narendra Modi, who put a lot of capital in the U.S.-India relationship, thought that he had Trump in his corner. He misread that situation. Now the dynamics with China are very different.

Also, bear in mind that Narendra Modi is going to be going up to China in about two weeks at the end of the month for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. This will be his first visit to China in seven years. And one has to assume that the talks that went on this week between Wang Yi and Narendra Modi were about potentially setting up a bilateral meeting between Xi Jinping and Modi. We don’t know. That has not been confirmed.

Very important now: after he left New Delhi, he went to Pakistan for talks with Pakistani foreign minister, Ishaq Dar. He’s going to be there for three days and participating in the sixth round of China-Pakistan strategic dialogue.

That’s going to be taking place in Islamabad. And again, we’re recording this right on the threshold of all of this movement. So you might hear some shifts in my tone. Things are moving very, very quickly.

At the end of the week, after his talks in Pakistan on the bilateral level, he’s going to be having discussions with his counterpart from Afghanistan -

Afghanistan acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who’s going to join with the Pakistani foreign minister for three-way talks on the Pakistani, Afghan, and China relationship.

There’s also talk about extending the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into Afghanistan as well.

So as you can see, lots going on there. And that’s why I’m thrilled to have back on the show someone who can help us explain everything.

I reached out to our good friend, Aram Ashraf, because I said, help, I need some assistance in understanding what’s going on. Aram, for those of you who’ve been listening to the show, may be familiar. She’s a China-Pakistan expert normally based in the United Kingdom, but today joins us on the line from Karachi.

Aram Ashraf researches China-Pakistan relations and the CPEC corridor. That’s the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. And the only scholar that we know of that does that from a vantage point of looking at gender issues in particular. She’s also writing a book now on gender and China-Pakistan security relations in the Cold War years for Bloomsbury Academic.

A very good morning to you, Aram. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

“Good afternoon from Karachi. Thank you, Ek.”

It’s wonderful to have you on the show again. As I said, lots of moving parts right now. I’m hoping that you’re going to be able to help us figure out all the different pieces and how they make sense.

As we said, let’s start maybe in India and let’s go back to the origins of where all of this kind of began earlier this year with the Pakistan-India conflict that kind of set in motion the changing dynamics that we see today.

So I’ll just refresh everybody. India and Pakistan had a brief skirmish over Kashmir. And that led to a lot of confidence in Pakistan that using Chinese military technology really helped them to even the score.

Again, a winner out of this conflict depends on who you read:

• The Pakistanis say they came out of it on top.
• The Indians say they came out of it on top. Now, Donald Trump claimed credit for settling this dispute. That really upset the Indians. That was part of the factors that came into consideration for why Donald Trump has turned on India, because he did not like the fact that they were challenging his narrative on that.

Also, there was another incident that really upset the Indians. Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was at the White House in June, and there’s been this rapprochement in U.S.-Pakistan ties.

Let’s start with all of this as the precursor for our discussion to where Wang Yi is this week. Help us understand the context for how we got here with the U.S.-Pakistan-India and China dynamic.

So it all began with a horrible, because I can only call it a horrible incident in Belgium, where civilians were targeted and killed so brutally.

But what it also represented was it revealed the change in India’s approach to terrorism within its borders, especially in the Kashmir incident.

Because their response was an attack on accusations that Pakistan was behind it, and that they would take appropriate action to deal with terrorists in Pakistan.

And the thing which attracted, to be honest, gave Pakistan a lot of leverage to a certain extent, was for the first time, India decided they did not need to prove and provide evidence for how they are linking the connection, how they’re connecting the dots.

Because for India, it was beyond the shadow of doubt, so they don’t need to convince everybody, Pakistan was behind, and it was their response.

So when India did respond, the response they did was, in the words of Pakistani air force and military, the largest ever aerial battle that both countries had seen.

The image that was presented to us was around 80 fighter jets from India standing across the border, but the aerial battle that was fought between both these countries was different in that they didn’t cross over their borders, they stayed within their respective borders.

It was the missiles that were being used, the drones, for example.

So it was something very different that we haven’t seen.

And of course, the different approaches.

So what we found from Pakistan’s side was literally every day you would have a press conference where they would try to show this was happening, this is happening.

