ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif yesterday left for China on his first foreign tour, eyeing high-impact Chinese infrastructure projects as an answer to economic malaise and an energy crisis.
Weak growth, inflation, dwindling foreign exchange reserves and power cuts of up to 20 hours a day ruining industry are some of the biggest problems Sharif faces.
He made fixing the woeful economy and energy crisis the mantra of his poll campaign and since winning a comfortable majority in May, has sought to strengthen ties with Beijing, arguably Islamabad’s closest ally.
During his five-day visit, Sharif will meet President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang, financial and corporate leaders, and visit industrial centres and special economic zones.
Before being sworn into office, Sharif hosted Li as the first foreign head of government to visit since his poll victory.
In June, Sharif asked state-owned China North Industries Corporation (NORINCO) to instal solar power plants, look into mining and explore iron ore, and discussed the building of underground train networks in Pakistan’s largest cities.
Sharif said that plans to build a trade corridor from the Chinese border to the Arabian Sea would be a “game changer” that would bring development and prosperity to three billion people.
“Pakistan has to come out of its difficulties and we want to cooperate with each other on... infrastructure and in the field of energy,” he said.
Chinese investment is popular in Pakistan where Sharif, one of the richest businessmen, won plaudits for pulling off high-impact infrastructure projects such as a high-speed motorway during his two previous tenures.
“A trade corridor could be transformative in parts of our ailing economy and it is here that the technocrats and business acumen of the new government are going to be shaping future foreign policy for Pakistan,” wrote newspaper The News.
China-Pakistan trade last year reached $12bn and is targeted to rise to $15bn in two to three years.
During his visit to Islamabad, Li said Beijing was ready to speed up work to upgrade the Karakoram Highway, a vital link to any economic corridor into Pakistan from the Chinese border.
China this year acquired Pakistan’s Gwadar port, which through an expanded Karakoram Highway could connect it to the Arabian Sea and Strait of Hormuz, a gateway for a third of the world’s traded oil.
China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said that Beijing attaches great importance to Sharif’s visit and welcomed the agreement on an economic corridor. “I believe that such a cooperation project will help both countries and the development of the region.”
Analyst Andrew Small of the German Marshall Fund of the US said Pakistan hoped for “substantive agreements”.
He said that the most important areas were the economic corridor to Gwadar, new infrastructure links, hydropower projects and nuclear cooperation, which he said looks like moving into the 1000MW range, China’s first such reactors overseas. “How much gets formally announced during the visit is another matter, especially when it comes to the sensitive questions around Sino-Pakistani civil-nuclear cooperation.”
But China will also raise concerns about security. Any route to Gwadar lies through the southwestern province of Baluchistan, plagued by separatist, sectarian and Taliban violence.
On June 22, gunmen shot dead 10 foreign climbers, three of them Chinese, at a base camp in the Himalayas. The mountaineers were killed in a region not only supposedly safe but not too far from where some Chinese hydropower and infrastructure projects are underway.
Pakistani political analyst Hasan Askari said he expected the Chinese to step up demands on Islamabad to be more forthright in dealing with terrorism.
The Chinese are also concerned that the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which wants an independent homeland for Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighurs, is training “terrorists” in Pakistan.
“They (China) don’t want Afghanistan to become a safe haven for ETIM after the US withdrawal in 2014, as it was in the 1990s, and they want Pakistan’s help to ensure that this doesn’t happen,” sources said. “The Chinese are very concerned about the prospects for Afghanistan and in the last 18 months or so, have discussed it more intensively with Pakistan than they did in the past.”
Agencies
