The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (30 page)

For China, the newfound resilience of Pakistani democracy was not the only unfamiliar element in the emerging political landscape. The
polls also confirmed the rise of new electoral forces in Pakistan as a fact rather than a flash in the pan. Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) won the second highest number of votes nationwide and swept to power in the sensitive province of Khyber-Pakhtunkwa, which sits between Islamabad and the tribal belt.
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A year before the elections, Imran Khan had visited Beijing at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Department, and Chinese officials had conveyed an unequivocal message about their security concerns: “There wasn’t any discussion on Xinjiang,” Imran Khan said to the press on his return, “they were more worried about stability in Pakistan.”
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War-weary Khyber-Pakhtunkwa had been roiled by a Taliban insurgency in recent years, and the PTI had a conciliatory—or indulgent—policy towards them. “We have no enmity with the Taliban,” said the incoming chief minister. “We appeal to the Taliban that we are not at war with you, this province is yours”.
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This province had an additional interest to Beijing: long stretches of the Karakoram Highway snake through it on the way south from Gilgit-Baltistan. Even more important to Chinese economic ambitions in Pakistan, however, was Balochistan, where Gwadar port sits, and here too the elections brought the prospect of change. Despite the majority won there by the PML-N and its allies, Nawaz Sharif had appointed a moderate Baloch nationalist politician as chief minister, the first to come from its middle classes rather than the
sardar
s, the traditional tribal leaders.
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It was a conciliatory message. Abdul Malik would accompany Sharif to China on his inaugural trip, a symbol of the new government’s efforts to pacify the province whose nationalist insurgency continued to threaten the viability of China’s projects there.

None of these political shifts meant that the Pakistani army had relinquished control over its traditional national security prerogatives, least of all in Balochistan. But China was now contemplating a country where power appeared more diffuse than in the days when it could transact virtually all of its essential business with the military leadership. In recent years, it had watched Pakistan’s vibrant media sector take off.
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It had seen a Supreme Court taking on an unusually assertive role under Chief Justice Ifitkhar Chaudhry.
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Now it had politicians with popular mandates to deal with too. One Chinese Pakistan hand, who had been wearily claiming before the elections that they were far more interested in who the next Chief of Army Staff would be after General Kayani’s
retirement, was afterwards enthusiastically enumerating Beijing’s efforts to deal with the widening spectrum of parties who had their hands on political office: “JI is running ministries in K-P [Khyber-Pakhtunkwa]. Some of the provincial governments will virtually be conducting their own foreign policy!”
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Sharif would be dealing with a changed cast on the Chinese side too. The Communist Party had just gone through its own once-a-decade changeover, with the seven members of the new Politburo Standing Committee taking the stage at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in November 2012. The political colour of the new politburo would have been familiar to Pakistan’s prime minister. After ten years in which many of the highest offices had been occupied by members of the CCP’s left-leaning Communist Youth League faction, the blue-blooded “prince-lings” were now firmly back in control.
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Six members of the new leadership group—the privileged children of high-ranking officials, whose careers had advanced through positions of power in the wealthy coastal provinces—were from the elite faction, including the new general secretary Xi Jinping himself. Its ageing head, believed at one point to be close to death but still wielding influence over personnel decisions from the shadows, was Jiang Zemin, the party chief and president when Nawaz Sharif last held office.
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There were echoes of the late 1990s in the economic field too. Then and now, China was facing a potentially serious growth slowdown and simultaneously contemplating a major programme of reform. In the 1990s, it was the Asian financial crisis that was the drag on growth, and the prospect of WTO membership that was the prize for reformers. This time, Beijing’s reform plans were motivated by concerns that the entire Chinese growth model could no longer be sustained.
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From Pakistan’s perspective, however, there was at least one crucial difference between 2013 and 1998: China’s western provinces were now drivers of China’s economy rather than charity cases. In 2012, Yunnan and Xinjiang clocked in at the double-digit GDP growth rates that had once been the norm in coastal Zhejiang and Guangdong, neither of which even hit the magic 8% growth number once believed to be the minimum required to stave off large-scale social unrest.
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While rising labour costs and a saturation of infrastructure investment in the east and south meant that it was getting harder and harder to pull off the same trick that had
propelled China’s thirty-year boom, there was still considerable scope to do so in the poorer interior. But maintaining high growth rates in these provinces, and thereby providing an alternative engine for a Chinese economy that was heading into a difficult phase, would require the transformation of the underdeveloped road, rail and energy infrastructure serving China’s west.