From the Indian side, it was more or less, “we will show when the time is right.”

So that, in effect, also gave Pakistan an advantage.

Now, where it got interesting for me was when the attack by India took place, we didn’t see China in the forefront coming and supporting.

It was, both countries need to be careful what they’re doing.

We didn’t see high-level visits by Chinese officials with Pakistan.

In fact, when Ishaq Dar was first asked in a press briefing, “Would China get involved between what India and Pakistan is taking place?” he said,

“No, this is between India and Pakistan. China will not be getting involved.”

It was the same stance I saw from Pakistan when Iran had, if you remember, attacked. There was missile exchange, attacked Pakistan. That why would China get involved?

No, this is between Iran and Pakistan. We will deal.

So, there was the same thing.

However, what we did notice was when the news started breaking of Pakistan defense, and their defense from the attacks got results in the form of the so-called jets, Indian jets, coming down, that’s when we started seeing the ambassador of China being invited in the middle of the night.

And that’s when we are seeing, okay, so they’re discussing.

So, that became interesting because all of a sudden then, we saw, how did the world respond to it?

• Everybody condemned the attack on Pahalgam
• But when India responded by attacking Pakistan, we didn’t
• I think it was just Israel and maybe one more country which supported openly, diplomatically, India’s response and that they should pay
• It didn’t

The other place we saw a change was in the United Nations. When the Americans put in an appeal, so in how-to phrase, “how will UN respond to the Pahalgam attack?”

It seems, according to the Indians, it was China which came to the defense of Pakistan and watered down the letter and said,

“The guilty parties and all that, third-party influence must be involved,”

and Pakistan was not named as such.

So, they felt it softened up the deal.

Now, this was, at the time, people said it was China’s deep-seek moment.

Deep-seek, of course, is the AI company that caught up, that a lot of people felt caught up with the West and closed the gap in AI between ChatGPT, Amazon, Microsoft, and China.

And then they said that because we saw, for the first time, Chinese fighter jets, particularly the J-10s, in action. But really, what we saw was an entire battlefield ecosystem that was being used because about 81% to 82% of Pakistan’s total military procurement comes from China.

So, in this case, we see an advantage that Pakistan had in this conflict by virtue of the fact that its ground stations, its aerial surveillance, its missiles, the fighter jets, all talking the same language using Chinese technology, whereas India is piecing together Russian technology, Soviet technology, a little bit of American technology, Indian technology, all of this that is more complicated to talk with one another.

So, a very interesting moment, as you pointed out, in the use of drones, too, also something we haven’t seen. So, that was a watershed.

Let’s try and move forward a little bit and talk about how, since, I think it was Operation Sindor, since then, the politics have changed as well.

I did not expect that the U.S., which has been embittered with Pakistan for a long time since 9-11, particularly the military, feels very burned and very frustrated that they really didn’t have a good relationship after 9-11. And the fact that Osama bin Laden was found in Pakistan and relations have been rather cold and sour.

And then, all of a sudden, the army chief shows up at the White House, something that really upset India.

What do you think China was seeing when they see this? Because the Pakistan-China relationship has always been one that they’ve said is all weather. And when they see the Pakistanis now turning to the Americans and trying to repair those relations, one can only assume that folks in Beijing may not be that happy about that.

So, one of the things I started noticing was that around about the same time this, like you said, rapprochement with the U.S. was happening, the high-level visits started taking place in China. So, you would see Field Marshal Munir going up to China also. And they were concerned, “What is going on?” Because all of a sudden, as you rightly pointed out, I wrote about this, in fact. For me, it was a shock.

It was a New Year tweet by President Trump in his first time, that all of a sudden, out of the blue, it comes with:

“We’re done with Pakistan. We’re stopping all the aid. We’re stopping everything. You’re not handing over.”

I think the Pakistan military played the cards right because the timing that they handed over the individual, the Afghan they caught, when the U.S. were retreating from Afghanistan, you know, they wanted the terrorists who had created that attack and killed, taken a lot of lives, American lives in Kabul.

So, when Pakistan found him and then handed over, I was, in fact, in Chicago for the ISA conference - the International Studies Association conference in Chicago in March. And I was watching TV before heading out to the conference, and I saw President Trump addressing the assembly.

