{"id":26722,"date":"2025-11-08T21:04:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T21:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=26722"},"modified":"2025-11-08T21:04:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T21:04:11","slug":"cpec-gone-sour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=26722","title":{"rendered":"CPEC gone sour?"},"content":{"rendered":"
As Pakistan remains embroiled in internal power struggles, its external friends and foes wonder where the country is politically and economically headed. The circumstances post 26th Amendment offer enough evidence to forecast the political direction Pakistan has taken. The economic distress is writ large too.<\/p>\n

The decision of Qatar’s Al Thani Group to withdraw its $2.09 billion investment from Pakistan’s Port Qasim Power Project underscores Pakistan’s growing reputation for broken contracts and unpaid obligations. No surprise foreign direct investment plummeted to a mere $26 million by September this year \u2014\u00a0compared to India which boasts more than $81 billion in the same period. The Qatari group’s pullout \u2014\u00a0preceded by the exit of global firms like Shell, TotalEnergies, Pfizer, Sanofi, Telenor, Uber, IGI and Microsoft inter alia and partial or full closure of even domestic prime producers such as Gul Ahmed Textiles \u2014\u00a0epitomises a fractured system that is asphyxiating under the acute indifference and incompetence of a power-centric elite that loathes real reform.<\/p>\n

The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) \u2014\u00a0often touted by Minister Ahsan Iqbal as a game-changer, a phrase our Chinese friends never favoured \u2014\u00a0suffers from the same malaise: lofty, irrational talk, little walk. Over a decade into CPEC, a number of Chinese academics, intellectuals and officials, who had dreamed of an economically viable, self-sustaining Pakistan with the help of CPEC, today sound disillusioned \u2014\u00a0wondering if Pakistan’s rulers are concerned at all about the economic viability and development of the country.<\/p>\n

Some points from conversations with Chinese friends are worth pondering:<\/p>\n

\u2022 China came in to improve infrastructure and help the people of Pakistan and not to please a particular political priority.<\/p>\n

\u2022 CPEC was intrinsically designed to focus on areas that needed development, regardless of who was proposing what.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ten years on, big investment ($25.4 billion) has not helped the approaches to governance \u2014\u00a0decision-making and implementation \u2014\u00a0nor has the security improved.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Holding high-profile events with the PM and COAS at closely guarded venues swarming with intelligence and security officials are optically bad for foreign investors, who always look for comfortable zones to invest their money.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Pakistan’s policymakers keep telling us: “We are doing our best to protect you.” Little do they realise that the issue at stake is not about protecting individual Chinese nationals but about protecting the long-term Pakistan-China relationship.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0In security conversations, Pakistanis often lecture us on geopolitics as the reason of insecurity. Do they take us for fools? We know what is happening around but such challenges and risks need to be managed \u2014\u00a0the way China gradually defied and eventually blunted the entire Western opposition to it. The talk needs to be followed up with calculated walk.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0When even your own people are not investing, why would then outsiders risk their money, particularly when the energy sector continues to reel from the crippling circular debt?<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0They also succinctly point to the minister for planning Ahsan Iqbal’s long speeches as an example. If a minister in this era doesn’t value the time and takes his audience for students then something serious is certainly missing. This age dictates precision, focus and execution and not lofty, lengthy rhetoric.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0China developed because it took underdeveloped regions along but Pakistan’s peripheral regions \u2014\u00a0Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan \u2014\u00a0remain excluded, conflict-scarred and badly managed. How can the country progress if these regions are step-motherly treated?<\/p>\n

This reminds me of the ancient Chinese philosophy of development: you may make progress in an island but development beyond that level is difficult if the surroundings are backward and turbulent. They keep emphasising a cross-party consensus for national development and not just CPEC.<\/p>\n

They had, via CPEC, entered into a marriage they hoped would help Pakistan take off the way 5-year plans evolved in China \u2014\u00a0spearheaded by the bureaucracy and guided by the party.<\/p>\n

Chinese officials and academics meanwhile concede that initially they overlooked Pakistan’s socio-cultural diversity and the provincial political dynamics.<\/p>\n

But Pakistan’s aid-addicted, day-dreaming leaders on the contrary expected China to spearhead and actualise the CPEC agreements without any technocratic input by Pakistanis themselves \u2014\u00a0a huge disconnect between expectations and capacities on ground.<\/p>\n

As for China, its leadership faces a tough choice: will it continue helping the same reform-averse, self-serving Pakistani elites that have exploited and hollowed out the political economy for their own benefit? Will Beijing keep ignoring the plight of the 250 million Pakistanis under the pretext of “non-interference in internal matters” or act like a real sincere Big Brother to prevent internal implosion and cause rupture in bilateral relations too?<\/p>\n

A big question for all well-meaning Pakistani leaders: has CPEC helped strengthen the time-tested Sino-Pak friendship or injected irritants into it – largely because they took China for granted and refused to change their style of governance. Is Pakistan ready at all from a regime that centres on the pleasure of the boss and not the policy? Without divorcing this dated governance approach, hope for improvement \u2014\u00a0let alone transformation \u2014\u00a0will remain dim, particularly in a situation that has rendered a country with a “geo-strategic location” literally into a landlocked country with tensions simmering at both the eastern and western borders.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Pakistan remains embroiled in internal power struggles, its external friends and foes wonder where the country is politically and economically headed. The circumstances post 26th Amendment offer enough evidence to forecast the political direction Pakistan has taken. The economic distress is writ large too. The decision of Qatar’s Al Thani Group to withdraw its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}