The Central Asian piece of the puzzle was well advanced, with gas pipelines running from Turkmenistan,
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and oil pipelines running from the shores of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan.
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A “Eurasian corridor” was already being utilized by companies which wanted to take advantage of the land route between China and Europe that shaved weeks off the time it took to ship the goods by sea.
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Xi Jinping would sell an even grander vision of a “Silk Road Economic Belt” during his extended tour of the region later in the year.
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But the South Asian infrastructure, which promised to connect China’s interior to the ports of the Indian Ocean rather than to faraway Shanghai and Shenzhen, was still lagging far behind.
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Two of these transport corridors would be at the top of the agenda of the new Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, when he made his first overseas visit in May 2013. The destination of the man with the burden of steering the Chinese economy through these turbulent waters would not be East Asia or Europe, as with his predecessors. He would start in New Delhi and Islamabad.

Li’s trip to India illustrated why an ostensibly simple set of economic goals in South Asia was so fraught with complication. The visit itself was almost called off by New Delhi before it even began, on the not unreasonable grounds that Chinese troops had set up camp in Indian territory about a month before he was due to arrive. On 15 April, thirty Chinese soldiers pitched their tents 10km inside the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh, and erected signs in English for their Indian counterparts saying “You are in Chinese side”
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and “You’ve crossed the border, please go back”.
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The political firestorm set off in India by this latest manifestation of China’s military assertiveness continued well after the troops had been withdrawn, which was barely two weeks before the visit. Li’s message, when he arrived in New Delhi on 19 May, was perfectly sensible: that India and China’s unresolved disputes in the region need not preclude a closer partnership on global issues and economic matters.
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But it would have sounded more convincing fresh out of the recent
BRICS summit, rather than after one of the most serious border incursions in years.
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The economic project that he was there to sell did get a hearing, the first time that it had been taken up at such high levels of government on the two sides.
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The so-called “Southern Silk Road” or “BCIM economic corridor” would link Yunnan province in China’s south-west to India’s north-east and the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, via northern Myanmar.
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The proposal had been kicking around for years, and a Kunming-Calcutta car rally had recently been staged to demonstrate that the route was no longer just a theoretical one.
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But while the Chinese, Burmese, and Bangladeshis were enthusiastic, the Indians were still cautious. There were some concerns that this would be yet a further contributor to India’s huge bilateral trade deficit with China, unleashing another flood of cheap Chinese goods.
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There were security concerns too. New Delhi has long been worried about the military advantages that could accrue to China from the build up of infrastructure around its borders, one of the reasons that India’s own transport networks in these areas have been so underdeveloped.
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And when it came to the strategic economic geography of connecting India’s northeast with southeast Asia, New Delhi was not at all sure that it wanted China in the lead. When Li stated in his speech to the Indian Council of World Affairs that “No country can choose its neighbours, and a distant relative may not be as helpful as a near neighbour. China and India should not seek cooperation from afar with a ready partner at hand,” the Indians had their doubts.
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Moreover, while the target of Li’s remarks was the United States, another Chinese adversary “from afar” was drawing the attention of the Indian leadership. Not long after Li’s departure, his counterpart Manmohan Singh was off to Tokyo. There he would finalize a deal to acquire Japanese nuclear technology and equipment, and push ahead with plans for various Japanese-backed “industrial corridors”—Delhi-Mumbai and Chennai-Bangalore—that New Delhi found a great deal more congenial than the BCIM.
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Li Keqiang would find a far warmer welcome on the next leg of his trip. The Pakistanis were well aware that they were the necessary add-on to his South Asian tour this time rather than the main event. With the political transition after Pakistan’s elections still underway, what would ordinarily have been an extensive bonanza of MOUs and joint agreements instead had to proceed with more modest preparation. Li arrived
to a grand reception nonetheless. JF-17 jets accompanied his plane as it entered Pakistani air space,
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and Pakistan’s “entire civil and military leadership” was waiting to greet him on his arrival at Chaklala airbase in Rawalpindi.
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Here, the Chinese prime minister’s talk of a new economic corridor was rapturously received, the departing President Zardari responding to his proposal with the statement that “today is one of the happiest days of my life”.
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After years of featuring more regularly in the fantasies of geostrategists than in realities on the ground, the long-talked-about Xinjiang-Gwadar connection looked as if it was getting a new lease on life. When Li sat down with Nawaz Sharif and his advisers, barely a week after the election, the modalities of the plan were one of the main subjects of discussion, and its most ambitious element—a new railway—featured prominently in Sharif ’s inaugural speech as Prime Minister on 5 June.
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“This is a game changer,” he declared, “it will change the fate of Pakistan.”
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There was plenty more too: China was ready to do its bit for Pakistan’s energy crisis, with everything from new hydro-electric dams and coal-fired power stations to the next phase of civil nuclear cooperation on the table. China was in the process of exporting its first 1000MW reactor, which, unlike the smaller reactors at Chashma, could actually start to make a dent in Pakistan’s energy needs.
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It also appeared that, for once, Pakistan had caught a lucky break. On the eve of Li’s visit, a bomb was detonated in Karachi’s affluent Clifton neighbourhood. The 10kg home-made bomb, filled with ballbearings and bolts, was packed in a metallic bucket and placed inside a sack by the roadside.
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The target was a van of Chinese engineers who were heading to work at the port and regularly passed by the spot close to the harbour. But while one of the detonators went off, causing a small explosion, the bomb itself misfired. It was a near miss. “If the 10-kilo bomb had exploded, it would have caused much destruction in an area of 25 to 30 metres, engulfing the vehicles of the delegation and destroying oil tankers parked there,” said bomb disposal squad official Ghulam Mustafa in a statement to the press.
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It would have been a catastrophic start for the two new prime ministers, and the fact that it ended up as little more than a minor item in the local press was a huge relief. But Pakistan’s luck didn’t hold for long.