And all of a sudden, he goes:

“We are very grateful to a Pakistani army. He’s a great man. He’s a great man.”

I was like, “Whoa, why is he mentioning Pakistan?” He’s the one that knew, because for me, New Year tweet. And all of a sudden, so it seems something has changed, and they’ve played the cards right by handing over somebody that the Americans really, really wanted. Forgot his name. But he is now with the Americans. So, they’re very grateful.

And that started the ball rolling.

Of course, the fact that they then gave President Trump something which President Trump, I suppose, was desiring. This idea that he’s a peace broker, and he should receive the Nobel Prize, didn’t hurt either. And they gave him a lot of the credit for ending the war.

The conflict with India, and that riled up the Indians quite a bit.

Yes.

Not just that. Also, they invited and gave General Kurilla a special award. So, the general who, the head of the military in the U.S., was now, I think, retired and moved on. He was given special Pakistani awards.

So, all of those things show that Pakistan’s diplomatic effort in the military side of things has been working well, and it’s working on their behalf in that sense.

But now, it seems there’s something more on the cards rather than the military, because all of a sudden, President Trump announced that we’re going to be doing deals in minerals, mining with the Pakistanis.

And maybe, you know, their oil, and maybe they can, Pakistanis, can then supply India the oil, whereas Pakistanis are looking at each other and saying,

“Pakistan has oil? What happened? We thought there wasn’t any oil.”

So, there’s a lot of interesting…

And the thought of Pakistan supplying India is a little bit unusual, right?

Yes, but that’s President Trump. I mean, he wants to take claims of that.

There was also another point of convergence, which I’m sure, well, maybe I’m not sure. It surprised me.

Go on.

And I’d be curious if it surprised you. But it was a point of convergence between the U.S. and the Chinese. And we don’t get many points of convergence these days between the U.S. and the Chinese. But it’s when the Trump administration declared that the Balochistan Liberation Army, which is a separatist army that’s been incredibly troublesome for the government in Islamabad, very violent, and also targeting Chinese nationals for many years.

And really been a major irritant in the China-Pakistan relationship, given the fact that Chinese nationals and Chinese projects along the CPEC corridor, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, have been targets of this. And the Americans turn around and say, well, they are a terrorist group and designate them officially as a terrorist group.

I can imagine that, again, folks in Beijing who may have been concerned about the U.S.-Pakistan rapprochement at the same time said, “hey, this is a good thing, actually.” Because we think the BLA is a problem. And now the Americans also think the BLA is a problem.

Talk to us about the decision to label the BLA as a terrorist group and how that, again, converges with some Chinese interests.

So the thing you’re talking about, the BLA more or less was there, but it was the Majeed Brigade that has been declared. And the Majid Brigade is the most important one because the Majid Brigade was the one who used the first female suicide bomber to kill three Chinese teachers. And the Confucius Institute, right? Confucius Institute in Karachi University.

It’s the Majid Brigade which has been using. And again, the recent incident with the railway, where the railway train was hijacked and so many people were affected by it. Hundreds of people were affected. So not only are the Chinese targeted, they are a problem. They are a problem.

So yes, in that incident, again, like you just said, this new phase between the U.S. and Pakistan is working around terrorism again. So you can see terrorist organizations being recognized. People, Pakistan has been declaring terrorist organizations are being recognized by the United States.

In that sense, I mean, we’ve got in the past the problem that the Americans were accusing the Chinese were in Afghanistan before they withdrew was that the Chinese are benefiting from the security provided by the Americans.

It’s American foot in Afghanistan, which provides the security so then the Chinese businesses are able to take advantage without themselves putting foot on the ground.

So if you keep that thing in mind, it makes sense why the Chinese would be, okay, that’s interesting. If the Americans can pressurize, first of all, recognize these organizations, because that’s a big thing to recognize these organizations as terrorist organizations. And then perhaps because Pakistan keeps on arguing now, they’ve made the case that these organizations are supported by India.

So the same way India accuses anything, even if a bird falls down from the sky, it’s Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir. Pakistan is doing now the same in Balochistan. They accuse India of having a hand.

