The Chinese Smaug And The Pakistani Dwarves

In The China-Pakistan Axis, Small recounts China’s role in helping Pakistan obtain nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable missiles by supplying technology and expertise—going as far as flying in supplies of highly enriched uranium—to help it keep pace with India’s nuclear weapons program. But China has never committed troops on Pakistan’s behalf, even during its many conflicts with India, and has often been more inclined to work with the United States to try to defuse a crisis than provide Pakistan with support.

As Small writes, “China would like to see the India-Pakistan relationship exist in a state of managed mistrust,” one which keeps India tied down in its own neighborhood rather than challenging China across their long land border or competing with it in the rest of Asia. But, particularly since India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, China has also fretted about the possibility of an all-out war between the two. Thus when Pakistan began a border conflict with India in the Kargil region of Jammu and Kashmir in 1999, China refused to provide military or diplomatic support. Significantly, Chinese officials were in regular contact with their U.S. counterparts during the Kargil crisis to ensure both Beijing and Washington delivered the same message to Pakistan about the need to pull back its troops. Those contacts would come as a surprise to many in Pakistan, which has tried to use its “all-weather friendship” with China to balance its often-antagonistic relationship with the United States, little realizing the two could also work together behind its back.

The China-Pakistan alliance is a geopolitical mirage. It is not based on respect, shared values, or even economics. China’s investments in Pakistan have yielded very little economic prosperity. 

An excerpt from, “Pakistan learns the cost of an alliance with China” by Saim Saeed, Politico, March 3, 2021:

The projects have not boosted local employment either, with the Chinese construction companies preferring to ship their labor from China rather than hire local workers, fueling tensions further. And Haqqani points out that stronger trade and road links have helped Chinese goods be sold in Pakistan, but not the other way round.

Pakistan is little more than a traffic stop in the eyes of Beijing. 

China is not investing in Pakistan but in itself. Everything it builds in Pakistan it intends to own one day. 

So far, the power imbalance between China and Pakistan has led to the erosion of Pakistan’s financial sovereignty, loss of strategic national assets, and the reshaping of its borders in favour of Chinese imperial interests. 

While Pakistan’s generals were busy seizing Afghanistan they lost their own country to China.

Last May Michael Rubin wrote in the article, “Is Pakistan nothing more than a colony of China?”

Pakistanis will soon realize—if they have not already—what a devil’s bargain their country has made. In China, Pakistan has tied itself to a country that is responsible for the incarceration in concentration camps of one million Muslims solely on the basis of their religion and it has partnered with a country that thinks nothing about killing Pakistanis and humiliating Pakistan. 

Chinese loans, not India or its own radical terrorists, will ultimately be Pakistan’s undoing.