Bordering on China, Gilgit-Baltistan is considered the safest province in Pakistan, largely free from the terrorist attacks that have plagued other
regions. It is one of the few parts of the country that have continued to attract foreign tourists, most of them mountaineers drawn by the densest concentration of high peaks in the world. While the majority of visitors were driven away by Pakistan’s burgeoning security threats, Islamabad airport still thronged with groups in conspicuous climbing apparel waiting for the packed morning flights to Skardu and Gilgit. Thirteen of the world’s tallest thirty mountains lie within a span of barely a hundred miles, where the Hindu Kush meets the Karakoram and the Himalayas. One of the most fearsome peaks is Nanga Parbat, known as the “killer mountain”, a name that took on another meaning early on the morning of 24 June.
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The killers in question were on a carefully planned operation. Dressed as paramilitary police, the gunmen had hiked for at least eighteen hours to reach their target, one of the high-altitude base camps frequented by climbers. They would later claim to be from a new branch of the Pakistani Taliban, Jundul Hafsa, established specifically to target foreigners.
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They found ten of them at the camp, who were dragged out of their tents, tied up and executed. Among the dead were two Chinese nationals and one Chinese-American. Another Chinese climber, Zhang Jingchuan, who had served four years in the PLA, managed to escape.
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Five Russians, a Ukrainian, and a Pakistani guide (who was believed by the killers to be a Shia) also died in the attack. But the timing—squarely between Li Keqiang’s visit and Nawaz Sharif ’s return trip—immediately prompted suspicions from Chinese officials that damaging the China-Pakistan relationship itself was the real political motivation. The Chinese ambassador in Islamabad was quickly on the phone to the new Interior Minister, Chaudry Nisar: “He asked whether Chinese tourists were the target,” the minister explained to the press.
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The embassy would later call on Pakistan to “severely punish” the attackers, an echo of the language used around the time of the Red Mosque assault.
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The Pakistani foreign ministry stated that it was an attempt “to disrupt the growing relations of Pakistan with China and other friendly countries”.
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