So if all these things pile up and somehow can help Pakistan stabilize, for them it’s good. Because the other thing you have to remember is, especially in the Balochistan where the terrorist organizations are most active, although they’ve carried out incidents in Karachi, even in the airport or other areas near the airport when they came, they flew in and they were going up to their respective companies to work.

Majority of the incidents take place in Balochistan, Balochistan next door to Iran, and Iran and Afghanistan. So that area, and also it has 40% of the landmass of Pakistan, and it is where the place they have the mines.

So the Rekodik mines, the copper mines, where the MCC is working. So all of these, if somebody can come in and provide some pressure and enable some sort of security, for the Chinese it’s good.

The only concern they have is if American companies come in and they are targeted, will the Americans, you know, we’ve seen, what was it, BlackRock that in the past was in Pakistan, the, you know, the security providers, will they be coming in?

But Pakistan has made, so far, they’ve made a decision that no more foreign security companies, no more foreigners will be allowed to bring the security forces inside Pakistan. And of course, I’m sure the Pakistani army is still a little bit sensitive over what happened with Osama bin Laden, the fact that the American special forces covertly came in and grabbed him.

It is, again, not a shining moment for the Pakistani military. Again, we don’t know if the Pakistani military knew that bin Laden was there or if he was there under their protection. But it’s something that I think is still a sore point, probably, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So in that sense, yeah. But again, they’re willing to move on ahead because the reality is they need that support. They need international support. And one of the things where people often in Pakistan, even, they connect the dots with support from Pakistan is the IMF. They link the IMF that, oh, so the IMF is giving you loans. The IMF is handing out, despite Indian concerns about Pakistan and its role in Kashmir, they still provide the funds for the loans and everything through the IMF to Pakistan. So in Pakistan, I keep on hearing this a lot. They connect the support to IMF.

Again, it’s, I don’t know, it’s going down the route of lack of transparency. So how do you know? But this is how they like to project it.

Well, let’s turn our attention to your specialty and the CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It always brings me back to this old saying that:

“If you owe the bank a million dollars, well, that’s your problem if you can’t pay it back. But if you owe the bank $10 billion, that’s the bank’s problem.”

And Pakistan always feels like the bank’s problem for China because they have sunk so much into Pakistan. We don’t have very clear data on exactly how much. The number that floats out there is $50 billion. I think you have challenged that a little bit. But at the same time, we’ve seen:

• Emergency financing
• Bridge loans coming in
• Rolling over of currency swaps

and things like that. There’s a huge amount of Chinese money going into Pakistan.

Just in the past few months, there’s also been requests from the Pakistani government to have more money for the port of Gawadar. And the port of Gawadar, for those who aren’t familiar with it, has been the long-held dream of the Chinese.

And correct me if I’m wrong here, is to have an overland trade route coming basically from the Indian Ocean or be able to avoid the Straits of Malacca and to have cargo, potentially even oil, travel overland from Pakistan into southwestern China.

It hasn’t fully materialized, even though there is some trade that’s going there. But the cost of doing this has been far more than anybody anticipated. Now we have the Pakistanis asking for more money to develop the port of Gawadar.

Tell us where we are right now with the port and CPEC and the health or the illness of the China-Pakistan economic corridor. What’s the status?

Well, the status is like recently, for example, just read the newspapers, just read the ministers. What is the main concern?

Security.

Okay, what about security? It’s also about keeping happy the locals. Well, why aren’t the locals happy? Ten years have gone by. If it’s a development project, all these things and investments are coming in. Why aren’t they happy? Why?

• They don’t have electricity
• They don’t have water
• They don’t have clean facilities

So, of course, the question then, they’re right. Well, why don’t they? And this is something which keeps on coming up again.

Now, when we talk about China’s interest in Gawadar, I find it very interesting that oftentimes you read Indian and Western academics saying China is interested in Gawadar port. The reality is we have people like Andrew Small talk to academics and, you know, speak to, for example, Andrew Small.

Who’s Andrew Small? He worked for the German Marshall Fund and he wrote a book on the China-Pakistan axis and people like that. The whole Gawadar port idea has been running for a long time. Even the Americans were interested in it at one point.

But really, the Chinese got involved when General Musharraf first came to power. He’s the one who went up to China and said,

“Look, we’d like you to set this port up and we’re the ones who would like you to have another alternative to Karachi and Port Qasim port.”

So, there’s more opportunity for Pakistan and we can develop that Balochistan area. Because according to, if you look at the geographical locations, it’s literally like 100 miles from Chabahar port in Iran, but very close to the Middle Eastern region’s connectivity.

It turns out that once he came back from China, the Chinese government sent their representatives to find out, is he really serious? Does he really expect?

So, currently, again, there’s a whole history how a Singaporean company was first involved to set it up. And then, as usual, the funds, it was set up, but then it wasn’t run properly. And then, the Chinese were given control, the COPHC, China Overseas Port Authority.

If you have a chance to listen to, there was an interview by the director, I forgot his name now, Xiao Baozhong. He said,

“When I first arrived in Gawadar, I thought I landed on Mars because there was nothing there. It’s a small fishing port.”

It’s a small fishing port. So, you’re trying to build it as the next Singapore. It’s not even Dubai, the next Singapore of Pakistan.

So, naturally, the question is, well, what is there? If you have a population of 100,000 fishermen and, you know, small-time people, how do you expect?

• There are no industries
• It is not even connected to Pakistan’s main electricity grid
• They get electricity from that area They were getting it from Iran, which is fluctuating. And, again, small things are taking place, which means that the bigger plan of opening special economic zones is a free port there.

They’ve already built the north free port and the south one they’re building. There are a couple of Chinese companies that are there. They want to open up this huge Yijiao center where donkeys are going to be slaughtered and processed and sent to China from there. But the big drive, the big drive didn’t happen because the reality is security was a big problem.

So, what they’ve done in the past year or so is to provide security to the Chinese. They’ve built fences around. And that’s created a lot of hostility. Locals are unhappy because they see Chinese coming in with electricity and water, and yet they don’t enjoy the same facilities. So, where’s the game changer for us?

But that security was linked to the BLA that we talked about earlier as well, which has targeted the Port of Guadar and other targets in the region for attack. Is that correct?

So, there are two. If you remember last time we were talking about this, we talked about grassroots protests taking place by people because the whole area, Guadar especially, is very securitized. So, when locals raise concerns, it turns out into protest marches.

So, for me, the protests from Balochia Jihati Committee and all these other groups, BYC, was different from the BLA. I did not want to conflate the two because, for me, they’re different, right? But now, Pakistan government has declared BYC and some of the protesters, especially the female protesters, also personal non-grata. And they are arrested and in jail because their groups are now considered terrorists because while it’s almost like while the BLA and the Majid Brigade may be the violent front, the political front are these groups.

So, there’s a lot of things taking place and it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help if you’re trying to set up and invite investors and say,

“Come and invest in this area, come and invest. We’ve built the ports, you can use them.”

It doesn’t create a lot of confidence in that sense.

With all of this in mind, with everything that’s going on, let’s go back to this question of Pakistan asking for more Chinese money to develop the port of Guadar. What do you think the mood is in Beijing to support something like this, given the fact that the Chinese economy, as we’re seeing just this week, a new data coming out saying that it’s facing a lot of headwinds. These are difficult times in China.

So, the cash isn’t as freely available today as it was, say, 10 years ago when they were spending a lot in Pakistan. Do you get the sense that the requests from Pakistan for more investment into the port of Guadar will be received well in Beijing?

So, now what I’m tending to do is look at the situation post the downing of the Rafales and then pre the downing. The Raphaels, of course, are the Indian fighter jets that were facing off against the J-10s in Pakistan, right?

Yes. I mean, just look at about Wang Yi. He’s a foreign minister, right? When was the last time China’s foreign minister visited Pakistan?

• 2023, Qin Gang.

After that, we all know what happened to Qinggang. But that was the last time China sent a foreign minister.

What did we have in terms of something close to foreign minister was the CPC’s international development head, Liu Jiangxiao. He had come in. And by the way, he is under investigation by the Communist Party. So, he’s not followed Qinggang down that path yet, but he’s certainly in trouble as far as we know right now.

Yes. So, in that sense, for me, there’s definitely a shift.

Of course, then you also have to keep in mind the domestic situation. Within Pakistan, the political parties changed. The scenario had changed. So, the Imran Khan government and the PTI - they’re all under arrest. The new government of PMLN and the coalition, they’ve come about. They took a little while to recover from the setback because it was a change.

Once you have a change, the interest rate was high. The economy wasn’t doing well. But now, over a couple of years, they’ve kind of stabilized to the point that Moody’s and all of those finance companies are saying:

OK, yes, they're slightly better now.

So, domestically, also, things have been changing. But how China will be doing, they are concerned. They are absolutely concerned.

Whether, for me, the biggest thing is, if you remember, we were talking about Sinoshaw, the insurance company.

So, high-level visits are taking place to Pakistan. And then the Pakistan prime minister is planning to go. Not just that, the minister for planning is also planning to go to attend the special CPEC meeting and all of that.

And what do we find in the newspaper yesterday?

Port Qasim is, again, one of the CPEC projects, power generation, plants and everything. A letter, apparently, has been leaked to the press that the Chinese head of the area is saying, “we need money to be paid.” You need to pay us money to honor the payments. And yet, Supreme State Bank of Pakistan came back and said, “we’ve paid all the dues.” You know, there is no nothing. There is no reason to say that we’re defaulting on the payments. We are paying.

So, there is this division in narrative because we find the people on the ground, the Chinese, asking, “no, this is the best time for us to remind people we need our dues to be paid.”

If you remember, some of the deals that have taken place in the power generation companies with China and Pakistan is that it doesn’t matter if it is going to be used or not. The megawatt doesn’t matter if it is going to be used. You’re going to also pay us the basic ground rate. You will be paying no matter what. So, in that sense, those are government guarantees that they’ve received from Pakistan. So, they remind you currently, “you have to pay.”

So, how do you expect large new projects to come about if people who are already involved in ground running projects on the ground saying, “can we have money, please?” That doesn’t look good.

The other change we find is there is this project for the CPEC project called the ML1 - ML1 project, the Mainline 1 train project linking Pakistan, connecting all over. And now, because the Chinese are reluctant because they don’t see their investment as fruitful and coming back, they have put a brake on it. Pakistan government has also broken it up now. So, they’re trying to make it more, they’ve broken the thing up and made it more smaller, so smaller projects. That may help them get the funding rather than one huge, one huge project.

So, let me just, if I understand what you’re saying, and again, just coming back to the very simple question about whether or not the request for more money in Beijing will be well received. It sounds like there’s some frustration on the part of Chinese stakeholders over how the money is being spent in the governance of these projects that they may be more reluctant to sink in a lot more money into Guadal and CPEC, at least in the near term.

So, what we’re finding, what I see, the projects that are being spoken about are not the big government ones, but I’m seeing a lot of small ones, like

• EV assembly plants being opened up
• Two or three, I see Changdan

And those are private sector, presumably, not government backed then. Yes. And they’re basically assembling it. The idea is that they will also transfer some technology, but I don’t think so.

But, so we have a lot of electric buses from China coming into Pakistan, different, in different provinces. And that’s, again, something new that I felt, that rather than central government of Pakistan being involved, now we’re starting to see provincial governments.

So, Pakistan is made up of four or five provinces, right? And now we find chief ministers of those provinces trying to attract Chinese investments with the special economic zones and that stuff into investing in Pakistan. So, that’s something new. So, rather than large government to government, we’re finding private investors coming in. And that’s a big change I’m seeing here.

You also have to remember, you know, that question you were asking about the change. So, I think it was last year I wrote an article. So, I was asked to look at the statement, the joint statements that were coming after the visit of Prime Minister Sharif to China. What do you think about the joint statements? And I was like, okay, let me just, I’ll write something about this. And I did a little study. And I noticed that from the beginning time of CPEC, when CPEC had begun, you would find two sentences almost identical in every statement.

So, for Pakistan, it was

“the cornerstone of Pakistan’s foreign policy.”

Which, for people who, from the past, if you remember, it was something Nixon had said for Pakistan, that Pakistan is the cornerstone of the U.S. foreign policy. But now we find that Pakistan is using the same line for China.

And China, in the beginning of CPEC, with Nawaz Sharif and all of them going, had started using the phrase that

“Pakistan is China’s highest priority.”

And when it comes to Pakistan, it is the highest priority in the foreign policy. And yet, when Shabazz Sharif had gone in 2023, all of a sudden I found

“Pakistan is a priority for China.”

I’m like, where did the highest go? I was like, yeah, that didn’t go down well for people. And none of that is accidental, of course. All of this is, I would imagine, very intentional with that language.

Yes.

Just very quickly, just to wrap up, because I know our time is short today, that let’s look forward. We’re recording this before the meetings between Wang Yi and Ishak Dar. And that’s the sixth strategic dialogue that happens. And that just followed, of course, the meetings in New Delhi. We see the rapprochement happening, the geopolitical realignment between India and China. I think we need to be very cautious about how far that goes. This is a deep, multifaceted, multilayered relationship that has a lot of suspicion within it.

So we’re never probably going to see India and China as best friends or anywhere near close with the Pakistan-China relationship is. But at the same time, we may see a lot of detente. We may see a resumption of some type of normal geopolitical relationship between India and China.

Does that make the Pakistanis worried going forward that if there is a detente, that maybe China won’t show Pakistan quite as much love because it wants to foster this relationship with India that it sees as very important? Especially now that the U.S.-India relationship is on the rocks and there may be a chance that India either leaves the Quad security relationship or just is not an enthusiastic member of it.

And that is a major priority for the Chinese because the Quad has been a thorn in their side for a long time.

So help us look forward a little bit as to where you see things going in the next two to three months. And with the caveat that with Donald Trump, anything can change at any time.

If you remember after the Doklam incident, even before that, China pressurized it. Now, it was the last time the government under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, it was known as the Dawn Leaks.

“It was known as the Dawn Leaks.”

And the leak was that China was pressurizing Pakistan to step back from supporting and getting involved in Kashmir in India. To a certain extent, it was known as the Dawn Leaks because it ended up creating a lot of problems in Pakistan’s political parties. A lot of people were fired, ministers were removed from positions because they leaked the news that the support for Kashmir from a military front, from that point of view, was a no-no by China.

And there was pressure put on by the politicians. So it came out in a newspaper called Dawn by a particular journalist.

So from that point of view, of course, Pakistan will be concerned that in terms of would China then again put some kind of pressure on Pakistan to, you know, in terms of how it responds to India in that sense.

But I think, again, going back to the dogfight and, well, I shouldn’t say dogfight, but the Air Force, the way the Pakistani Air Force defended themselves using technology from China, because now they are the best-selling agents for Chinese technology.

All of a sudden, those planes which were like, yeah, but who will use them? Now people realize, no, there is potential. The export quality is there.

So I think we will see a lot of maneuvering and moving around these sensitive areas.

But again, like you just said, how far the Indian and the Chinese work together is different, because I’m just hearing and reading that the Chinese media takeout is that Jay Shankar, former minister Jay Shankar, has said Taiwan is part of China.

Here is the Indians have not said anything of that sort.

So how much of this will work? So I think they’re going to be continuing on in the way they are because of the geopolitics and also how the global scenario is working with President Trump and the tariffs that are working.

So I think they will see how it goes and try to use it to their advantage if possible.

Yeah, and just a little side note that last week, before we recorded this, India and the Philippines engaged in joint maritime exercises in the South China Sea, an act that the Chinese felt was very provocative.

So again, as we see this India-China relationship improve, it’s also a good reminder that there are a lot of details in it, and especially as it relates to Pakistan.

Aram, thank you so much for taking the time to help us figure all of this out and to sort through it.

It’s an onion that we keep peeling back, and every time we think we get to the center, there’s more to go, and you’ve been so helpful in helping us figure it all out.

Aram Ashraf is a China-Pakistan scholar, normally based in the UK, but joining us today from Karachi. She researches the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor with a particular focus on gender issues, and we’re looking forward to your upcoming book on China-Pakistan security relations in the Cold War.

Again, that’s coming out. When do you think that you’ll have that? You haven’t written it yet, right? You’re just starting, correct?

No, I’ve just signed the contract, so we’re looking at 2027.

Okay.

Well, we’re looking forward to having you back before then, and then of course when the book comes out, to reading it and to sharing it with everybody.

So, Aram, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Eric.

Thank you.

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